About Mark Doty: A Profile

A summer visitor to the Cape Cod resort village of Provincetown, Massachusetts, is liable to see just about anything walking down Commercial Street, the town's main drag and zone of street theater. From muscle boys with shaved chests and nail polish to Portuguese fishermen in waders to a drag queen wearing a G-string, metal helmet, and gold body paint, the possibilities for human identities seem both fluid and vast. P-town is also a site of incredible natural beauty, but a volatile one. Surrounded on three sides by water, the tip of the Cape is pounded by waves and winter storms, its shape shifting as the wind moves the dunes. In the summer, it is a circus, in the winter, desolate. It is this landscape of both natural and human extremity and theatricality that the poet Mark Doty uses as the surface upon which to map an inner life.

The author of five collections of poems and a memoir, Mark Doty is one of the most celebrated writers of his generation -- the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American to earn the T. S. Eliot Prize in Britain. He has also received a Whiting Writer's Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA, and the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Born in Maryville, Tennessee, in 1953, Doty spent much of his childhood moving around the country. His father was a civilian member of the Army Corps of Engineers, and the job required one relocation after another. The place where Doty first came in contact with contemporary poetry was Tucson, Arizona, where he went to high school. A drama teacher introduced him to the poet Richard Shelton, who read Doty's early poems and encouraged him. "Most importantly," Doty says, "he showed me that one could have a life as a poet, that literature, or any art, might be the very center of one's experience." No small trick in Tucson, in the suburbs in the sixties. One moment in particular stayed in Doty's memory. "I went to Dick Shelton's house in the desert to help clean out his garage, and his wife, Lois, was at the piano when I walked in, playing Kurt Weill and singing 'Pirate Jenny' from
The Threepenny Opera in German. I felt a window had opened onto another world."

During the seventies, while living in Iowa, where he'd attended Drake University, he cowrote and published three chapbooks with his then-wife, the poet Ruth Doty -- books to which he no longer feels an allegiance. He now thinks of
Turtle, Swan as his first book. Published in 1987 by David R. Godine,
Turtle, Swan announced the arrival of a singular and vibrantly new voice in American poetry. These early poems were marked with what have come to be signatures of Doty's work: an efficient narration of events, an elegant handling of free verse one wants to call "post-formal," and a lyric intensity akin to that of Doty's prominent influence, Hart Crane. The book was not simply a precursor of things to come, but evidence of a voice fully formed. One of the most notable poems in the collection is the extraordinary "Charlie Howard's Descent," which describes the 1984 killing of a homosexual man who was thrown from a bridge by a group of boys in Bangor, Maine:

Over and over

he slipped into the gulf

between what he knew and how

he was known

With these lines, Doty took bold steps toward becoming the first post-Stonewall gay poet to emerge as a major voice in American letters. His predecessors, such as James Merrill, William Meredith, and Richard Howard, had all favored a more privileged tone and vocabulary, elaborate ventriloquism through personae, or occluded references to homosexuality. On the opposite spectrum, Ginsberg used an expansive self-mythologizing strung along an elastic line to address topics that placed him on America's sexual margins. With
Turtle, Swan, Doty effectively merged the political with the aesthetic, uniting a taut line with a lyric voice and an imagination that included notions of activism. Simply by being open about his sexuality, by using it as a subject for his poems without having it be
the subject, Doty created a new model for gay and lesbian poets and poetry.

For several years, Doty and his partner, Wally Roberts, lived in Montpelier, Vermont. Doty taught creative writing at Goddard College, where he'd received his M.F.A., and he and Wally renovated a one-hundred-ten-year-old house. In 1989, Wally tested positive for HIV. Doty tested negative. In his bestselling memoir about Wally's illness and decline,
Heaven's Coast (HarperCollins, 1996), Doty writes, "The virus seemed to me, first, like a kind of solvent which dissolved the future, our future, a little at a time. It was like a dark stain, a floating, inky transparency hovering over Wally's body, and its intention was to erase the time ahead of us, to make that time, each day, a little smaller." In 1989 the couple visited Provincetown, renting a house on the beach, and eventually decided to stay. The beautiful seaside environment, and the sizable gay community that could provide support for the couple as they faced Wally's illness together, made it seem an ideal place to settle.

