Mark Doty, the poet and memoirist, is sitting on the porch of a friend's River Oaks house on a perfect day, looking out on gardens and lawns so exquisitely designed and manicured they might be in heaven.

It's a nice break, given that he has just been through Hurricane Sandy in New York. He left his country house, which had no power or water, for his New York apartment, "which at least had water," he says.

A former Houstonian - he left the city and a teaching gig at the University of Houston in '08 - Doty is in town to speak at an event for Writers in the Schools, a program that goes into schools, hospitals and other institutions to teach kids of all ages the joy of writing.

It's dear to Doty's heart, and when he lived here, he was a board member.

"When I was a high school student, writers came to the school, and it was a life-changer," he says. In suburban Tucson, the idea of making a living writing was unheard of.

When Doty worked for the Iowa Arts Council, he taught kids from kindergarten to grade 12. "Writing creatively means play," Doty says. "It's almost inherently delightful for kids."

If it's taught right, that is, and that's a big if. "Poetry in our culture is marginalized. Teachers are intimidated by it, and they don't know how to teach it," he says.As a result, an activity that has been a critical part of human culture forever becomes a chore and a bore.

Finding the gift of writing unlocked emotion for Doty, and it became his mode of expression. "It was as if a door opened," he says. "If I didn't write, I didn't know what I was feeling or thinking. It gave me access to an inner life."

That took him to college and grad school, to small presses and then to bigger and bigger audiences. He now teaches at Rutgers in New Jersey.

Doty has written often about Houston. Here's how one of his poems, "Grackles on Montrose," begins: "Eight o'clock, warm Houston night, and in the parking lot/the grackles hold forth royally, in thick trees on the lip of traffic,/and either they're oblivious to the street-rush/and come-and-go at the Kroger or else they actually like it …"

But he has also written memoirs, including "Dog Years," a story of his relationship with two retrievers and the death of his lover. He was taken aback one day in a Barnes & Noble in New York when he saw the book ensconced in the pet section. When he reported the affront to his agent, the agent reassured him with this morsel of knowledge: "Those books sell."

At present he has a golden retriever, age 2 1/2, and a year-old Bedlington terrier (they're the ones that look like lambs). "Animals are markers in time for the childless," Doty says. "Agreeing to love something that will go before you do is a commitment to getting your heart broken."

Inspired by ...

His writing process has evolved over the years, but not the inspiration. "I depend upon being struck by something, to feeling the tug at my sleeve. It must not be just any pretty or intellectually interesting thing. If I'm lucky, I'll start to understand why I wanted to write about it in the first place."

Right now he does most of his writing at a busy coffee shop in Manhattan, and he just did something new: He wrote a poem for a bestiary in collaboration with an artist. "I wrote a poem on demand, and it felt like playing."

It is good, he says, to be back in Houston. This morning, at a cafe on Westheimer, he had heard the grackles.

"I was here for 10 years. It took awhile for it to grow on me," he says.

"But it happened."