Overview

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.

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9781665179232

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A masterful example [of the hybrid memoir] weaving a close reading of Whitman's life and writings into Doty's own ruminations on art, queerness, humanism, and the American experience. -- BuzzFeed What Is the Grass may be the definitive book on Whitman's life, afterlife, and poetry. But it's [in] the moments in Doty's own life...that the book truly glistens. -- Los Angeles Times An incisive, personal meditation. -- New York Times Book Review Doty is a reverential penitent before the greatest American poet, giving an account of how his own subjective experience intersects with that of the singer of 'Song of Myself.'...What Doty most shares with Whitman, however, is a heretic's faith in language, both its promise and its failures. -- Millions.com Narrator Jonathan Yen is unobtrusive, letting the text carry the considerable emotional weight of two lives and some of the greatest--and most revolutionary--of American poetry. There is enough going on here that the narrator can just stand back and stay out of the way. Listeners may want to be aware that some of what is going on is modestly graphic queer sex. -- AudioFile

Author Information

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. Jonathan Yen is a commercial voice-over artist and Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator. He was inspired by the Golden Age of Radio, and while the gold was gone by the time he got there, he has carried that inspiration through to commercial work, voice acting, and stage productions. From vintage Howard Fast science fiction to naturalist Paul Rosolie's true adventures in the Amazon, he loves to tell a good story.

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