Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
    What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
    What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
    Audiobook10 hours

    What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

    Written by Mark Doty

    Narrated by Jonathan Yen

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.

    How does a voice survive death? 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 14, 2020
    ISBN9781684578733
    What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
    Author

    Mark Doty

    Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City.

    Related to What Is the Grass

    Related audiobooks

    LGBTQIA+ Biographies For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Sharon Olds, America’s Brave Poet of the Body

      Mar 8, 2017

      Sharon Olds can still remember how furious editors became when she started submitting her poems, 40 years ago. “They came back often with very angry notes,” the 74-year-old poet says, sitting in her small, light-filled apartment overlooking NYU’s cam

      16 min read

    • Article

      On Louise Glück

      Dec 1, 2021

      I WAS LYING in bed late at night, woeful, confused by another death, this one the death of a close friend; the losses had been mounting steadily, a bewildering number of losses, each one specific, difficult to accept, hard to overcome, and I must hav

      12 min read

    • Article

      Poet Mary Oliver Dies at 83

      Jan 17, 2019

      Poet Mary Oliver Dies at 83
      2 min read

    • Article

      Pre-order* Your Copy Today At

      Mar 9, 2021

      Pre-order* Your Copy Today At
      1 min read

    • Article

      Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder

      Aug 17, 2017

      What, if anything, do you think poetry can do for us in these difficult times? The post Think What a Poem Might Do: A Conversation with Jill Bialosky and Matthew Zapruder appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      Must-Read Poetry: September 2019

      Sep 5, 2019

      Eight new and notable collections you want on your nightstand this month, including work by a lost Catalan master and the latest from our new poet laureate. The post Must-Read Poetry: September 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      Reconsidering Pablo Neruda in Light of ‘The Poet’s Calling’

      Jun 4, 2018

      When Pablo Neruda was expelled from France in 1952, he wrote this to his beloved countrymen in Chile: “The future of humanity may be endangered in the hands of a few evil men, but it does not belong to them. The future of man is ours, because we are

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos

      Dec 8, 2020

      I felt so wrecked, so torn apart—yet somehow, miraculously, also shored back up. The post A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2023

      There was a family of deer that looked something like us.They traveled far with a fierce sense of collective unity.Held their fearless faces absent of cosmic worry, for the most part.And yet something crept in, making the easiest partof being togethe

      9 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for What Is the Grass

    4.5/5

    5 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words