[New-Poetry] Fwd: Poem of the Week- Mark Doty

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Subject: Poem of the Week- Mark Doty






Poem Of The Week   04-11-08 
 

                    



Mark Doty


 

                    



Mark Doty













 

Demolition 

 

 

 



The intact facade's now almost black 
in the rain; all day they've torn at the back 
of the building, "the oldest concrete structure 
in New England," the newspaper said. By afternoon, 
when the backhoe claw appears above 
three stories of columns and cornices, 

the crowd beneath their massed umbrellas cheer. 
Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves, 
atomized plaster billowing: dust of 1907's 
rooming house, this year's bake shop and florist's, 
the ghosts of their signs faint above the windows 
lined, last week, with loaves and blooms. 

We love disasters that have nothing to do 
with us: the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, 
a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head 
and considering what to topple next. It's a weekday, 
and those of us with the leisure to watch 
are out of work, unemployable or academics, 

joined by a thirst for watching something fall. 
All summer, at loose ends, I've read biographies, 
Wilde and Robert Lowell, and fallen asleep 
over a fallen hero lurching down a Paris boulevard, 
talking his way to dinner or a drink, 
unable to forget the vain and stupid boy 

he allowed to ruin him. And I dreamed 
I was Lowell, in a manic flight of failing 
and ruthless energy, and understood 
how wrong I was with a passionate exactitude 
which had to be like his. A month ago, 
at Saint-Gauden's house, we ran from a startling downpour 

into coincidence: under a loggia built 
for performances on the lawn 
hulked Shaw's monument, splendid 
in its plaster maquette, the ramrod-straight colonel 
high above his black troops. We crouched on wet gravel 
and waited out the squall; the hieratic woman 

-- a wingless angel? -- floating horizontally 
above the soldiers, her robe billowing like plaster dust, 
seemed so far above us, another century's 
allegorical decor, an afterthought 
who'd never descend to the purely physical 
soldiers, the nearly breathing bronze ranks crushed 

into a terrible compression of perspective, 
as if the world hurried them into the ditch. 
"The unreadable," Wilde said, "is what occurs." 
And when the brutish metal rears 
above the wall of unglazed windows --
where, in a week, the kids will skateboard 

in their lovely loops and spray 
their indecipherable ideograms 
across the parking lot -- the single standing wall 
seems Roman, momentarily, an aqueduct, 
all that's left of something difficult 
to understand now, something Oscar 

and Bosie might have posed before, for a photograph. 
Aqueducts and angels, here on Main, 
seem merely souvenirs; the gaps 
where the windows opened once 
into transients' rooms are pure sky. 
It's strange how much more beautiful 

the sky is to us when it's framed 
by these columned openings someone meant us 
to take for stone. The enormous, articulate shovel 
nudges the highest row of moldings 
and the whole thing wavers as though we'd dreamed it, 
our black classic, and it topples all at once. 

 

 

Fog

 

 

 

The crested iris by the front gate waves
its blue flags three days, exactly, 
then they vanish. The peony buds'
tight wrappings are edged crimson; 

when they open, a little blood-color
will ruffle at the heart of the flounced, 

unbelievable white. Three weeks after the test,
the vial filled from the crook 

of my elbow, I'm seeing blood everywhere:
a casual nick from the garden shears, 

a shaving cut and I feel the physical rush
of the welling up, the wine-fountain 

dark as Siberian iris. The thin green porcelain
teacup, our homemade Ouija's planchette, 

rocks and wobbles every night, spins
and spells. It seems a cloud of spirits 

numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy --
children grabbing for the telephone, 

happy to talk to someone who isn't dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least 

these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss. 

Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all. One character, Frank, 

distinguishes himself: a boy who lived
in our house in the thirties, loved dogs 

and gangster movies, longs for a body,
says he can watch us through the television, 

asks us to stand before the screen
and kiss. God in garden, he says. 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,
I'm almost convinced. In this geometry 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows
of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling: 

some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space. 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,
all these tulip petals thinning 

at the base until any wind takes them.
I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in, 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is
subjectively. As blood is utterly without 

an outside, can't be seen except out of context,
the wrong color in alien air, no longer itself. 

Though it submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times, 

though not for me, since at their first entry
into my disembodied blood 

there was nothing at home there.
For you they entered the blood garden over 

and over, like knocking at a door
because you know someone's home. Three times 

the Elisa Test, three the Western Blot,
and then the incoherent message. We're 

the public health care worker's
nine o'clock appointment, 

she is a phantom hand who forms
the letters of your name, and the word 

that begins with P. I'd lie out
and wait for the god if it weren't 

so cold, the blue moon huge
and disruptive above the flowering crab's 

foaming collapse. The spirits say Fog
when they can't speak clearly 

and the letters collide; sometimes
for them there's nothing outside the mist 

of their dying. Planchette,
peony, I would think of anything 

not to say the word. Maybe the blood
in the flower is a god's. Kiss me, 

in front of the screen, please,
the dead are watching. 

They haven't had enough yet.
Every new bloom is falling apart. 

I would say anything else
in the world, any other word.


then they vanish. The peony buds'
tight wrappings are edged crimson; 

when they open, a little blood-color
will ruffle at the heart of the flounced, 

unbelievable white. Three weeks after the test,
the vial filled from the crook 

of my elbow, I'm seeing blood everywhere:
a casual nick from the garden shears, 

a shaving cut and I feel the physical rush
of the welling up, the wine-fountain 

dark as Siberian iris. The thin green porcelain
teacup, our homemade Ouija's planchette, 

rocks and wobbles every night, spins
and spells. It seems a cloud of spirits 

numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy --
children grabbing for the telephone, 

happy to talk to someone who isn't dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least 

these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss. 

Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all. One character, Frank, 

distinguishes himself: a boy who lived
in our house in the thirties, loved dogs 

and gangster movies, longs for a body,
says he can watch us through the television, 

asks us to stand before the screen
and kiss. God in garden, he says. 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,
I'm almost convinced. In this geometry 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows
of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling: 

some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space. 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,
all these tulip petals thinning 

at the base until any wind takes them.
I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in, 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is
subjectively. As blood is utterly without 

an outside, can't be seen except out of context,
the wrong color in alien air, no longer itself. 

Though it submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times, 

though not for me, since at their first entry
into my disembodied blood 

there was nothing at home there.
For you they entered the blood garden over 

and over, like knocking at a door
because you know someone's home. Three times 

the Elisa Test, three the Western Blot,
and then the incoherent message. We're 

the public health care worker's
nine o'clock appointment, 

she is a phantom hand who forms
the letters of your name, and the word 

that begins with P. I'd lie out
and wait for the god if it weren't 

so cold, the blue moon huge
and disruptive above the flowering crab's 

foaming collapse. The spirits say Fog
when they can't speak clearly 

and the letters collide; sometimes
for them there's nothing outside the mist 

of their dying. Planchette,
peony, I would think of anything 

not to say the word. Maybe the blood
in the flower is a god's. Kiss me, 

in front of the screen, please,
the dead are watching. 

They haven't had enough yet.
Every new bloom is falling apart. 

I would say anything else
in the world, any other word.

          -from My Alexandria, 1993
 


 



 

Mark Doty is the author of seven books of poems, among them School of the Arts, Source, Sweet Machine, Atlantis, and My Alexandria. He has also published three volumes of nonfiction prose:  Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast and Firebird.

 

Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker.  Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.  

 

Doty has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards  and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Doty lives in New York City and in Houston, Texas, where he is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at the University of Houston.

 

 

Ouija and Garden and Fog, an Interview with Mark Doty

                                                                                        -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum                                                     

 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: There are countess ways in which we measure art.  Obviously, the way we do this depends on all sorts of factors.  But one of the elements that we don’t attribute to poetry very much is memorability.  I’m not sure why that is, but I think that one reason I’m drawn back to “Demolition” again and again, is this memorability, particularly in images like “the oldest concrete structure in New England” and “the ghost of their signs” and “the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, / a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head.”

 

I think that all poets hope their poem is remembered, but we sort of have a love/hate relationship with this ideal.  How important is it to you that we remember "Demolition?"

 

Mark Doty:  Memorability is mostly a pre-20th century value in poetry, since traditional patterns of rhythm and rhyme served as mnemonic aids, and having a supply of poems at the ready was a valuable source of entertainment. Free verse is nowhere near as easy to recall, but how important is that to us?  I don't love, say, Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" any less because I don't remember every line of it. I certainly hope that people will remember my poem, recalling the shape it makes, its argument or way of viewing experience, maybe particular figures of speech. The poems I love best are those that become ways of seeing for me, internal reference points or guideposts I go back to, in order to navigate the world.

 

AMK: Is there a way, in particular, to create a poem that’s memorable?  Do you think about this while in the drafting/revising process?

 

MD: Well, I'm working for musicality in the language, and for accuracy, and to be as clear as I can about complex things. I'd guess that if you attend to those, then memorability will take care of itself.

 

AMK: My teacher, Rodney Jones, said in class the other day that “all of us as writers do things for other people…”  To what degree do the various moves in this poem exist due to a concern for your readers, rather than for yourself or for the poem?

