MARK DOTY is a poet and memoirist of considerable range and power. His earliest books demonstrate a passion for natural landscapes and candid acknowledgements of gay male love and his own relationships. With the HIV-related death of his partner, Wally Roberts, in 1994, Doty’s poems and nonfiction continued and extended these themes to include a more politically charged edge (such as in his masterpiece, “Homo Will Not Inherit”). His association with Provincetown, where he lived for many years, shows up in both his poetry and prose writings. His well-known love of dogs is immortalized in his memoir Dog Years. To date he has published twelve volumes of poetry and three memoirs. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award in 2008.
Doty, who currently teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has been married to his partner, Paul Lisicky, since 1995.
This interview is an edited collation of e-mail exchanges and a one-hour telephone conversation that occurred late last year.
Tony Leuzzi: Your groundbreaking poem “Homo Will Not Inherit” was anthologized in Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford, 2000). In his introductory notes to that poem Nelson writes, “Doty has a rich and complex relationship to the work of several other American poets, including Hart Crane. In Crane’s case, one might say that Doty has set out to write the poems Crane himself could not have written in his own time.” While there is no question that you’re writing poems Crane could not have written in his lifetime, I was wondering if you agree with Nelson’s claim about your complex and rich relationship to Crane in particular.
Mark Doty: Crane’s a hero of mine, and a poet I carry with me—that is, I seem to be in an ongoing conversation with him, and his poems are touchstones that I go back to in relation to particular kinds of experiences. (Whitman and Bishop, Stevens and Lynda Hull are certainly members of that internal company as well.) I’ll talk about him first on the level of content. He is a great poet of exuberance; his work overflows with his energetic encounter with the city, with the twentieth century, and with the erotic life. “Voyages” is one of modernity’s great love poems, nearly boundless in its faith that sex will transform the speaker. Even if he’s left with a mere artifact of memory, a poem instead of a beloved, by the end of it—well, it’s the intensity of erotic encounter in that poem that anyone would remember. And passion is of course also the signature of Crane’s relationship to language; he’s intent on a charged density of music, on a line that makes a charged little explosion of music and sense all by itself. And who could ever manage to braid so many lines of thinking into a single phrase? Here’s a favorite of mine: “The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed, / Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.” I spent a few pages in a recent book, The Art of Description, talking about those lines; they invite you to unpack them, to consider—in the poem’s context—the multiple meanings they can have.
TL: Other, more obvious affinities exist between your poems and Mary Oliver’s. I was wondering if you might be willing to comment on your relationship to Oliver’s work and—by extension—the work of her mentors who also appear to be yours: Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore.
MD: Do you think so? There are a lot more people in my poems, and many urban settings. And my work has sex in it! But Mary and I have both been citizens of Provincetown, and that compelling landscape has been crucial to our work. And we’re both poets who do turn to the world for instruction, as though we’re knocking at the door of whatever image it may be that fascinates us and asking it to teach us something. We are inheritors of Emerson in that way, students out to read the book of the world. I think Mary is much more certain in her stance toward reality than I am; I’m inclined toward speculation and qualification, while Mary, at least in her poems, really does know what the wild geese are saying, or how to read a message of the moss on the stones. I love her work, and I wrote a longish essay about it for Provincetown Arts a while back in which I tried to point to its canny intelligence, its sly strategies, and some of the subtle ways it incorporates self-doubt. I think people sometimes read her as a sentimental pastoralist, but there’s more going on there than that.
Bishop and Moore are of course essential companions for me, especially the former. Her way of revealing the self not only through what she chooses to look at, but through how she looks—this continues to teach me so much about seeing. Again, in The Art of Description there’s an extended discussion of “The Fish,” which is a remarkable model of the perceiving mind at work, an inexhaustible poem. Both poets have such firm allegiance to the individual character of perception; they are entirely committed to their way of seeing and saying how they see.
TL: Although you’ve lived many years on the Atlantic coast, you were born in Maryville, Tennessee. To what extent does that geographical and cultural landscape inform your writing?
MD: I was born in Maryville. Then my family lived in many towns in Tennessee because my father was an engineer, and we moved very frequently for different jobs he took. So I lived in a lot of towns in Tennessee until I was seven years old. After I finished first grade, we moved to Tucson, Arizona, and from there on out we lived in lots of Sunbelt places in the Southwest and the West—and even back to Florida for a while. Tennessee has for me a sort of magic about it, because it is a landscape to which one does not return. Part of that is about cadence and voice: my relatives had these rich voices and a distinct vocabulary that didn’t appear in other places I had lived. One place that really showed up was in singing. We would sit out on the porch swing on warm nights and everyone would sing these old hymns like “Rock of Ages,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “He’s the Lily of the Valley, He’s a Bright and Shining Star.” I loved the imagery of those songs, and they come from an otherworldliness that became important to me as a kid. Also there was Tennessee food, which was really different from what you would eat in other places. Those flavors still seem to me very relevant to my past.
