(75min run-time)
In his new collectionWhat Is the Grass, National Book Award–winning poet and best-selling memoirist Mark Doty effortlessly blends biography, criticism, and memoir, and explores his personal quest for Walt Whitman. What Is the Grass is a conversation across time and space, a study of the astonishment one poet finds in the accomplishment of another, and an attempt to grasp Whitman’s deeply hopeful vision of human possibility. Mark Doty will be joined in conversation by prize winning poet Honor Moore for a live reading, discussion and audience Q&A.

Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, perennially new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass, Doty—a poet, a New Yorker, and an American—keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poet’s life and work.

What is it then between us? Whitman asks. In search of an answer, Doty explores spaces—both external and internal—where he finds the poet’s ghost. He meditates on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work: a radical experience of transformation and enlightenment, queer sexuality, and an obsession with death, as well as unabashed love for a great city and for the fresh, rowdy character of American speech. In riveting close readings threaded with personal memoir and illuminated by awe, Doty reveals the power of Whitman’s persistent presence in his life and in the American imagination at large.

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry and three memoirs. His many honors include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.

What Is the Grass was named a 'Most Anticipated Book of 2020' by Buzzfeed, Library Journal, The Millions, and The Rumpus.

Honor Moore is the author of two previous memoirs in A Daughter’s Family Trilogy—The Bishop’s Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The White Blackbird, a New York Times Notable Book—as well as a play and three collections of poems. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, and many other journals and anthologies. She lives in New York City.

What Is the Grass: Mark Doty & Honor Moore in Conversation