Here is the world you asked for,
        gorgeous and opportune,

here is nine o’clock, harbor wide,
       and a glinting code: promise and warning
             The morning’s the size of heaven.

What will you do with it?

—Mark Doty, from “Long Point Light” in Atlantis: Poems

Mark Doty, 59, is an American poet and memoirist, and the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.  Doty was born in Maryville, Tennessee, earned his Bachelor of Arts from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont.  Doty has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton, Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, Cornell, University of Houston and NYU.  He is currently Distinguished Professor and Writer in Residence in the Department of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he directs Writers House.

His third book, “My Alexandria” (University of Illinois Press, 1993), is entirely informed by…

Canada is home.
Yet, like the older brother you look up to,
it was always bigger than life.
Its optimism.
Its vastness.
Its spirit.

I’ve been elsewhere.

Argentina. The middle class dream wasn’t a 4-bedroom home in the suburbs. It was sending your children to a college in the U.S.