Mark Doty is the author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, (National Book Award for Poetry, 2008) and four volumes of memoir and nonfiction. Here are a few of Doty’s ideas on the art of literary description from Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy.
– What is described, finally, is not the thing itself but a way of seeing, the perceptual self.
– The finest descriptive art is a form of “permanent intimacy.”
– “… if we look and look we will be surprised and we will be rewarded.”
Much fine work here on painting, perception, life. Recommended.
