Mark Doty (photo by Star Black)

If you haven’t read Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty, please get a copy. It’s beautiful. I read the book, an extended essay really, on how we should see, observe and understand art, in an English class last fall. When I found out that Doty and his partner Paul Lisicky would be reading at the second installment of Writers at Drew this semester, I needed to be there. Lisicky, a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, was humorous and honest as he opened the reading last fall. “I must confess,” he said, “I had a glass or two of wine before this.” His nonfiction pieces spoke to the “shy, New Jersey dork in all of us.” They began with his childhood obsession with housing developments, an obsession stemming from his life on a South Jersey farm watching them grow around him, and then turned, more seriously, to the ways dementia transformed his mother’s mind.

Paul Lisicky (photo by Mark Doty)

Doty’s reading lived up to my high expectations. The only American to ever win the T.S. Eliot prize in the United Kingdom, Doty writes poetry that’s just as beautifully crafted as his prose. “[As a poet], you want poetry to affect the body,” said Doty. And it did. While reading, the audience let out audible “Aww’s” and laughter, and I felt my body grow comfortable and calm. His voice was just as soothing as I had imagined when I read his book last year.

At the end of the reading, Lisicky and Doty took questions. “This question is mostly for you, Mr. Doty. You’re my Michael Jackson,” said Vanessa Nichols C’10, who asked him how he writes about the ordinary, simple things of life in such a moving way. “Listen to those things that tug at your sleeve,” Doty told us. “Poetry can be found if you open up and observe.” –Samantha Pritchard C’10