Interview with poet Mark Doty: A poet who goes from “Fire to Fire.”

Interview with poet Mark Doty: A poet who goes from “Fire to Fire.”

When a publicist from Harper Collins in New York City emailed to see if I wanted to review Mark Doty’s new poetry collection: “Fire to Fire,” I was on it like the proverbial hornet. Doty is high on the top shelf of American poets, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award and the U.K’s T.S. Eliot Prize. His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshare, Prairie Schooner, and many other well-regarded literary journals. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, as well as the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In his new collection Doty peppers his work with beautiful studied images, and haunting apparitions he spies in the most unlikely of places. Doty has an astute ear for music, he can smell death’s most subtle odor, and he can explain to you what you have been just dying to articulate. To be honest, few of the poetry books I get to review are dyed-in-the-wool page turners. But Doty’s is hands down. I interviewed Doty recently for The Somerville News.








Doug Holder: You were an army brat moving from one place to the other. Did that transience early on make you want to get that image on the permanent page?




Mark Doty: I really had transience drummed into me -- by my grandparents' apocalyptic Protestantism, and the hymns we used to sing on the porch, and what seems to have been a built-in obsession with mortality. And because we moved all the time, it's true that people and places were always being left behind.

DH: Ghosts are a presence in your poems. Do you feel that you are haunted? Is that a good thing for a poet?

MD: I do want my poems to hold conversation with the dead -- both my own and the great dead whose poems I love.
It's an inescapable thing for a poet, because how can you not speak back to the poets who've mattered most to you, who've taught you to see and to speak?

DH: Saul Bellow considered himself a writer who happened to be Jewish. Do you consider yourself a poet who happens to be Gay?

MD: I like to steal a line from Lucille Clifton, who says, "I do not happen to be black, I AM black." Same-sex desire lives right near the core of me. But what that has to do with being a poet is complex. It doesn't mean that my poems must always focus on
sexual life, or on the cultural conditions in which gay men live. But it does mean that my sexuality is part of my subjectivity, and inescapably shapes how I see.

DH: Your partner Wally Roberts died of AIDS. Many of your poems address this. Do you view “Illness as a metaphor?

MD: Other people made it so -- AIDS as a token of sexual shame, or punishment for transgression. HIV's a virus, and we surround it, as we do a select group of diseases, with meanings. I have yet to find any of the ways we try to make HIV disease "mean" to be helpful. But I've wanted to at least give form to my experience with Wally, and with our friends and neighbors, during the terrible crisis years of the late 80s and early 90s. That's part of what you described above as being haunted. What can you do for the dead but keep their stories, or name them?

DH: I noticed your second volume of poems was “Bethlehem in Broad Daylight” was published by David R. Godine, Inc., a fine small press here in Boston. I awarded Godine an Ibbetson Street Press Life Time Achievement Award a few years back for his contributions to poetry and the small press. How was it working with Godine? Do you think the small press plays an important role in the development of poetic talent?

MD: Godine published my first two books, and I'm forever grateful for that. The press took a chance on an unknown poet and produced beautiful volumes. I don't think poets need think about smaller presses as just places to start out. A trade house isn't necessarily the best place to wind up; books can get lost in the shuffle, and frequently do not remain in print. The loyalty and resources of a more specialized literary press often serve our art better than the big houses do -- though I have been very fortunate in this regard.


DH: Your poetry is accessible. I don’t think you need an academic bent to get something out of your work. Obviously this has not hurt you in the poetry biz. Do you think a lot of poetry being written today is deliberately obtuse?

MD: It’s a very large and capacious house, American poetry. I have no desire for everyone to work in the same way. What interests me most is the individuality and vivacity of a voice, a way of seeing and speaking the world. So there are poets I love who are very plain-spoken (like Marie Howe) and poets I love whose work makes a different set of demands on the reader (Brenda Hillman or Jean Valentine). I don't think either transparency or opacity are virtues in themselves. They're just ways of speaking. What matters is what you do with them.

DH: In the poem “Almost Blue” in your new collection “Fire to Fire” (Harper Collins) you write of the beautiful and doomed jazz musician Chet Baker. In the poem you imagine Baker’s swan song which is composed of nodding out and falling out a hotel window in Amsterdam:

“ and you leaning into that warm
haze from the window, Amsterdam,
late afternoon glimmer
a blur of buds.

Breathing in the lindens
And you let go and why not.”

Is this acceptance of things as they are, what is, is; something you try to get across in your work?

