Tenderness and Style – Best Gestures we can Make in the Face of Death

I walked into my kitchen late Saturday night and found two messages on my machine; both were from Mark Doty. “Um…” the first message began, “Well, it’s about eleven o’clock and I think I’m at your house, but I can’t seem to rouse anybody.” My first thought was that I had confused the days of the week again and had missed Saturday all together. But then I listened to the second message. Mark learned, after driving past the downtown marquee with his name on it, that he was an entire day early “thus proving that poets are too much in their own heads to function in the outside world.” It wasn’t the uniqueness of the observation that struck me as much as it’s place among the often surreal and philosophical observations that characterize his work. His 2002 collection Source is devoted to this Walt Whitman theme of the illusion of a self that ends or begins at the flesh and it was on this note that Mark Doty began the reading of his new collection, School of the Arts with its first poem Flit.Sunday was the first time Mark had seen his new book in print and read almost exclusively from it. Flit presents a world where the human mind is a flock of birds, changing direction mid flight but “all that action/barely disturbs the air.” In Signal Doty asks “do we join the whole?” like a bird flying from the isolation of its cage into central park. This, Mark says, “leads to ideas of heaven.” In Helen to Helen we are asked what do people desire, and is it the vision of an afterlife that ultimately betrays us. In another poem, Stanley Kunitz’ Garden Poem, we see a man without desire and he’s “already there.” So from poem to poem we get a sense of questions simultaneously being asked and answered; an absurd sense of a world in an oscillating state of destruction and reconstruction. Cynthia Huntington, the New Hampshire poet laureate who introduced Mark explained his work as “trying to reconstitute a world that is constantly falling apart.” These are the most interesting and pervasive of the themes that move gently among and through Doty’s various writings. His writing however, is by no means limited to this. Doty has also published several well received memoirs and a seventy page essay titled Still Life with Oyster and Lemon that is a long, beautiful and insightful musing on art, poetry and most importantly, a person’s place as observer and appreciator. In the shrinking subculture of American poets, a few names seem to continually surface. One of them is Mark Doty. Unlike many poets of the last few decades, Doty’s clever writing and philosophizing have allowed him to escape the bindings of genre. A gay poet, Doty transcended stigmatization and has deftly continued to create and recreate accessible and engaging art. Among my favorite living poets, Mark Doty is still a young man in the poetry world whose imagination we can plan to revisit for many years. His closing comments were arguably the most interesting time of the afternoon as he answered questions and explained his feelings on what poetry is. “My metaphors know more than I do. They operate ahead of me…the feeling of the poet is irritation…it’s always returning to a position of not knowing.”