Sweet Machine has turned me into a black sheep. Either I have no taste or very bad taste or I felt off the planet when modern poetry came into the world. But Mark Doty is one of the most bloviating poets I have encountered. Not only his poems are verbose (anti-poetry, nonpoetry?, counterpoetry?, no?) but they are easily forgettable. Perhaps what contributes to his verbosity is his poetic language, which he seems to have plucked and pulled like dough from the gaudy doorknobs of history (particularly from the Byzantine Era). Also, he borrows a few commonly used nouns from Jorie Graham (like San Marco which I recalled from her Erosion collection). Though his poems are nothing near the sharp style of Jorie Graham. After reading his "Door to the River," which I thought was the only exquisite thing of his Sweet Machine collection, I couldn't remember what it was that I was reading.



However, let me be nice. Here is something beautiful, not verbose, that he has written:



"despite which the mouth of the flower/-quick and temporary as any gesture made by desire-"



Let me conclude this criticism: Reading Mark Doty poems is like having a visceral frontal lobotomy