 

MD: Interesting question. The poem wants to tie together several frames of reference: the building being demolished, the monument to Colonel Shaw that Lowell touches upon in "For the Union Dead," and Lowell's own biography as well as Oscar Wilde's. I guess it would have been possible to write a version of the poem with less narrative "glue," placing these elements side by side in a Pound-like juxtaposition. But I am interested in taking the reader along on the journey, and likewise in tracking the motion of association myself, and thus there are phrases like "All summer I've been reading biographies..." or "A month ago, at St. Gaudens's house..." These gestures of transition felt necessary to me, since I'm putting together relatively disparate elements of cultural history. I can't tell you now which of these associations might have occurred while I was watching that old building hit the ground and which came in the writing process, but it doesn't matter. Unfolding and investigating the connections -- that, to my mind, IS the composing process.

 

AMK: For a poem that seems so obviously fixed in the 1st person, I think we can all learn a lot from this poem; the word “I” only occurring a few times.  From what perspective is this poem written and how do you think this poem works within this perspective so successfully?

 

MD: I think of Buckminster Fuller saying "I seem to be a verb." The self's revealed in the action of looking, inquiring, thinking, and looking some more. That's my hope. And of course nothing's duller syntactically than lots of sentences beginning with "I" and then a verb.

 

AMK: What are your thoughts on the relationship between a speaker in a poem and the poet his/herself in Contemporary Poetry?  How should we be reading your poetry?

 

MD: I think in all my published work, there are maybe four poems that aren't spoken by some version of myself; there's a monologue by a dog, by a heroine of the Paris Commune, by a friend in a hospital watching his sister die, and one by a woman who thinks she's a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian. And of course all those are versions of me, too! 

 

But the fact is, what you put on the page is always a version of self, even if you feel you are being strictly allegiant to the truth. You can't get the whole, complex, hard-to-know self on the page. I believe in performing as many aspects of myself, and therefore there are plain spoken poems and more markedly wrought ones. And poems which seem to come with my biography attached and poems wherein "I" is much more of a placeholder, an open space for a reader to step into.

 

AMK: “Fog” is, hands down, one of my favorite poems.  I remember the first time I read it and, talking to a colleague, admitted I didn’t understand what the poem was about.  Later, giving it a closer reading, it became clear what was going on in the poem, and once the basic narrative of the poem was clear to me, I simply fell in love with the sad, searching movement of the lines that take us from the blood tests, to the ouija board, and to the ghosts who yearn to live.

 

I think this is an important aspect/problem of poetry…that it sometimes asks a lot of a reader, which can be a delight if he or she goes along with it…

 

Now, looking at this poem, I realize I wasn’t a great reader when I first came to “Fog,” but I’m wondering what you think is reasonable and unreasonable to expect of a reader and how you convince someone to work with a poem that they find “less than easy” to read.

 

MD: It would be a mistake for them all to be immediately transparent, since experience isn't like that. I do my best to be clear, but I understand that some poems may require greater patience on the reader's part, or that there might be a delay in getting at what's taking place. But if I do my job well, then you want to stay with a poem; you grant it a line of credit, as it were, believing that it may resolve before your eyes, as you keep looking, in the way that a challenging painting might.

 

AMK: Similarly, do you think “Fog” is a difficult poem?  And if so, were you aware of this when you wrote it…how did this awareness affect its writing?

 

MD: I think it's emotionally difficult. It's sidling up to a feeling of utter and complete devastation, the emptying-out of the speaker's future. Therefore it needs an array of vehicles -- ouija and garden and fog -- to approach the 

molten core of the matter. I wonder if anyone ever thinks their own poems are difficult? My friend Jean Valentine, who is notorious among readers for a certain degree of opacity, always says that she could not be any more clear.

I thought I'd been very clear here, and then I was surprised when a reviewer said that my poem lacked courage because it would not inscribe the word "positive." I've done everything in my power to point to that word, which had newly become terrible, late in the 1980s, and to portray the speaker's horror of it. Do I need to make it more plain than that?

 

AMK: Another element of “Fog” that I think is particularly beautiful is the dualistic nature of its voice, which, at times, speaks from inside the poem and, at others, from outside the poem.  

 

When I say inside, I’m thinking of lines like “The crested iris by the front gate waves / its blue flags three days, exactly” and 

 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight, 

I'm almost convinced.  In this geometry 

 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows 

of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling…

 

lines that seem to come from within the experience.  

 

By outside, I mean lines like

 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,

         all these tulip petals thinning

 

          at the base until any wind takes them.

I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in,

 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is

subjectively…

 

lines that emit from some other place, a more reflective voice; a voice looking back.

 

Do you see the poem in this way?  Is this an element of form that we should read as a reflection of what the poem is about?

 

MD: I spoke earlier about perception and inquiry. The lines you point to are an example of that: here's a place in the poem where a scene is evoked, and here's a meditation on that scene. I like this kind of yoking because it feels to me like consciousness.  This is my departure from the old "show don't tell" advice that grows out of Imagism; I like poems that show and then go on to "tell" -- that is, to examine, consider, question, propose.  And in this particular poem, the speaker is desperately trying to get out of the experience, trying to find some way to stand at a remove from an oncoming train, as it were.

 

AMK: Thank you so much for your time.
 

 





About Mark Doty: A Profile 



                                                by Mark Wunderlich 










A summer visitor to the Cape Cod resort village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is liable to see just about anything walking down Commercial Street, the town’s main drag and zone of street theater. From muscle boys with shaved chests and nail polish to Portuguese fishermen in waders to a drag queen wearing a G-string, metal helmet, and gold body paint, the possibilities for human identities seem both fluid and vast. P-town is also a site of incredible natural beauty, but a volatile one. Surrounded on three sides by water, the tip of the Cape is pounded by waves and winter storms, its shape shifting as the wind moves the dunes. In the summer, it is a circus, in the winter, desolate. It is this landscape of both natural and human extremity and theatricality that the poet Mark Doty uses as the surface upon which to map an inner life. 

The author of five collections of poems and a memoir, Mark Doty is one of the most celebrated writers of his generation—the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American to earn the T. S. Eliot Prize in Britain. He has also received a Whiting Writer’s Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. 

Born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953, Doty spent much of his childhood moving around the country. His father was a civilian member of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the job required one relocation after another. The place where Doty first came in contact with contemporary poetry was Tucson, Arizona, where he went to high school. A drama teacher introduced him to the poet Richard Shelton, who read Doty’s early poems and encouraged him. “Most importantly,” Doty says, “he showed me that one could have a life as a poet, that literature, or any art, might be the very center of one’s experience.” No small trick in Tucson, in the suburbs in the sixties. One moment in particular stayed in Doty’s memory. “I went to Dick Shelton’s house in the desert to help clean out his garage, and his wife, Lois, was at the piano when I walked in, playing Kurt Weill and singing ‘Pirate Jenny’ from The Threepenny Opera in German. I felt a window had opened onto another world.” 

During the seventies, while living in Iowa, where he’d attended Drake University, he cowrote and published three chapbooks with his then-wife, the poet Ruth Doty—books to which he no longer feels an allegiance. He now thinks of Turtle, Swan as his first book. Published in 1987 by David R. Godine, Turtle, Swan announced the arrival of a singular and vibrantly new voice in American poetry. These early poems were marked with what have come to be signatures of Doty’s work: an efficient narration of events, an elegant handling of free verse one wants to call “post-formal,” and a lyric intensity akin to that of Doty’s prominent influence, Hart Crane. The book was not simply a precursor of things to come, but evidence of a voice fully formed. One of the most notable poems in the collection is the extraordinary “Charlie Howard’s Descent,” which describes the 1984 killing of a homosexual man who was thrown from a bridge by a group of boys in Bangor, Maine:

 

Over and over
he slipped into the gulf
between what he knew and how
he was known

With these lines, Doty took bold steps toward becoming the first post-Stonewall gay poet to emerge as a major voice in American letters. His predecessors, such as James Merrill, William Meredith, and Richard Howard, had all favored a more privileged tone and vocabulary, elaborate ventriloquism through personae, or occluded references to homosexuality. On the opposite spectrum, Ginsberg used an expansive self-mythologizing strung along an elastic line to address topics that placed him on America’s sexual margins. With Turtle, Swan, Doty effectively merged the political with the aesthetic, uniting a taut line with a lyric voice and an imagination that included notions of activism. Simply by being open about his sexuality, by using it as a subject for his poems without having it be the subject, Doty created a new model for gay and lesbian poets and poetry.

For several years, Doty and his partner, Wally Roberts, lived in Montpelier, Vermont. Doty taught creative writing at Goddard College, where he’d received his M.F.A., and he and Wally renovated a one-hundred-ten-year-old house. In 1989, Wally tested positive for HIV. Doty tested negative. In his bestselling memoir about Wally’s illness and decline, Heaven’s Coast (HarperCollins, 1996), Doty writes, “The virus seemed to me, first, like a kind of solvent which dissolved the future, our future, a little at a time. It was like a dark stain, a floating, inky transparency hovering over Wally’s body, and its intention was to erase the time ahead of us, to make that time, each day, a little smaller.” In 1989 the couple visited Provincetown, renting a house on the beach, and eventually decided to stay. The beautiful seaside environment, and the sizable gay community that could provide support for the couple as they faced Wally’s illness together, made it seem an ideal place to settle. 