I think the Christian thing was important. My father’s mother was a fundamentalist who thought the end was coming soon; she really believed these were the last days, that the world we saw in front of us was a veil before what lay beyond it. That kind of thinking was very influential, that one could somehow see through things to a deeper level of reality. I was mostly young enough to escape the conservatism and the prohibitions of religion. I got a sense of hellfire, but I didn’t feel I was born a sinner. I felt, if anything, God’s eye was on me as it was on the sparrow, and that was a lovely thing.
TL: Because you moved around so much, do you feel that you developed an eye for seeing changes in landscapes, more than if you had stayed in one place?
MD: Probably, yes. It gave me a sense of being in a position of unfamiliarity, not expecting things to be the same, which is a very different point of view than what most of my classmates grew up with. If you stay in one place you get a sense that “This is what the world is” or “I can predict that the world will look certain ways.” I never felt that. There was always something new and I was always trying to find my way. In this regard, I was also influenced by my mother, who took up painting when we moved to Arizona. She loved to paint the desert landscape, loved to pay attention to its color and light. She was totally enchanted by it in a way that was new to me. Before this, I had never seen someone fall in love with a place, and it was very interesting to me.
TL: You’re not afraid to ask questions in your poems, which is a risk insofar as this often indicates a certain degree of vulnerability and searching. Could you discuss the importance of questions in your poems?
MD: It was a crucial thing for me when I found the nerve to pose questions in poems, and to allow them to remain in the finished text. I had been interested, from the poems in my first book, in a poetry of expansiveness: how could I delay closure and thus avoid shutting off a more complicated sort of meaning, allowing the poem to dig in, walk around its subject, build a larger sense of the real. I’m mixing metaphors with abandon here because that feels to me like what I wanted in widening my embrace: to open, to dig, to explore, to construct. I felt when I wrote a poem that was mono-focal, in a single layer as it were, I couldn’t get the sense of dimensionality I was after. I began to incorporate other scenes and frames of reference and to braid narratives. And to pose questions, which could serve as points of entry into deeper levels of the poem. By asking questions, I could push against the given material—the image or perception that had engaged me in the first place—and try to figure out why it mattered, why it might demand being written.
Questions have the advantage of feeling like an invitation to participate. There’s a certain humility in them, a nod to the presence of the reader. It’s wonderful, for example, that in one of Whitman’s great visionary moments, section six of “Song of Myself,” just as he is about to make one of his grandest claims, he turns to his audience and asks, in a separate stanza, “What do you think had become of the women and children?/ And what do you think has become of the old mothers?” Then, having thus relinquished or shared his authority for a moment, he can go on to say the most shocking thing, that to die is “different than anyone had supposed, and luckier.”
Of course this can be manipulated. Rilke uses questions to make very bold assertions seem acceptable, and though I am usually aware that he is disguising his pronouncement with that interrogative mark, he’s so charming that I don’t mind. I myself am trying not to let the question become a mannerism, an easy gesture; I like them so much that I have to be a little hard on myself in revision.
TL: You’re also not afraid to discuss the process of writing a poem as you’re writing it. Matters of poetics are confided in ways that challenge the traditional practice of remaining mute on one’s æsthetic technique.
MD: Writing a poem is an act of making or discovering order. I’m interested in how we make knowledge, how we map the world, constructing a sense of our relation to what is. So when I talk about “the poem” in the poem I’m writing, I’m really thinking about this action of meaning-making, of how we manage to know anything. I’ve certainly heard it said in workshop or among teachers of writing that poems shouldn’t be “about “ poetry. Well, either all of my poems are about poetry, or none of them are: that is, they are self-conscious acts in language of making pattern, attempting to represent something of subjectivity. And part of my subjectivity is that investigation of language.
An example might be my poem “Source,” which is a kind of gloss on James Wright’s unforgettable “A Blessing.” Wright’s poem ends after the speaker has encountered some horses by the roadside, and then he gives us one of those quintessential James Wright moments, an epiphany that comes barreling out of nowhere with a mysterious rightness, its power resulting from an emotionally charged, somewhat ambiguous image: “Suddenly I realize/ That if I stepped out of my body I would break/ Into blossom.” The poem goes on reverberating in the mind long after you’ve finished it. It’s an open-ended, thrilling assertion, and while it feels like a precise description of the ecstatic, we also are left thinking about what it might mean to step out of the body, and not just to bloom but to break into bloom.
