An Interview with Poet and Memoirist Mark Doty, Part 1

We hear that you will be reading from new work at Seattle Arts & Lectures, can you give us any hints as to what you will be reading from?

Doty: Well, I usually put the program together shortly before a reading, responding to the mood of the day, the location, the time of the year. And leaving some room for spontaneity. So I can't tell you exactly, but I'm certain that I'll be reading from a group of new poems - some of which feel especially appropriate as they had their beginnings on the West Coast, and involve some Pacific landscapes.

Can you tell us more about your forthcoming book of prose, The Art of Description: World into Word? When in 2010 will it be available?

Doty: It's a short handbook for writers, and part of a series Graywolf is publishing, each titled THE ART OF.. other volumes in the series discuss syntax, lineation, the treatment of time, and other aspects of the writer's craft. It was a total pleasure to write. It's a book that follows many different poets - very disparate ones, from George Herbert to May Swenson--as they try to evoke the presence of the sensory world.

How is writing poetry different for you than writing nonfiction? Is there a different satisfaction that comes from writing poetry that you don't receive in nonfiction, or vice versa?

Doty: Poetry is profoundly concentrated; it aims to bring feeling, thinking and perception together, in an attempt to catch something of the nature of subjectivity, something of what it's like to be human. It does this by trying to embody perception in sound - that is, to do what language doesn't usually do, which is to approximate the way living actually feels. Writing nonfiction allows one a lot of space to expand, walk around a subject, build context, open many doors. A poem can do some of that too, but there's a different, intense sort of pressure on each word and line in a poem that makes it a different experience for the writer --- both difficult and strangely resonant.

But not every experience lends itself to poetry, and one doesn't live in that lyric intensity all the time - so it's very good to have something else to do, and for me non-fiction is that other thing.

Many critics have referred to your work as "lyrical glitter," mentioning your use of adjectives such as "shimmer," "luster," or "shiny" as very characteristic of your work. How do you see the relationship of lyric and narrative working in your poems?

Doty: I'm of two minds about that description. On the one hand, what's not to like about glitter and sparkly stuff, the trappings that have been making drag queens (and real ones) shine since the dawn of time? On the other hand, I sort of distrust the idea that what would make the world seem to shine would be an application of luster from without. I have a friendly relationship with artifice, but I'm also drawn to those things that gleam from within, of their own accord.

Truthfully, for me narrative is a way of getting to a lyric moment; I need to move through time to arrive at timelessness. I'm in awe of poets like Jean Valentine or Adam Zagajewski, who seem able to dive to some lyric depth very early on in a poem, or simply to begin there. I find I need to travel through experience toward that place where time and space seem to open.

One of the main themes we've heard people mention about your work is on the topic of it being American. It's been quoted as "brazenly American," "American but not too American," or on how you were the first American author to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, and why or what that means. How do you feel about your work in terms of it being "American?"

Doty: Practically impossible to answer about oneself. I didn't think about this much until I began to publish in the UK, where mine was described as a distinctly American voice, and I had to begin to consider what that might mean. I guess it refers to qualities which can be seen as either positive or negative, depending on your feeling about American character. Are my poems expansive or do they take up too much space? Are they self-involved, or generous in their sharing of personal experience with readers? Too personal, or appealingly frank?

Here's a broad generalization or two. American poets tend to be inclined to go through the self to get to the world; that is, we're not automatically embarrassed to take up space on the page with evocations of our own feelings or experiences. We may be less likely to think of ourselved as representative citizens, or as persons shaped by historical forces. We don't necessarily regard the self ironically.

What writers have inspired you or your work the most?

Doty: Whitman, Cavafy, Crane, Rilke, Bishop, Lowell, James Wright, James Merrill. James L. White, whose remarkable collection The Salt Ecstasies will be republished by Graywolf this spring as part of a series of "lost books" I'm editing for them called the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series. And among my contemporaries, so much to admire - Lynda Hull and Marie Howe have been especially important to me, as poets and as friends.

Many readers are familiar with your memoir writing and poetry that centers around the tragic death of your late partner, Wally Roberts. Do you feel that your writing helped you cope with his untimely passing? Have you heard from readers who have also lost loved ones to AIDS that have found comfort in your work?

Doty: There isn't anything that makes grief better, and I think artists have to accommodate that fact, in their work; the elegy is a necessary gesture to its maker, and to its audience, and after it has been written and delivered, with all the love and care in the world, the dead are still dead. That said, I truly don't know how people survive grief without making something out of it. It was crucial to me to find a form, or forms, for the overwhelming emotional experience of Wally's illness and death. I couldn't do anything to save him, nothing except try to make him comfortable; the one thing I felt I had some control over was the arrangement of words on the page. And that is no small thing, that degree of control; it can provide you with a place to stand, a margin that can save your life.

I've had wonderful responses from readers to that work, and they continue to appear to this day, and not only from people who've themselves lost others to AIDS. Grief is always highly specific but it also turns out to be very much alike, and so the occasion has turned out to matter less than the emotions that work seems to mirror back to the grieving. It's been a transformative thing for me, to hear from readers the use they made of my work in their lives. I couldn't have imagined that, and it give the lie to the
Idea that poetry (or memoir, for that matter) is "lyric glitter," in the pejorative sense - not a decoration for the world, but a crucial matter.

It seems that loss of love, elegies, dogs, religion, and art have all been very important themes in your past work. Would you say that these themes are still prevalent in your new work?

Doty: Our obsessions probably don't change all that much, but certainly the vehicles we use do, and the circumstances. You know, same body (more or less), different clothes. Elegies, spiritual concerns, the work that art does - those are all still there. And lots of animal, though no dogs at present!

In your second memoir Firebird: A Memoir you go back to your childhood as a young gay male--"a chubby smart bookish sissy..."--who was shuffled around the southern states from town to town. Was this memoir harder to write since it was all based on your childhood memories? Do you feel that it provided you with a better sense of your childhood altogether?

Doty: It was easier to write, in truth, because the shape of my life between the ages of six and sixteen, which are the years covered by the book, suggested a shape for the narrative. Of my prose books, it's the most linear and the most novelistic, and I enjoyed setting one scene after another, trying to let action and dialogue carry the weight of the book, as opposed to the lyrical mediation of the previous one. I learned, writing it, how much I didn't know about my family, and how strange those years were. Your own life often doesn't seem odd to you, it's just what you know. And then when you set out to recount it - well, suddenly it can look unfamiliar, and peculiarly itself.

To Be Continued Until Tomorrow...

Mark Doty will be reading as a part of the Seattle Arts & Lectures 2009-2010 Poetry Series at 7:30 p.m., on Friday, February 26, at Benaroya Hall. Tickets range from $10-50.