MD: Baker was a heroin addict for something like 28 years, so you could see that as a very long slow letting go. He fell from a hotel window in Amsterdam, maybe nodded out, maybe jumped. I wanted, in this poem; to try to lean into the feeling of addiction, into that state of mind that just says Oh, let me go, let it all go. What I want to admire, you know, is the Chet Baker who made all that incredible art, who kept producing that stunning music. But there's something about the toxic pull of addiction, of the poison -- you know, the deep allure of that. Acceptance? I don't know. Sometimes yes. Then sometimes I think you should resist with all your might.







At the Gym



This salt-stain spot

marks the place where men

lay down their heads,

back to the bench,



and hoist nothing

that need be lifted

but some burden they've chosen

this time: more reps,



more weight, the upward shove

of it leaving, collectively,

this sign of where we've been:

shroud-stain, negative



flashed onto the vinyl

where we push something

unyielding skyward,

gaining some power



at least over flesh,

which goads with desire,

and terrifies with frailty.

Who could say who's



added his heat to the nimbus

of our intent, here where

we make ourselves:

something difficult



lifted, pressed or curled,

Power over beauty,

power over power!

Though there's something more



tender, beneath our vanity,

our will to become objects

of desire: we sweat the mark

of our presence onto the cloth.



Here is some halo

the living made together.


--Mark Doty

Mark Doty will be reading from his collection "Fire to Fire" March 19 7PM 79 Harvard Street Brookline Booksmith



DOUG HOLDER

Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. Mark Doty.

Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. Mark Doty. (Harper Collins-2008) $23.


Mark Doty is not only a poet’s poet. Thank God. Doty is an accomplished writer, the winner of the National Book Critics Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and is the only American winner of Britain’s T.S. Eliot Prize. But in spite of these accolades, we barbarians outside of the gates of the Academy can be thoroughly engaged and enamored with his latest collection: “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.”

Some years ago a friend of mine the poet Richard Wilhelm took a workshop with Doty at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, in Cambridge, Mass. He said Doty emphasized the need to avoid neat, pat, endings. He wanted his students to “stretch” their work. In this time of frenzied movement he wanted his students to “sit” with their poems.

And indeed this seems what Doty has done as evidenced by his brilliant new collection. His work is peppered with beautiful, studied images; with haunting apparitions spotted in the most unlikely of places. Doty has an astute ear for music, which makes for a wonderful musicality in his work. He can smell death’s most subtle odor, and he can explain to you what your inarticulate rage is all about. How many poetry books can we really call page-turners? But this book is in the truest sense.

In a stunning poem about the late “Cool” jazz horn player Chet Baker, Doty’s musical language captures the brutal and beautiful texture of Baker’s life and art. Baker, a naturally gifted musician, with a hauntingly, angelic voice, was also a dyed-in-the wool heroin addict and psychopath. He met his end by nodding out of a hotel window in Amsterdam. In Doty’s poem “Almost Blue,” we have Baker’s swan song, and the poet encapsulates the man, his elegiac music, his lyrics, and his drugged-out Zen-like acceptance of what life brings:

“ in the warm suspension and glaze
of this song everything stays up

almost forever in the long
glide sung into the vein,

one note held almost impossibly
almost blue and the lyric takes so long

to open, a little blood
blooming: there’s no love song finer

but how strange the change
from major to minor

every time
we say goodbye

and you leaning into that warm
haze from the window, Amsterdam,

late afternoon glimmer
a blur of buds

breathing in the lindens
and you let go and why not.”

And speaking of inarticulate rage, and lives of quiet desperation, have you ever thought why you become inordinately angry with some of the daily outrages you encounter on the street? In the poem “Citizens,” Doty is almost swiped by a truck on a Manhattan street. The truck driver smiles as Doty yells his indignant invective in his direction. Doty ponders why he carries the burden of anger so long after the fact:

“ and I am carrying the devil
in his carbon chariot all the way to 23rd, down into the subway,
roiling against the impersonal malice of the truck that armors
him

so he doesn’t have to know anyone.
Under the Port Authority I understand I’m raging
because that’s easier than weeping, not because I’m so afraid

of scraping my skull
on the pavement but because he’s made me erasable,
a slip of self, subject to. How’d I get emptied

till I can be hostaged
by a dope in a flaming climate-wrecker? I try to think
who made him so powerless he craves dominion over strangers,

but you know what?
I don’t care. If he’s one of those people miserable for lack
of what is found in poetry, fine.”

Yes—that it’s Mr. Doty. You have got it down. It’s what I meant to say. It is what I meant to write.

This is one of the most brilliant collections I have reviewed in years, and I am sent a lot of them. I don’t care if you are gay or straight, have a Rockefeller Grant, or food stamps, Doty speaks to us all, baby.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Somerville, Mass /2008


* Om Monday March 19 7PM Doty will be reading at the Brookline Booksmith 279 Harvard Street.