Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitmanâs 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, Dotyâa poet, a New Yorker, and an Americanâkeeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the legendary poetâs life and work.
What is it then between us? Whitman asks. In search of an answer, Doty explores spacesâboth external and internalâwhere he finds the poetâs ghost. He meditates on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poetâs 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 Whitmanâs 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 Whitmanâs deeply hopeful vision of human possibility.