In his second volume of poems, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (David R. Godine, 1991), Doty began chronicling Provincetown, its light and harbor and glittering surfaces. More than rare beauty distinguished the poems, however. One got the sense that Doty now viewed poetry as an arena of argument—an argument between public and private selves about how to construct an inner life. Most remarkable in this second book is the way in which observation of the physical world is integrated into a deeply personal and intimate narrative. 

In 1993, Mark Doty’s third volume of poems was selected by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Illinois Press. My Alexandria (the title of which makes reference to another primary Doty influence, C. P. Cavafy) was a tour de force, catapulting Doty into the center of attention.The book is perhaps the finest in-depth literary investigation of the AIDS crisis, and at its center is the anticipation of tremendous loss, an ache that pervades each of the poems. Curiosity about the incidental leads to inner investigations of the relationship between sex and illness, desire and inevitable decay. In the long poem “The Wings,” Doty begins with a description of a boy at an auction, lying on the grass, reading. As the poem progresses, he offers: 

 

Don’t let anybody tell you

death’s the price exacted
for the ability to love;

couldn’t we live forever
without running out of occasions? 

Both readers and critics responded generously to My Alexandria. The book received numerous awards, including The Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Yet Doty’s success was to be shadowed by loss. In February of 1994, his partner, Wally, died of complications from AIDS. Doty writes, “In some way I had joined the invisible, too. I think that when people die they make those around them feel something like they felt; that may be the dying’s first legacy to us. . . . Acceptance breeds acceptance, as Wally’s attitude during his illness had shown; it’d been easy, somehow, for the people who took care of him to do so. He seemed, to those who carried him, to have made himself light.” 

In Atlantis, published in 1995 by HarperCollins, Doty documents with great acuity the colors and textures of Provincetown. The book describes storm after storm. Ruined boats are both ravishing and haunted. Each tempest leaves behind something beautiful, but tinged with sorrow. It is a book about a storm, and the storm’s quiet aftermath; something has been lost, but something else is left behind, worthy of description and contemplation. Punctuating the volume are occasional spikes of rage, as in the poem “Homo Will Not Inherit,” in which the poet confronts a flier stating, “Homo will not inherit. Repent and be saved.” 

 

. . . I have for hours
believed—without judgment, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,

is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s 

the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy. 

This is Doty at the height of his powers, the poem driven into the world by force of the poet’s will, the engine hurtling it along his ecstatic imagistic capabilities. He turns biblical language on its ear, reclaiming its strength and lyricism, while exposing its misuse as an instrument of hate. The book’s primary subject remains grief and its survival—loss as it scours the psyche to the bone. 

With Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Doty’s most recent book, we see a poet emerging with a more public voice, a formidable and lyrical style of argumentation. “I’m wanting my own poems to turn more towards the social, to the common conditions of American life in our particular uncertain moment,” Doty says. “I am, I guess, groping towards those poems; I’m trying to talk about public life without resorting to public language.” 

“Mercy on Broadway” from Sweet Machine acts as a bridge, linking Doty’s previous work with his new artistic ambitions. The poet takes on the tumult and rapture of Manhattan, describing a scene on lower Broadway, where a woman is trying to sell a bowl full of turtles from a place on the sidewalk:

 

. . . I’m forty-one years old
and ready to get down 

on my knees to a kitchen bowl
full of live green. I’m breathing here,

a new man next to me who’s beginning
to matter.

The poem becomes a meditation on finding the will to start over, but it also functions as a love song for the noise and chaos of street life as it shuffles itself into and out of meaning. In this masterful poem, Doty combines the vast and the very small, what’s impersonal and what is deeply felt. 

Mark Doty makes his living as a teacher of creative writing, and in recent years he has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the creative writing program at the University of Utah. He currently teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston, and he and his partner, the novelist Paul Lisicky, split their time between Houston and Provincetown. 

Doty recently finished a second memoir entitled Firebird, which will be published by HarperCollins next year. “Firebird is an autobiography from six to sixteen, with a particular eye towards matters of aesthetic education: How do we learn to identify what we find beautiful, and what are the uses to which beauty is put? It’s a sissy boy’s story, and thus an exile’s tale, and a chronicle of a gradual process of coming to belong somewhere, to the world of art.” He goes on to add, “I hope the book is not so much about me as it is an examination of a whole constellation of experiences and ideas—personal and collective—about art, sexuality, identity, gender, and the survival of the inner life.”

On summer afternoons in Provincetown, students from the Cape Cod School of Art are seen throughout the town, painting landscapes of various local scenes. Very often, groups of them set up easels in the street in front of Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky’s two-century-old house. With its rose arbor, white clapboards, and vibrant, overblown flower beds, it’s the perfect New England subject. With each stroke, the painters try to get at something Doty noted in his poem “Fog”—“some secret amplitude . . . in this orderly space”—which exemplifies what Doty has been able to reveal, with grace and mastery, in his work and life. 

Mark Wunderlich is the author of the poetry collection The Anchorage, which will be published this spring by the University of Massachusetts Press. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the managing director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. 






            -from Ploughshares, Spring 1999


 

 





About Mark Doty: A Profile 



                                                by Mark Wunderlich 










A summer visitor to the Cape Cod resort village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is liable to see just about anything walking down Commercial Street, the town’s main drag and zone of street theater. From muscle boys with shaved chests and nail polish to Portuguese fishermen in waders to a drag queen wearing a G-string, metal helmet, and gold body paint, the possibilities for human identities seem both fluid and vast. P-town is also a site of incredible natural beauty, but a volatile one. Surrounded on three sides by water, the tip of the Cape is pounded by waves and winter storms, its shape shifting as the wind moves the dunes. In the summer, it is a circus, in the winter, desolate. It is this landscape of both natural and human extremity and theatricality that the poet Mark Doty uses as the surface upon which to map an inner life. 

The author of five collections of poems and a memoir, Mark Doty is one of the most celebrated writers of his generation—the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American to earn the T. S. Eliot Prize in Britain. He has also received a Whiting Writer’s Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. 

Born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953, Doty spent much of his childhood moving around the country. His father was a civilian member of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the job required one relocation after another. The place where Doty first came in contact with contemporary poetry was Tucson, Arizona, where he went to high school. A drama teacher introduced him to the poet Richard Shelton, who read Doty’s early poems and encouraged him. “Most importantly,” Doty says, “he showed me that one could have a life as a poet, that literature, or any art, might be the very center of one’s experience.” No small trick in Tucson, in the suburbs in the sixties. One moment in particular stayed in Doty’s memory. “I went to Dick Shelton’s house in the desert to help clean out his garage, and his wife, Lois, was at the piano when I walked in, playing Kurt Weill and singing ‘Pirate Jenny’ from The Threepenny Opera in German. I felt a window had opened onto another world.” 

During the seventies, while living in Iowa, where he’d attended Drake University, he cowrote and published three chapbooks with his then-wife, the poet Ruth Doty—books to which he no longer feels an allegiance. He now thinks of Turtle, Swan as his first book. Published in 1987 by David R. Godine, Turtle, Swan announced the arrival of a singular and vibrantly new voice in American poetry. These early poems were marked with what have come to be signatures of Doty’s work: an efficient narration of events, an elegant handling of free verse one wants to call “post-formal,” and a lyric intensity akin to that of Doty’s prominent influence, Hart Crane. The book was not simply a precursor of things to come, but evidence of a voice fully formed. One of the most notable poems in the collection is the extraordinary “Charlie Howard’s Descent,” which describes the 1984 killing of a homosexual man who was thrown from a bridge by a group of boys in Bangor, Maine:

 

Over and over
he slipped into the gulf
between what he knew and how
he was known

With these lines, Doty took bold steps toward becoming the first post-Stonewall gay poet to emerge as a major voice in American letters. His predecessors, such as James Merrill, William Meredith, and Richard Howard, had all favored a more privileged tone and vocabulary, elaborate ventriloquism through personae, or occluded references to homosexuality. On the opposite spectrum, Ginsberg used an expansive self-mythologizing strung along an elastic line to address topics that placed him on America’s sexual margins. With Turtle, Swan, Doty effectively merged the political with the aesthetic, uniting a taut line with a lyric voice and an imagination that included notions of activism. Simply by being open about his sexuality, by using it as a subject for his poems without having it be the subject, Doty created a new model for gay and lesbian poets and poetry.