My own tender encounter with some roadside horses was informed by this poem—how could it not be, as I’ve been reading “A Blessing” for forty years? When I began to write, I found myself thinking about what might lie beyond that epiphanic moment; what if you arrived there and kept writing? Wright’s poem is completely transparent: it doesn’t want you to be conscious that it’s made of language, doesn’t ask you to think about the fact that it is a poem. So I’ve done the opposite, in a way—favored expansion and exploration over compression, and allowed the poem to become reflexive, contemplating its own project. One reason you might want to do that is to construct a portrait of a mind at work. A poem like “Source” wants to give you both a report on an experience and to study the consciousness that is framing and ordering and making meaning of that report.
TL: Do you think “gay poetry” is a dead term, that poets are poets who write what they write, as opposed to being defined or framed by identity politics?
MD: Good question! I love reading poetry that in some way speaks to my own experience of desire. It’s inevitable that poets who write about same-sex desire, particularly male-male desire, are going to come closer to the realm in which I live. Here’s the paradox: I want to be able to read about experience which touches directly upon mine, but it’s also true that what we define as gay can become a very limited set of elements that may simply leave other things out. So, to be called a “gay poet” suggests that you might be dealing with a smaller subset of experiences—which is absurd. Cavafy is a splendid example of a poet who manages to talk about absolutely everything in the world—time, memory, desire, and history, to talk about the possibility of transcendence, to talk about what it means to live to old age—without any feeling of limitation. Everything is there in his work, and yet it’s always very focused on a few elements. Identity politics is always a paradox. It can be maddening. As a gay poet you might be shoved off in a corner, or you could be told that you’re not gay enough. I was hurt that way pretty recently in a review of my work, startled by it actually. How can I get much more gay? I ask you!
On the other hand, I recently went to speak to this great group in New York City called The Wilde Boys. It’s a sort of loose association of younger gay poets who have salons where they talk about particular poems or invite people to come and speak. Just this fall, Frank Bidart has been invisted, as has John Ashbery and myself. I was so knocked out. They’ll put more than fifty people in the room, and they’re clearly writing very different kinds of poems and have very different ideas about poetics, but there was such a sense of vigor and life there. And I don’t think they want to be cordoned off in a gay bookstore or in a gay section of stores like Barnes & Noble. They want readers, but they also want to find ways to wrestle with the particular stuff of their own lives and the circumstances of those lives. I think probably the era of the gay bookstore as a place where you would go to find like-minded souls is gone and that our literature will be intermingled with everything else, as it already is, with writers like André Aciman, Michael Cunningham, and Colm Tóibín.
TL: You’ve written not one memoir but three. Do you ever feel, “Gosh, I’ve said it all!” or do you think other memoirs are bound to come?
MD: Well, these aren’t autobiographies in the sense of covering a whole span of a life. They’re quite particular. Heaven’s Coast is concerned with the illness and death of my partner Wally and the time thereafter; Firebird is about growing up; and Dog Years is about sixteen years of living with four-legged creatures, like the one who is driving me crazy at the moment! These are books that choose a particular lens through which to look at aspects of a life. I’m actually working on another one at the moment, a book about reading Walt Whitman and also about sex, death, ecstasy, the fate of the body—issues Whitman helps me to think about. Writing these memoirs is comfortable for me because they give me a kind of center or spine that lets me know what to leave out. Each memoir has a particular question it’s addressing; each proceeds from a specific point of departure.
TL: There are so many books about Whitman published each year. What’s your angle?
MD: If I start thinking about my little contribution to the library of books on Whitman, it’s thoroughly daunting and makes me want to shut up. But I feel an affinity with Whitman that has grown deeper and more obsessive over the years. I have come to live more profoundly in his work and to talk back to it. Whitman opens the territory for me as a writer. What I have to say is indirectly about him. I don’t think I can give anything new to Whitman scholarship, but what I can do is talk about my own history as a reader of Whitman and the ways that my experiences intersected with those texts. It becomes a way of talking about a friendship between writers, a way of talking about Whitman as a spiritual guide to the erotic, which really interests me enormously. And I’m not sure that that book quite exists yet.
Tony Leuzzi is a poet and teacher living in Rochester, New York.
