A Verse for the Pink Palace

The Pink Palace serves many functions —a place to collect and care for objects related to the MidSouth, an educational facility, a venue to get married and a motivation for creative works. Mark Doty is one person whose visit to the museum inspired a personal interpretation. Doty is a well-respected contemporary poet who currently teaches at Rochester University in addition to writing. His poems and prose works won the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry, a T.S. Eliot Prize in the United Kingdom and many other commendations. He included the poem “The Pink Palace” in his first published book titled Turtle. Swan.

The Pink Palace

My father would take me, Saturdays,
to an unfinished mansion: a rich eccentric
had built a few rooms and a facade
of pink granite before the money ran out
and the fragments became property of the state,
a museum for children. Of what
I’m not…