For several years, Doty and his partner, Wally Roberts, lived in Montpelier, Vermont. Doty taught creative writing at Goddard College, where he’d received his M.F.A., and he and Wally renovated a one-hundred-ten-year-old house. In 1989, Wally tested positive for HIV. Doty tested negative. In his bestselling memoir about Wally’s illness and decline, Heaven’s Coast (HarperCollins, 1996), Doty writes, “The virus seemed to me, first, like a kind of solvent which dissolved the future, our future, a little at a time. It was like a dark stain, a floating, inky transparency hovering over Wally’s body, and its intention was to erase the time ahead of us, to make that time, each day, a little smaller.” In 1989 the couple visited Provincetown, renting a house on the beach, and eventually decided to stay. The beautiful seaside environment, and the sizable gay community that could provide support for the couple as they faced Wally’s illness together, made it seem an ideal place to settle. 

In his second volume of poems, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (David R. Godine, 1991), Doty began chronicling Provincetown, its light and harbor and glittering surfaces. More than rare beauty distinguished the poems, however. One got the sense that Doty now viewed poetry as an arena of argument—an argument between public and private selves about how to construct an inner life. Most remarkable in this second book is the way in which observation of the physical world is integrated into a deeply personal and intimate narrative. 

In 1993, Mark Doty’s third volume of poems was selected by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Illinois Press. My Alexandria (the title of which makes reference to another primary Doty influence, C. P. Cavafy) was a tour de force, catapulting Doty into the center of attention.The book is perhaps the finest in-depth literary investigation of the AIDS crisis, and at its center is the anticipation of tremendous loss, an ache that pervades each of the poems. Curiosity about the incidental leads to inner investigations of the relationship between sex and illness, desire and inevitable decay. In the long poem “The Wings,” Doty begins with a description of a boy at an auction, lying on the grass, reading. As the poem progresses, he offers: 

 

Don’t let anybody tell you

death’s the price exacted
for the ability to love;

couldn’t we live forever
without running out of occasions? 

Both readers and critics responded generously to My Alexandria. The book received numerous awards, including The Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Yet Doty’s success was to be shadowed by loss. In February of 1994, his partner, Wally, died of complications from AIDS. Doty writes, “In some way I had joined the invisible, too. I think that when people die they make those around them feel something like they felt; that may be the dying’s first legacy to us. . . . Acceptance breeds acceptance, as Wally’s attitude during his illness had shown; it’d been easy, somehow, for the people who took care of him to do so. He seemed, to those who carried him, to have made himself light.” 

In Atlantis, published in 1995 by HarperCollins, Doty documents with great acuity the colors and textures of Provincetown. The book describes storm after storm. Ruined boats are both ravishing and haunted. Each tempest leaves behind something beautiful, but tinged with sorrow. It is a book about a storm, and the storm’s quiet aftermath; something has been lost, but something else is left behind, worthy of description and contemplation. Punctuating the volume are occasional spikes of rage, as in the poem “Homo Will Not Inherit,” in which the poet confronts a flier stating, “Homo will not inherit. Repent and be saved.” 

 

. . . I have for hours
believed—without judgment, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,

is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s 

the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy. 

This is Doty at the height of his powers, the poem driven into the world by force of the poet’s will, the engine hurtling it along his ecstatic imagistic capabilities. He turns biblical language on its ear, reclaiming its strength and lyricism, while exposing its misuse as an instrument of hate. The book’s primary subject remains grief and its survival—loss as it scours the psyche to the bone. 

With Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Doty’s most recent book, we see a poet emerging with a more public voice, a formidable and lyrical style of argumentation. “I’m wanting my own poems to turn more towards the social, to the common conditions of American life in our particular uncertain moment,” Doty says. “I am, I guess, groping towards those poems; I’m trying to talk about public life without resorting to public language.” 

“Mercy on Broadway” from Sweet Machine acts as a bridge, linking Doty’s previous work with his new artistic ambitions. The poet takes on the tumult and rapture of Manhattan, describing a scene on lower Broadway, where a woman is trying to sell a bowl full of turtles from a place on the sidewalk:

 

. . . I’m forty-one years old
and ready to get down 

on my knees to a kitchen bowl
full of live green. I’m breathing here,

a new man next to me who’s beginning
to matter.

The poem becomes a meditation on finding the will to start over, but it also functions as a love song for the noise and chaos of street life as it shuffles itself into and out of meaning. In this masterful poem, Doty combines the vast and the very small, what’s impersonal and what is deeply felt. 

Mark Doty makes his living as a teacher of creative writing, and in recent years he has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the creative writing program at the University of Utah. He currently teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston, and he and his partner, the novelist Paul Lisicky, split their time between Houston and Provincetown. 

Doty recently finished a second memoir entitled Firebird, which will be published by HarperCollins next year. “Firebird is an autobiography from six to sixteen, with a particular eye towards matters of aesthetic education: How do we learn to identify what we find beautiful, and what are the uses to which beauty is put? It’s a sissy boy’s story, and thus an exile’s tale, and a chronicle of a gradual process of coming to belong somewhere, to the world of art.” He goes on to add, “I hope the book is not so much about me as it is an examination of a whole constellation of experiences and ideas—personal and collective—about art, sexuality, identity, gender, and the survival of the inner life.”

On summer afternoons in Provincetown, students from the Cape Cod School of Art are seen throughout the town, painting landscapes of various local scenes. Very often, groups of them set up easels in the street in front of Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky’s two-century-old house. With its rose arbor, white clapboards, and vibrant, overblown flower beds, it’s the perfect New England subject. With each stroke, the painters try to get at something Doty noted in his poem “Fog”—“some secret amplitude . . . in this orderly space”—which exemplifies what Doty has been able to reveal, with grace and mastery, in his work and life. 

Mark Wunderlich is the author of the poetry collection The Anchorage, which will be published this spring by the University of Massachusetts Press. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the managing director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. 






            -from Ploughshares, Spring 1999









 

Demolition 

 

 

 



The intact facade's now almost black 
in the rain; all day they've torn at the back 
of the building, "the oldest concrete structure 
in New England," the newspaper said. By afternoon, 
when the backhoe claw appears above 
three stories of columns and cornices, 

the crowd beneath their massed umbrellas cheer. 
Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves, 
atomized plaster billowing: dust of 1907's 
rooming house, this year's bake shop and florist's, 
the ghosts of their signs faint above the windows 
lined, last week, with loaves and blooms. 

We love disasters that have nothing to do 
with us: the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, 
a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head 
and considering what to topple next. It's a weekday, 
and those of us with the leisure to watch 
are out of work, unemployable or academics, 

joined by a thirst for watching something fall. 
All summer, at loose ends, I've read biographies, 
Wilde and Robert Lowell, and fallen asleep 
over a fallen hero lurching down a Paris boulevard, 
talking his way to dinner or a drink, 
unable to forget the vain and stupid boy 

he allowed to ruin him. And I dreamed 
I was Lowell, in a manic flight of failing 
and ruthless energy, and understood 
how wrong I was with a passionate exactitude 
which had to be like his. A month ago, 
at Saint-Gauden's house, we ran from a startling downpour 

into coincidence: under a loggia built 
for performances on the lawn 
hulked Shaw's monument, splendid 
in its plaster maquette, the ramrod-straight colonel 
high above his black troops. We crouched on wet gravel 
and waited out the squall; the hieratic woman 

-- a wingless angel? -- floating horizontally 
above the soldiers, her robe billowing like plaster dust, 
seemed so far above us, another century's 
allegorical decor, an afterthought 
who'd never descend to the purely physical 
soldiers, the nearly breathing bronze ranks crushed 

into a terrible compression of perspective, 
as if the world hurried them into the ditch. 
"The unreadable," Wilde said, "is what occurs." 
And when the brutish metal rears 
above the wall of unglazed windows --
where, in a week, the kids will skateboard 

in their lovely loops and spray 
their indecipherable ideograms 
across the parking lot -- the single standing wall 
seems Roman, momentarily, an aqueduct, 
all that's left of something difficult 
to understand now, something Oscar 

and Bosie might have posed before, for a photograph. 
Aqueducts and angels, here on Main, 
seem merely souvenirs; the gaps 
where the windows opened once 
into transients' rooms are pure sky. 
It's strange how much more beautiful 

the sky is to us when it's framed 
by these columned openings someone meant us 
to take for stone. The enormous, articulate shovel 
nudges the highest row of moldings 
and the whole thing wavers as though we'd dreamed it, 
our black classic, and it topples all at once. 

 

 

Fog

 

 

 

The crested iris by the front gate waves
its blue flags three days, exactly, 
then they vanish. The peony buds'
tight wrappings are edged crimson; 

when they open, a little blood-color
will ruffle at the heart of the flounced, 

unbelievable white. Three weeks after the test,
the vial filled from the crook 

of my elbow, I'm seeing blood everywhere:
a casual nick from the garden shears, 

a shaving cut and I feel the physical rush
of the welling up, the wine-fountain 

dark as Siberian iris. The thin green porcelain
teacup, our homemade Ouija's planchette, 

rocks and wobbles every night, spins
and spells. It seems a cloud of spirits 

numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy --
children grabbing for the telephone, 

happy to talk to someone who isn't dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least 

these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss. 

Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all. One character, Frank, 

distinguishes himself: a boy who lived
in our house in the thirties, loved dogs 

and gangster movies, longs for a body,
says he can watch us through the television, 

asks us to stand before the screen
and kiss. God in garden, he says. 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,
I'm almost convinced. In this geometry 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows
of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling: 

some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space. 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,
all these tulip petals thinning 

at the base until any wind takes them.
I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in, 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is
subjectively. As blood is utterly without 

an outside, can't be seen except out of context,
the wrong color in alien air, no longer itself. 

Though it submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times, 

though not for me, since at their first entry
into my disembodied blood 

there was nothing at home there.
For you they entered the blood garden over 

and over, like knocking at a door
because you know someone's home. Three times 

the Elisa Test, three the Western Blot,
and then the incoherent message. We're 

the public health care worker's
nine o'clock appointment, 

she is a phantom hand who forms
the letters of your name, and the word 

that begins with P. I'd lie out
and wait for the god if it weren't 

so cold, the blue moon huge
and disruptive above the flowering crab's 

foaming collapse. The spirits say Fog
when they can't speak clearly 

and the letters collide; sometimes
for them there's nothing outside the mist 

of their dying. Planchette,
peony, I would think of anything 

not to say the word. Maybe the blood
in the flower is a god's. Kiss me, 

in front of the screen, please,
the dead are watching. 

They haven't had enough yet.
Every new bloom is falling apart. 

I would say anything else
in the world, any other word.


then they vanish. The peony buds'
tight wrappings are edged crimson; 

when they open, a little blood-color
will ruffle at the heart of the flounced, 

unbelievable white. Three weeks after the test,
the vial filled from the crook 

of my elbow, I'm seeing blood everywhere:
a casual nick from the garden shears, 

a shaving cut and I feel the physical rush
of the welling up, the wine-fountain 

dark as Siberian iris. The thin green porcelain
teacup, our homemade Ouija's planchette, 

rocks and wobbles every night, spins
and spells. It seems a cloud of spirits 

numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy --
children grabbing for the telephone, 

happy to talk to someone who isn't dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least 

these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss. 

Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all. One character, Frank, 

distinguishes himself: a boy who lived
in our house in the thirties, loved dogs 

and gangster movies, longs for a body,
says he can watch us through the television, 

asks us to stand before the screen
and kiss. God in garden, he says. 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,
I'm almost convinced. In this geometry 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows
of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling: 

some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space. 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,
all these tulip petals thinning 

at the base until any wind takes them.
I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in, 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is
subjectively. As blood is utterly without 

an outside, can't be seen except out of context,
the wrong color in alien air, no longer itself. 

Though it submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times, 

though not for me, since at their first entry
into my disembodied blood 

there was nothing at home there.
For you they entered the blood garden over 

and over, like knocking at a door
because you know someone's home. Three times 

the Elisa Test, three the Western Blot,
and then the incoherent message. We're 

the public health care worker's
nine o'clock appointment, 

she is a phantom hand who forms
the letters of your name, and the word 

that begins with P. I'd lie out
and wait for the god if it weren't 

so cold, the blue moon huge
and disruptive above the flowering crab's 

foaming collapse. The spirits say Fog
when they can't speak clearly 

and the letters collide; sometimes
for them there's nothing outside the mist 

of their dying. Planchette,
peony, I would think of anything 

not to say the word. Maybe the blood
in the flower is a god's. Kiss me, 

in front of the screen, please,
the dead are watching. 

They haven't had enough yet.
Every new bloom is falling apart. 

I would say anything else
in the world, any other word.

          -from My Alexandria, 1993
 


 



 












 

Demolition 

 

 

 



The intact facade's now almost black 
in the rain; all day they've torn at the back 
of the building, "the oldest concrete structure 
in New England," the newspaper said. By afternoon, 
when the backhoe claw appears above 
three stories of columns and cornices, 

the crowd beneath their massed umbrellas cheer. 
Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves, 
atomized plaster billowing: dust of 1907's 
rooming house, this year's bake shop and florist's, 
the ghosts of their signs faint above the windows 
lined, last week, with loaves and blooms. 

We love disasters that have nothing to do 
with us: the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, 
a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head 
and considering what to topple next. It's a weekday, 
and those of us with the leisure to watch 
are out of work, unemployable or academics, 

joined by a thirst for watching something fall. 
All summer, at loose ends, I've read biographies, 
Wilde and Robert Lowell, and fallen asleep 
over a fallen hero lurching down a Paris boulevard, 
talking his way to dinner or a drink, 
unable to forget the vain and stupid boy 

he allowed to ruin him. And I dreamed 
I was Lowell, in a manic flight of failing 
and ruthless energy, and understood 
how wrong I was with a passionate exactitude 
which had to be like his. A month ago, 
at Saint-Gauden's house, we ran from a startling downpour 

into coincidence: under a loggia built 
for performances on the lawn 
hulked Shaw's monument, splendid 
in its plaster maquette, the ramrod-straight colonel 
high above his black troops. We crouched on wet gravel 
and waited out the squall; the hieratic woman 

-- a wingless angel? -- floating horizontally 
above the soldiers, her robe billowing like plaster dust, 
seemed so far above us, another century's 
allegorical decor, an afterthought 
who'd never descend to the purely physical 
soldiers, the nearly breathing bronze ranks crushed 

into a terrible compression of perspective, 
as if the world hurried them into the ditch. 
"The unreadable," Wilde said, "is what occurs." 
And when the brutish metal rears 
above the wall of unglazed windows --
where, in a week, the kids will skateboard 

in their lovely loops and spray 
their indecipherable ideograms 
across the parking lot -- the single standing wall 
seems Roman, momentarily, an aqueduct, 
all that's left of something difficult 
to understand now, something Oscar 

and Bosie might have posed before, for a photograph. 
Aqueducts and angels, here on Main, 
seem merely souvenirs; the gaps 
where the windows opened once 
into transients' rooms are pure sky. 
It's strange how much more beautiful 

the sky is to us when it's framed 
by these columned openings someone meant us 
to take for stone. The enormous, articulate shovel 
nudges the highest row of moldings 
and the whole thing wavers as though we'd dreamed it, 
our black classic, and it topples all at once. 

 

 

Fog

 

 

 

The crested iris by the front gate waves
its blue flags three days, exactly, 
then they vanish. The peony buds'
tight wrappings are edged crimson; 

when they open, a little blood-color
will ruffle at the heart of the flounced, 

unbelievable white. Three weeks after the test,
the vial filled from the crook 

of my elbow, I'm seeing blood everywhere:
a casual nick from the garden shears, 

a shaving cut and I feel the physical rush
of the welling up, the wine-fountain 

dark as Siberian iris. The thin green porcelain
teacup, our homemade Ouija's planchette, 

rocks and wobbles every night, spins
and spells. It seems a cloud of spirits 

numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy --
children grabbing for the telephone, 

happy to talk to someone who isn't dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least 

these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss. 

Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all. One character, Frank, 

distinguishes himself: a boy who lived
in our house in the thirties, loved dogs 

and gangster movies, longs for a body,
says he can watch us through the television, 

asks us to stand before the screen
and kiss. God in garden, he says. 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,
I'm almost convinced. In this geometry 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows
of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling: 

some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space. 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,
all these tulip petals thinning 

at the base until any wind takes them.
I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in, 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is
subjectively. As blood is utterly without 

an outside, can't be seen except out of context,
the wrong color in alien air, no longer itself. 

Though it submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times, 

though not for me, since at their first entry
into my disembodied blood 

there was nothing at home there.
For you they entered the blood garden over 

and over, like knocking at a door
because you know someone's home. Three times 

the Elisa Test, three the Western Blot,
and then the incoherent message. We're 

the public health care worker's
nine o'clock appointment, 

she is a phantom hand who forms
the letters of your name, and the word 

that begins with P. I'd lie out
and wait for the god if it weren't 

so cold, the blue moon huge
and disruptive above the flowering crab's 

foaming collapse. The spirits say Fog
when they can't speak clearly 

and the letters collide; sometimes
for them there's nothing outside the mist 

of their dying. Planchette,
peony, I would think of anything 

not to say the word. Maybe the blood
in the flower is a god's. Kiss me, 

in front of the screen, please,
the dead are watching. 

They haven't had enough yet.
Every new bloom is falling apart. 

I would say anything else
in the world, any other word.


then they vanish. The peony buds'
tight wrappings are edged crimson; 

when they open, a little blood-color
will ruffle at the heart of the flounced, 

unbelievable white. Three weeks after the test,
the vial filled from the crook 

of my elbow, I'm seeing blood everywhere:
a casual nick from the garden shears, 

a shaving cut and I feel the physical rush
of the welling up, the wine-fountain 

dark as Siberian iris. The thin green porcelain
teacup, our homemade Ouija's planchette, 

rocks and wobbles every night, spins
and spells. It seems a cloud of spirits 

numerous as lilac panicles vie for occupancy --
children grabbing for the telephone, 

happy to talk to someone who isn't dead yet?
Everyone wants to speak at once, or at least 

these random words appear, incongruous
and exactly spelled: energy, immunity, kiss. 

