An Interview with Poet and Memoirist Mark Doty, Part 2
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.
Continued from yesterday...
As a child, did you write poetry or have a want to be a writer "when you grew up?"
Doty: I didn't write poetry, but I loved to read, which was a good thing because a kid who moves all the time needs company, and books of course were the best imaginable companions. I took my reading life very seriously, and it was probably more real to me than experience itself, at least a lot of the time. I started writing stories and little novel and screenplays. It just seemed like something you did, if you loved reading; it was inevitable. I never thought about "being a writer" though.
What was the first poem or story that you remember as being your favorite?
Doty: A picture book about Perry the squirrel. The White Seal by Jack London, Kipling's Jungle Book. There were many animal books and stories that made me weep with their profound sense that we were isolated from animals, that we could never really be with them because our lives were shaped by words but theirs were not. I thought this was the saddest thing in the world. I remember one night I finished a book in bed, about some chidren who could understand the speech of cats when they took a special medicine, but then of course they had to go back to the human world. I was crying in my bed about the book, and my father found me, and told me I couldn't read any more sad books. I think I remember feeling surprised that you shouldn't cry over a book. I didn't think that way and didn't know why he did.
What has been your most difficult challenge overall as a writer?
Doty: Just because you figure out how to do something once - discover a way to shape a poem around this image or that experience - doesn't mean you ever get to do it that way again. The writer is always starting over, and if you think you know what you're doing, you're probably damned. This is the source of a wellspring of youth, of artistic energy, of the will to keep going. And it's also damnably hard, and daunting.
We love the way that you play with image and form; the way that you bring ordinary objects to life and turn them into striking images with depth and implication. Is this the result of a particular influence in your work (Levine, Whitman?) or something powerful you discovered as a way to develop your poems?
Doty: Thank you. I'm not sure where that impulse comes from. My mother was a gifted amateur painter and I used to love to watch her work; I learned that color was more complex than any simple vocabulary for it would suggest, and that if you looked closely you'd see not what you thought was there but what the eye actually could perceive: that there were blue shadows in an orange, or green undertones in the skin beneath the eyes. Some of the painting I love best takes the most common stuff - sunflowers, a shell, a blue pitcher - and so pressurizes them through the power of the gaze that they bear all the weight of the world; everything's at stake in them.
Similarly, in the most powerful poetic image, perception becomes charged with feeling and idea. Or, another way to say that is that perception is restored, in poetry, to the dramatic adventure of meaning-making that it actually is, or can be.
Do you plan your books of poetry in advance or do they happen poem by poem?
Doty: Both. One poem leads to another; a current develops, a poem builds upon or complicates another. I love that feeling, when a sequence of poems begins to generate itself. But I find if I get too architectonically minded, my imagination rebels. I don't think I could ever write a whole book of, say, poems based on Moby Dick. I'd get bored out of my mind, and something entirely different would have to happen.
As a professor, what advice do you most often give to young writers and poets?
Doty: Read and read and read some more. Don't go in fear of influence; you are influenced already. What you want is more and more if it, more of the influence of work you love and feel a connection to. When you find a writer whose work you love, then drink it in, let it wash over you, use whatever you can from it. In time you'll move on to the next influence, and each one will furnish its part toward the writer you're becoming.
What are you most proud of in your writing life?
Doty: Two responses. First, I think, to some degree, I have been brave. I've written what I wanted to; I've not shied away from talking about anything that mattered to me. I've tried to stand up and pay attention and give voice to what was given to me.
Second, I haven't stopped. The poem I'm most proud of is the one I just wrote. That I did it, found a way to make something I'm interested in, that I hadn't quite done before, that seemed to have some life to it, after decades of making poems. You would think I would get used to it, that there'd be another poem, but in fact it's always a relief and a surprise.
Which of your books would you recommend for those who are yet to have read your work? Would Fire to Fire be a good choice?
Doty: I think it would be fine to start anyplace. Fire to Fire is a volume of new and selected poems, it would give you a feel of where I've been for the last 25 years or so. Or, if you're more of a prose reader, you might pick up Dog Years. It's a meditation on love and loss, language and time, and though it's disguised as a memoir about two of my four-legged companions, truly I think that just about everything I'm concerned with is somewhere in that book. Maybe that's something you learn from writing poetry - whatever the ostensible subject, it's a door into the things that matter most.
