Culture Break: Mark Doty Reads "Brian, Age 7"

Mark Doty is one of my favorite poets -- there's something almost crystalline about his best work, rich, multifaceted, throwing the world back at us taken apart and rearranged so we can see the parts we never knew were there. Unfortunately, like so many poets, he's not very good at reading his own work, but I thought it was worth getting it from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

I'm presently wading through The Art of Description, a nonfiction work in which Doty discusses how poets make it happen (that's the closest I can come to a summation -- it reads like his poetry.) A friend recommended it; he's a curator at the Illinois State Museum and had just done a show based on the book (which was a pretty interesting show, although it was sobering to realize that I had known, at one point or another, half of the artists.) It's not a hefty tome, by any means -- it's quite slim, and small. I'm just not patient with reading these days.