Then: M. has immunity. W. has.
And that was all. One character, Frank, 

distinguishes himself: a boy who lived
in our house in the thirties, loved dogs 

and gangster movies, longs for a body,
says he can watch us through the television, 

asks us to stand before the screen
and kiss. God in garden, he says. 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,
I'm almost convinced. In this geometry 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows
of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling: 

some secret amplitude
seems to open in this orderly space. 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,
all these tulip petals thinning 

at the base until any wind takes them.
I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in, 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is
subjectively. As blood is utterly without 

an outside, can't be seen except out of context,
the wrong color in alien air, no longer itself. 

Though it submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times, 

though not for me, since at their first entry
into my disembodied blood 

there was nothing at home there.
For you they entered the blood garden over 

and over, like knocking at a door
because you know someone's home. Three times 

the Elisa Test, three the Western Blot,
and then the incoherent message. We're 

the public health care worker's
nine o'clock appointment, 

she is a phantom hand who forms
the letters of your name, and the word 

that begins with P. I'd lie out
and wait for the god if it weren't 

so cold, the blue moon huge
and disruptive above the flowering crab's 

foaming collapse. The spirits say Fog
when they can't speak clearly 

and the letters collide; sometimes
for them there's nothing outside the mist 

of their dying. Planchette,
peony, I would think of anything 

not to say the word. Maybe the blood
in the flower is a god's. Kiss me, 

in front of the screen, please,
the dead are watching. 

They haven't had enough yet.
Every new bloom is falling apart. 

I would say anything else
in the world, any other word.

          -from My Alexandria, 1993
 


 



 

Mark Doty is the author of seven books of poems, among them School of the Arts, Source, Sweet Machine, Atlantis, and My Alexandria. He has also published three volumes of nonfiction prose:  Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast and Firebird.

 

Doty’s poems have appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The New Yorker.  Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections.  

 

Doty has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards  and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

 

Doty lives in New York City and in Houston, Texas, where he is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor in the graduate program at the University of Houston.

 

 

Ouija and Garden and Fog, an Interview with Mark Doty

                                                                                        -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum                                                     

 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: There are countess ways in which we measure art.  Obviously, the way we do this depends on all sorts of factors.  But one of the elements that we don’t attribute to poetry very much is memorability.  I’m not sure why that is, but I think that one reason I’m drawn back to “Demolition” again and again, is this memorability, particularly in images like “the oldest concrete structure in New England” and “the ghost of their signs” and “the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, / a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head.”

 

I think that all poets hope their poem is remembered, but we sort of have a love/hate relationship with this ideal.  How important is it to you that we remember "Demolition?"

 

Mark Doty:  Memorability is mostly a pre-20th century value in poetry, since traditional patterns of rhythm and rhyme served as mnemonic aids, and having a supply of poems at the ready was a valuable source of entertainment. Free verse is nowhere near as easy to recall, but how important is that to us?  I don't love, say, Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" any less because I don't remember every line of it. I certainly hope that people will remember my poem, recalling the shape it makes, its argument or way of viewing experience, maybe particular figures of speech. The poems I love best are those that become ways of seeing for me, internal reference points or guideposts I go back to, in order to navigate the world.

 

AMK: Is there a way, in particular, to create a poem that’s memorable?  Do you think about this while in the drafting/revising process?

 

MD: Well, I'm working for musicality in the language, and for accuracy, and to be as clear as I can about complex things. I'd guess that if you attend to those, then memorability will take care of itself.

 

AMK: My teacher, Rodney Jones, said in class the other day that “all of us as writers do things for other people…”  To what degree do the various moves in this poem exist due to a concern for your readers, rather than for yourself or for the poem?

 

MD: Interesting question. The poem wants to tie together several frames of reference: the building being demolished, the monument to Colonel Shaw that Lowell touches upon in "For the Union Dead," and Lowell's own biography as well as Oscar Wilde's. I guess it would have been possible to write a version of the poem with less narrative "glue," placing these elements side by side in a Pound-like juxtaposition. But I am interested in taking the reader along on the journey, and likewise in tracking the motion of association myself, and thus there are phrases like "All summer I've been reading biographies..." or "A month ago, at St. Gaudens's house..." These gestures of transition felt necessary to me, since I'm putting together relatively disparate elements of cultural history. I can't tell you now which of these associations might have occurred while I was watching that old building hit the ground and which came in the writing process, but it doesn't matter. Unfolding and investigating the connections -- that, to my mind, IS the composing process.

 

AMK: For a poem that seems so obviously fixed in the 1st person, I think we can all learn a lot from this poem; the word “I” only occurring a few times.  From what perspective is this poem written and how do you think this poem works within this perspective so successfully?

 

MD: I think of Buckminster Fuller saying "I seem to be a verb." The self's revealed in the action of looking, inquiring, thinking, and looking some more. That's my hope. And of course nothing's duller syntactically than lots of sentences beginning with "I" and then a verb.

 

AMK: What are your thoughts on the relationship between a speaker in a poem and the poet his/herself in Contemporary Poetry?  How should we be reading your poetry?

 

MD: I think in all my published work, there are maybe four poems that aren't spoken by some version of myself; there's a monologue by a dog, by a heroine of the Paris Commune, by a friend in a hospital watching his sister die, and one by a woman who thinks she's a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian. And of course all those are versions of me, too! 

 

But the fact is, what you put on the page is always a version of self, even if you feel you are being strictly allegiant to the truth. You can't get the whole, complex, hard-to-know self on the page. I believe in performing as many aspects of myself, and therefore there are plain spoken poems and more markedly wrought ones. And poems which seem to come with my biography attached and poems wherein "I" is much more of a placeholder, an open space for a reader to step into.

 

AMK: “Fog” is, hands down, one of my favorite poems.  I remember the first time I read it and, talking to a colleague, admitted I didn’t understand what the poem was about.  Later, giving it a closer reading, it became clear what was going on in the poem, and once the basic narrative of the poem was clear to me, I simply fell in love with the sad, searching movement of the lines that take us from the blood tests, to the ouija board, and to the ghosts who yearn to live.

 

I think this is an important aspect/problem of poetry…that it sometimes asks a lot of a reader, which can be a delight if he or she goes along with it…

 

Now, looking at this poem, I realize I wasn’t a great reader when I first came to “Fog,” but I’m wondering what you think is reasonable and unreasonable to expect of a reader and how you convince someone to work with a poem that they find “less than easy” to read.

 

MD: It would be a mistake for them all to be immediately transparent, since experience isn't like that. I do my best to be clear, but I understand that some poems may require greater patience on the reader's part, or that there might be a delay in getting at what's taking place. But if I do my job well, then you want to stay with a poem; you grant it a line of credit, as it were, believing that it may resolve before your eyes, as you keep looking, in the way that a challenging painting might.

 

AMK: Similarly, do you think “Fog” is a difficult poem?  And if so, were you aware of this when you wrote it…how did this awareness affect its writing?

 

MD: I think it's emotionally difficult. It's sidling up to a feeling of utter and complete devastation, the emptying-out of the speaker's future. Therefore it needs an array of vehicles -- ouija and garden and fog -- to approach the 

molten core of the matter. I wonder if anyone ever thinks their own poems are difficult? My friend Jean Valentine, who is notorious among readers for a certain degree of opacity, always says that she could not be any more clear.

I thought I'd been very clear here, and then I was surprised when a reviewer said that my poem lacked courage because it would not inscribe the word "positive." I've done everything in my power to point to that word, which had newly become terrible, late in the 1980s, and to portray the speaker's horror of it. Do I need to make it more plain than that?

 

AMK: Another element of “Fog” that I think is particularly beautiful is the dualistic nature of its voice, which, at times, speaks from inside the poem and, at others, from outside the poem.  

 

When I say inside, I’m thinking of lines like “The crested iris by the front gate waves / its blue flags three days, exactly” and 

 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight, 

I'm almost convinced.  In this geometry 

 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows 

of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling…

 

lines that seem to come from within the experience.  

 

By outside, I mean lines like

 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,

         all these tulip petals thinning

 

          at the base until any wind takes them.

I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in,

 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is

subjectively…

 

lines that emit from some other place, a more reflective voice; a voice looking back.

 

Do you see the poem in this way?  Is this an element of form that we should read as a reflection of what the poem is about?

 

MD: I spoke earlier about perception and inquiry. The lines you point to are an example of that: here's a place in the poem where a scene is evoked, and here's a meditation on that scene. I like this kind of yoking because it feels to me like consciousness.  This is my departure from the old "show don't tell" advice that grows out of Imagism; I like poems that show and then go on to "tell" -- that is, to examine, consider, question, propose.  And in this particular poem, the speaker is desperately trying to get out of the experience, trying to find some way to stand at a remove from an oncoming train, as it were.

 

AMK: Thank you so much for your time.
 

