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"It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see," Mark Doty begins. "But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your eyes . . ." Doty finds refuge in the sensory experience found in poems by Blake, Whitman, Bishop, and others. The Art of Description is an invaluable book by one of America's most revered writers and teachers.
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About the Author:
MARK DOTY is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. He teaches at Rutgers University and lives in New York.
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- PublisherGraywolf Press
- Publication date2010
- ISBN 10 1555975631
- ISBN 13 9781555975630
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages128
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Book Description Softcover. Condition: new. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.The Art of DescriptionWorld Into WordBy Mark Doty Graywolf PressCopyright 2010 Mark DotyAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-55597-563-0ContentsWorld into Word,A Tremendous Fish,Remembered Stars,Instruction and Resistance,Four Sunflowers,Description's Alphabet,CHAPTER 1World into WordIt sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see. But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your eyes, and it immediately becomes clear that all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive. As Susan Mitchell says, "The world is wily, and doesn't want to be caught."Perception is simultaneous and layered, and to single out any aspect of it for naming is to turn your attention away from myriad other things, those braiding elements of the sensorium-that continuous, complex response to things perpetually delivered by the senses, the encompassing sphere that is such a large part of our subjectivity. The word always makes me think of a label invented to describe the totalizing experience offered by a kind of movie speakers, Sensurround-a commercial coinage, but a memorable one, in that it addresses the way we're englobed entirely by the reports of our senses, held in a kind of continuous thrall. A seamless weft of information-but information is the driest and least revealing of essential twenty-first-century words, and the data the senses offer every waking moment is anything but that.In his memoir Planet of the Blind, Stephen Kuusisto describes a moment in Grand Central Station when he and his guide dog have just gotten themselves lost in the great urban hive of transport. Steve sees a dark, suggestive blur of shapes and colors; I want to write the word only or merely before dark, suggestive blur, but that isn't right. The way he sees is in fact a rich, engaging way of encountering the world, and that's Steve's point. His dog is new to the intricate passageways of the station, crowded with ranks of commuters streaming forward at a breathless pace, and Steve could reasonably be terrified. Instead he reports this as an occasion of pleasure, a perceptual adventure; both he and his companion animal are exhilarated, and having, as we say, the time of their lives.In fact all perception is limited, no matter how acute your eyesight, how sharp the hearing, how sensitive the sense of touch. What we can take in is a partial rendering of the world. To go for a walk with a dog is enough to illustrate this principle. Where a universe of scents-historical, multifaceted-presents itself to the canine "reader," human nostrils detect maybe a little whiff of urine, maybe nothing at all. And dogs, in their turn, seem to be unable to see as we do. Their eyesight is geared to detect motion, the slightest bit of action, but when things are at rest they lack the ability to distinguish colors and patterns that human eyes might. Deer cannot see red or orange, a biologist writes, but apparently can see blue much better than we can. Who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be-well, more?All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative, an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.On a warm August evening on a pier in Cherry Grove, New York, I watched a display of fireworks. The wooden dock was crowded, everyone excited for the show to start. Police boats and fire boats whizzed around on the water. When the first flare went up, it became clear that the barge from which the rockets flared was anchored a mere hundred yards off the end of the pier. We could see, in a way I never really did before, the rough industrial-looking process of firework-shooting. When a group of streaks all went up at once, the metal barge itself was lit, and you could smell the gunpowder, and see the fire fountains sput. Seller Inventory # DADAX1555975631
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