Arizona Poets is a series featuring 20 poets from Arizona in honor of our 60th Anniversary. These poets have all visited the Poetry Center and recordings of those visits are available in our audiovisual archive, Voca. Click here to learn more about our anniversary and here to see the rest of this series. 

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honors include the National Book Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award. He is a Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City. Doty lived in Tucson on and off throughout his youth, where he attended Rincon High School and the University of Arizona.

See more of Doty's work on Voca.

…though not long

after I slid into sunlight

and the grass-world I slid

again into the mudhole,

From Deep Lane. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, ©2015. Read the full poem here.