 





About Mark Doty: A Profile 



                                                by Mark Wunderlich 










A summer visitor to the Cape Cod resort village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is liable to see just about anything walking down Commercial Street, the town’s main drag and zone of street theater. From muscle boys with shaved chests and nail polish to Portuguese fishermen in waders to a drag queen wearing a G-string, metal helmet, and gold body paint, the possibilities for human identities seem both fluid and vast. P-town is also a site of incredible natural beauty, but a volatile one. Surrounded on three sides by water, the tip of the Cape is pounded by waves and winter storms, its shape shifting as the wind moves the dunes. In the summer, it is a circus, in the winter, desolate. It is this landscape of both natural and human extremity and theatricality that the poet Mark Doty uses as the surface upon which to map an inner life. 

The author of five collections of poems and a memoir, Mark Doty is one of the most celebrated writers of his generation—the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American to earn the T. S. Eliot Prize in Britain. He has also received a Whiting Writer’s Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. 

Born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953, Doty spent much of his childhood moving around the country. His father was a civilian member of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the job required one relocation after another. The place where Doty first came in contact with contemporary poetry was Tucson, Arizona, where he went to high school. A drama teacher introduced him to the poet Richard Shelton, who read Doty’s early poems and encouraged him. “Most importantly,” Doty says, “he showed me that one could have a life as a poet, that literature, or any art, might be the very center of one’s experience.” No small trick in Tucson, in the suburbs in the sixties. One moment in particular stayed in Doty’s memory. “I went to Dick Shelton’s house in the desert to help clean out his garage, and his wife, Lois, was at the piano when I walked in, playing Kurt Weill and singing ‘Pirate Jenny’ from The Threepenny Opera in German. I felt a window had opened onto another world.” 

During the seventies, while living in Iowa, where he’d attended Drake University, he cowrote and published three chapbooks with his then-wife, the poet Ruth Doty—books to which he no longer feels an allegiance. He now thinks of Turtle, Swan as his first book. Published in 1987 by David R. Godine, Turtle, Swan announced the arrival of a singular and vibrantly new voice in American poetry. These early poems were marked with what have come to be signatures of Doty’s work: an efficient narration of events, an elegant handling of free verse one wants to call “post-formal,” and a lyric intensity akin to that of Doty’s prominent influence, Hart Crane. The book was not simply a precursor of things to come, but evidence of a voice fully formed. One of the most notable poems in the collection is the extraordinary “Charlie Howard’s Descent,” which describes the 1984 killing of a homosexual man who was thrown from a bridge by a group of boys in Bangor, Maine:

 

Over and over
he slipped into the gulf
between what he knew and how
he was known

With these lines, Doty took bold steps toward becoming the first post-Stonewall gay poet to emerge as a major voice in American letters. His predecessors, such as James Merrill, William Meredith, and Richard Howard, had all favored a more privileged tone and vocabulary, elaborate ventriloquism through personae, or occluded references to homosexuality. On the opposite spectrum, Ginsberg used an expansive self-mythologizing strung along an elastic line to address topics that placed him on America’s sexual margins. With Turtle, Swan, Doty effectively merged the political with the aesthetic, uniting a taut line with a lyric voice and an imagination that included notions of activism. Simply by being open about his sexuality, by using it as a subject for his poems without having it be the subject, Doty created a new model for gay and lesbian poets and poetry.

For several years, Doty and his partner, Wally Roberts, lived in Montpelier, Vermont. Doty taught creative writing at Goddard College, where he’d received his M.F.A., and he and Wally renovated a one-hundred-ten-year-old house. In 1989, Wally tested positive for HIV. Doty tested negative. In his bestselling memoir about Wally’s illness and decline, Heaven’s Coast (HarperCollins, 1996), Doty writes, “The virus seemed to me, first, like a kind of solvent which dissolved the future, our future, a little at a time. It was like a dark stain, a floating, inky transparency hovering over Wally’s body, and its intention was to erase the time ahead of us, to make that time, each day, a little smaller.” In 1989 the couple visited Provincetown, renting a house on the beach, and eventually decided to stay. The beautiful seaside environment, and the sizable gay community that could provide support for the couple as they faced Wally’s illness together, made it seem an ideal place to settle. 

In his second volume of poems, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (David R. Godine, 1991), Doty began chronicling Provincetown, its light and harbor and glittering surfaces. More than rare beauty distinguished the poems, however. One got the sense that Doty now viewed poetry as an arena of argument—an argument between public and private selves about how to construct an inner life. Most remarkable in this second book is the way in which observation of the physical world is integrated into a deeply personal and intimate narrative. 

In 1993, Mark Doty’s third volume of poems was selected by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Illinois Press. My Alexandria (the title of which makes reference to another primary Doty influence, C. P. Cavafy) was a tour de force, catapulting Doty into the center of attention.The book is perhaps the finest in-depth literary investigation of the AIDS crisis, and at its center is the anticipation of tremendous loss, an ache that pervades each of the poems. Curiosity about the incidental leads to inner investigations of the relationship between sex and illness, desire and inevitable decay. In the long poem “The Wings,” Doty begins with a description of a boy at an auction, lying on the grass, reading. As the poem progresses, he offers: 

 

Don’t let anybody tell you

death’s the price exacted
for the ability to love;

couldn’t we live forever
without running out of occasions? 

Both readers and critics responded generously to My Alexandria. The book received numerous awards, including The Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Yet Doty’s success was to be shadowed by loss. In February of 1994, his partner, Wally, died of complications from AIDS. Doty writes, “In some way I had joined the invisible, too. I think that when people die they make those around them feel something like they felt; that may be the dying’s first legacy to us. . . . Acceptance breeds acceptance, as Wally’s attitude during his illness had shown; it’d been easy, somehow, for the people who took care of him to do so. He seemed, to those who carried him, to have made himself light.” 

In Atlantis, published in 1995 by HarperCollins, Doty documents with great acuity the colors and textures of Provincetown. The book describes storm after storm. Ruined boats are both ravishing and haunted. Each tempest leaves behind something beautiful, but tinged with sorrow. It is a book about a storm, and the storm’s quiet aftermath; something has been lost, but something else is left behind, worthy of description and contemplation. Punctuating the volume are occasional spikes of rage, as in the poem “Homo Will Not Inherit,” in which the poet confronts a flier stating, “Homo will not inherit. Repent and be saved.” 

 

. . . I have for hours
believed—without judgment, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,

is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s 

the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy. 

This is Doty at the height of his powers, the poem driven into the world by force of the poet’s will, the engine hurtling it along his ecstatic imagistic capabilities. He turns biblical language on its ear, reclaiming its strength and lyricism, while exposing its misuse as an instrument of hate. The book’s primary subject remains grief and its survival—loss as it scours the psyche to the bone. 

With Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Doty’s most recent book, we see a poet emerging with a more public voice, a formidable and lyrical style of argumentation. “I’m wanting my own poems to turn more towards the social, to the common conditions of American life in our particular uncertain moment,” Doty says. “I am, I guess, groping towards those poems; I’m trying to talk about public life without resorting to public language.” 

“Mercy on Broadway” from Sweet Machine acts as a bridge, linking Doty’s previous work with his new artistic ambitions. The poet takes on the tumult and rapture of Manhattan, describing a scene on lower Broadway, where a woman is trying to sell a bowl full of turtles from a place on the sidewalk:

 

. . . I’m forty-one years old
and ready to get down 

on my knees to a kitchen bowl
full of live green. I’m breathing here,

a new man next to me who’s beginning
to matter.

The poem becomes a meditation on finding the will to start over, but it also functions as a love song for the noise and chaos of street life as it shuffles itself into and out of meaning. In this masterful poem, Doty combines the vast and the very small, what’s impersonal and what is deeply felt. 

Mark Doty makes his living as a teacher of creative writing, and in recent years he has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the creative writing program at the University of Utah. He currently teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston, and he and his partner, the novelist Paul Lisicky, split their time between Houston and Provincetown. 

Doty recently finished a second memoir entitled Firebird, which will be published by HarperCollins next year. “Firebird is an autobiography from six to sixteen, with a particular eye towards matters of aesthetic education: How do we learn to identify what we find beautiful, and what are the uses to which beauty is put? It’s a sissy boy’s story, and thus an exile’s tale, and a chronicle of a gradual process of coming to belong somewhere, to the world of art.” He goes on to add, “I hope the book is not so much about me as it is an examination of a whole constellation of experiences and ideas—personal and collective—about art, sexuality, identity, gender, and the survival of the inner life.”

On summer afternoons in Provincetown, students from the Cape Cod School of Art are seen throughout the town, painting landscapes of various local scenes. Very often, groups of them set up easels in the street in front of Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky’s two-century-old house. With its rose arbor, white clapboards, and vibrant, overblown flower beds, it’s the perfect New England subject. With each stroke, the painters try to get at something Doty noted in his poem “Fog”—“some secret amplitude . . . in this orderly space”—which exemplifies what Doty has been able to reveal, with grace and mastery, in his work and life. 

Mark Wunderlich is the author of the poetry collection The Anchorage, which will be published this spring by the University of Massachusetts Press. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the managing director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. 






