SOURCE: Doty, Mark, and Michael Glover. “Poetry, Mark Doty Says, Is the Only True Guarantor of Individuality.” New Statesman 126, no. 4336 (30 May 1997): 44-5.

In the following interview, Doty discusses his work as a teacher, the social role of poetry, his formative experiences and life before and after the death of his long-time partner, and his political orientation.

It was two years ago that I first read a book by a remarkable young American poet called Mark Doty. He was completely unknown in this country. His poems had a compassionate, lyrical urgency, a descriptive and metaphorical power that was more exciting than anything I'd read from America since the death of Robert Lowell in the 1970s.

Last month Doty came to Britain to lodge in a converted pigsty at the Arvon Foundation in Totleigh, Devon, and do what he regularly does at the University of Utah: teach poetry to aspiring...