            -from Ploughshares, Spring 1999


 

 





About Mark Doty: A Profile 



                                                by Mark Wunderlich 










A summer visitor to the Cape Cod resort village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is liable to see just about anything walking down Commercial Street, the town’s main drag and zone of street theater. From muscle boys with shaved chests and nail polish to Portuguese fishermen in waders to a drag queen wearing a G-string, metal helmet, and gold body paint, the possibilities for human identities seem both fluid and vast. P-town is also a site of incredible natural beauty, but a volatile one. Surrounded on three sides by water, the tip of the Cape is pounded by waves and winter storms, its shape shifting as the wind moves the dunes. In the summer, it is a circus, in the winter, desolate. It is this landscape of both natural and human extremity and theatricality that the poet Mark Doty uses as the surface upon which to map an inner life. 

The author of five collections of poems and a memoir, Mark Doty is one of the most celebrated writers of his generation—the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American to earn the T. S. Eliot Prize in Britain. He has also received a Whiting Writer’s Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. 

Born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953, Doty spent much of his childhood moving around the country. His father was a civilian member of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the job required one relocation after another. The place where Doty first came in contact with contemporary poetry was Tucson, Arizona, where he went to high school. A drama teacher introduced him to the poet Richard Shelton, who read Doty’s early poems and encouraged him. “Most importantly,” Doty says, “he showed me that one could have a life as a poet, that literature, or any art, might be the very center of one’s experience.” No small trick in Tucson, in the suburbs in the sixties. One moment in particular stayed in Doty’s memory. “I went to Dick Shelton’s house in the desert to help clean out his garage, and his wife, Lois, was at the piano when I walked in, playing Kurt Weill and singing ‘Pirate Jenny’ from The Threepenny Opera in German. I felt a window had opened onto another world.” 

During the seventies, while living in Iowa, where he’d attended Drake University, he cowrote and published three chapbooks with his then-wife, the poet Ruth Doty—books to which he no longer feels an allegiance. He now thinks of Turtle, Swan as his first book. Published in 1987 by David R. Godine, Turtle, Swan announced the arrival of a singular and vibrantly new voice in American poetry. These early poems were marked with what have come to be signatures of Doty’s work: an efficient narration of events, an elegant handling of free verse one wants to call “post-formal,” and a lyric intensity akin to that of Doty’s prominent influence, Hart Crane. The book was not simply a precursor of things to come, but evidence of a voice fully formed. One of the most notable poems in the collection is the extraordinary “Charlie Howard’s Descent,” which describes the 1984 killing of a homosexual man who was thrown from a bridge by a group of boys in Bangor, Maine:

 

Over and over
he slipped into the gulf
between what he knew and how
he was known

With these lines, Doty took bold steps toward becoming the first post-Stonewall gay poet to emerge as a major voice in American letters. His predecessors, such as James Merrill, William Meredith, and Richard Howard, had all favored a more privileged tone and vocabulary, elaborate ventriloquism through personae, or occluded references to homosexuality. On the opposite spectrum, Ginsberg used an expansive self-mythologizing strung along an elastic line to address topics that placed him on America’s sexual margins. With Turtle, Swan, Doty effectively merged the political with the aesthetic, uniting a taut line with a lyric voice and an imagination that included notions of activism. Simply by being open about his sexuality, by using it as a subject for his poems without having it be the subject, Doty created a new model for gay and lesbian poets and poetry.

For several years, Doty and his partner, Wally Roberts, lived in Montpelier, Vermont. Doty taught creative writing at Goddard College, where he’d received his M.F.A., and he and Wally renovated a one-hundred-ten-year-old house. In 1989, Wally tested positive for HIV. Doty tested negative. In his bestselling memoir about Wally’s illness and decline, Heaven’s Coast (HarperCollins, 1996), Doty writes, “The virus seemed to me, first, like a kind of solvent which dissolved the future, our future, a little at a time. It was like a dark stain, a floating, inky transparency hovering over Wally’s body, and its intention was to erase the time ahead of us, to make that time, each day, a little smaller.” In 1989 the couple visited Provincetown, renting a house on the beach, and eventually decided to stay. The beautiful seaside environment, and the sizable gay community that could provide support for the couple as they faced Wally’s illness together, made it seem an ideal place to settle. 

In his second volume of poems, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (David R. Godine, 1991), Doty began chronicling Provincetown, its light and harbor and glittering surfaces. More than rare beauty distinguished the poems, however. One got the sense that Doty now viewed poetry as an arena of argument—an argument between public and private selves about how to construct an inner life. Most remarkable in this second book is the way in which observation of the physical world is integrated into a deeply personal and intimate narrative. 

In 1993, Mark Doty’s third volume of poems was selected by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Illinois Press. My Alexandria (the title of which makes reference to another primary Doty influence, C. P. Cavafy) was a tour de force, catapulting Doty into the center of attention.The book is perhaps the finest in-depth literary investigation of the AIDS crisis, and at its center is the anticipation of tremendous loss, an ache that pervades each of the poems. Curiosity about the incidental leads to inner investigations of the relationship between sex and illness, desire and inevitable decay. In the long poem “The Wings,” Doty begins with a description of a boy at an auction, lying on the grass, reading. As the poem progresses, he offers: 

 

Don’t let anybody tell you

death’s the price exacted
for the ability to love;

couldn’t we live forever
without running out of occasions? 

Both readers and critics responded generously to My Alexandria. The book received numerous awards, including The Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Yet Doty’s success was to be shadowed by loss. In February of 1994, his partner, Wally, died of complications from AIDS. Doty writes, “In some way I had joined the invisible, too. I think that when people die they make those around them feel something like they felt; that may be the dying’s first legacy to us. . . . Acceptance breeds acceptance, as Wally’s attitude during his illness had shown; it’d been easy, somehow, for the people who took care of him to do so. He seemed, to those who carried him, to have made himself light.” 

In Atlantis, published in 1995 by HarperCollins, Doty documents with great acuity the colors and textures of Provincetown. The book describes storm after storm. Ruined boats are both ravishing and haunted. Each tempest leaves behind something beautiful, but tinged with sorrow. It is a book about a storm, and the storm’s quiet aftermath; something has been lost, but something else is left behind, worthy of description and contemplation. Punctuating the volume are occasional spikes of rage, as in the poem “Homo Will Not Inherit,” in which the poet confronts a flier stating, “Homo will not inherit. Repent and be saved.” 

 

. . . I have for hours
believed—without judgment, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,

is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s 

the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy. 

This is Doty at the height of his powers, the poem driven into the world by force of the poet’s will, the engine hurtling it along his ecstatic imagistic capabilities. He turns biblical language on its ear, reclaiming its strength and lyricism, while exposing its misuse as an instrument of hate. The book’s primary subject remains grief and its survival—loss as it scours the psyche to the bone. 

With Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Doty’s most recent book, we see a poet emerging with a more public voice, a formidable and lyrical style of argumentation. “I’m wanting my own poems to turn more towards the social, to the common conditions of American life in our particular uncertain moment,” Doty says. “I am, I guess, groping towards those poems; I’m trying to talk about public life without resorting to public language.” 

“Mercy on Broadway” from Sweet Machine acts as a bridge, linking Doty’s previous work with his new artistic ambitions. The poet takes on the tumult and rapture of Manhattan, describing a scene on lower Broadway, where a woman is trying to sell a bowl full of turtles from a place on the sidewalk:

 

. . . I’m forty-one years old
and ready to get down 

on my knees to a kitchen bowl
full of live green. I’m breathing here,

a new man next to me who’s beginning
to matter.

The poem becomes a meditation on finding the will to start over, but it also functions as a love song for the noise and chaos of street life as it shuffles itself into and out of meaning. In this masterful poem, Doty combines the vast and the very small, what’s impersonal and what is deeply felt. 

Mark Doty makes his living as a teacher of creative writing, and in recent years he has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the creative writing program at the University of Utah. He currently teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston, and he and his partner, the novelist Paul Lisicky, split their time between Houston and Provincetown. 

Doty recently finished a second memoir entitled Firebird, which will be published by HarperCollins next year. “Firebird is an autobiography from six to sixteen, with a particular eye towards matters of aesthetic education: How do we learn to identify what we find beautiful, and what are the uses to which beauty is put? It’s a sissy boy’s story, and thus an exile’s tale, and a chronicle of a gradual process of coming to belong somewhere, to the world of art.” He goes on to add, “I hope the book is not so much about me as it is an examination of a whole constellation of experiences and ideas—personal and collective—about art, sexuality, identity, gender, and the survival of the inner life.”

On summer afternoons in Provincetown, students from the Cape Cod School of Art are seen throughout the town, painting landscapes of various local scenes. Very often, groups of them set up easels in the street in front of Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky’s two-century-old house. With its rose arbor, white clapboards, and vibrant, overblown flower beds, it’s the perfect New England subject. With each stroke, the painters try to get at something Doty noted in his poem “Fog”—“some secret amplitude . . . in this orderly space”—which exemplifies what Doty has been able to reveal, with grace and mastery, in his work and life. 

Mark Wunderlich is the author of the poetry collection The Anchorage, which will be published this spring by the University of Massachusetts Press. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the managing director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. 






            -from Ploughshares, Spring 1999





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