In his second volume of poems,
Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (David R. Godine, 1991), Doty began chronicling Provincetown, its light and harbor and glittering surfaces. More than rare beauty distinguished the poems, however. One got the sense that Doty now viewed poetry as an arena of argument -- an argument between public and private selves about how to construct an inner life. Most remarkable in this second book is the way in which observation of the physical world is integrated into a deeply personal and intimate narrative.

In 1993, Mark Doty's third volume of poems was selected by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Illinois Press.
My Alexandria (the title of which makes reference to another primary Doty influence, C. P. Cavafy) was a tour de force, catapulting Doty into the center of attention.The book is perhaps the finest in-depth literary investigation of the AIDS crisis, and at its center is the anticipation of tremendous loss, an ache that pervades each of the poems. Curiosity about the incidental leads to inner investigations of the relationship between sex and illness, desire and inevitable decay. In the long poem "The Wings," Doty begins with a description of a boy at an auction, lying on the grass, reading. As the poem progresses, he offers:

Don't let anybody tell you

death's the price exacted

for the ability to love;

couldn't we live forever

without running out of occasions?

Both readers and critics responded generously to
My Alexandria. The book received numerous awards, including
The Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Yet Doty's success was to be shadowed by loss. In February of 1994, his partner, Wally, died of complications from AIDS. Doty writes, "In some way I had joined the invisible, too. I think that when people die they make those around them feel something like they felt; that may be the dying's first legacy to us. . . . Acceptance breeds acceptance, as Wally's attitude during his illness had shown; it'd been easy, somehow, for the people who took care of him to do so. He seemed, to those who carried him, to have made himself light."

In
Atlantis, published in 1995 by HarperCollins, Doty documents with great acuity the colors and textures of Provincetown. The book describes storm after storm. Ruined boats are both ravishing and haunted. Each tempest leaves behind something beautiful, but tinged with sorrow. It is a book about a storm, and the storm's quiet aftermath; something has been lost, but something else is left behind, worthy of description and contemplation. Punctuating the volume are occasional spikes of rage, as in the poem "Homo Will Not Inherit," in which the poet confronts a flier stating, "Homo will not inherit. Repent and be saved."

. . . I have for hours

believed -- without judgment, without condemnation --

that in each body, however obscured or recast,

is the divine body -- common, habitable --

the way in a field of sunflowers

you can see every bloom's

the multiple expression

of a single shining idea,

which is the face hammered into joy.

This is Doty at the height of his powers, the poem driven into the world by force of the poet's will, the engine hurtling it along his ecstatic imagistic capabilities. He turns biblical language on its ear, reclaiming its strength and lyricism, while exposing its misuse as an instrument of hate. The book's primary subject remains grief and its survival -- loss as it scours the psyche to the bone.

With
Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Doty's most recent book, we see a poet emerging with a more public voice, a formidable and lyrical style of argumentation. "I'm wanting my own poems to turn more towards the social, to the common conditions of American life in our particular uncertain moment," Doty says. "I am, I guess, groping towards those poems; I'm trying to talk about public life without resorting to public language."

"Mercy on Broadway" from
Sweet Machine acts as a bridge, linking Doty's previous work with his new artistic ambitions. The poet takes on the tumult and rapture of Manhattan, describing a scene on lower Broadway, where a woman is trying to sell a bowl full of turtles from a place on the sidewalk:

. . . I'm forty-one years old

and ready to get down

on my knees to a kitchen bowl

full of live green. I'm breathing here,

a new man next to me who's beginning

to matter.

The poem becomes a meditation on finding the will to start over, but it also functions as a love song for the noise and chaos of street life as it shuffles itself into and out of meaning. In this masterful poem, Doty combines the vast and the very small, what's impersonal and what is deeply felt.

Mark Doty makes his living as a teacher of creative writing, and in recent years he has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the creative writing program at the University of Utah. He currently teaches one semester a year at the University of Houston, and he and his partner, the novelist Paul Lisicky, split their time between Houston and Provincetown.

Doty recently finished a second memoir entitled
Firebird, which will be published by HarperCollins next year. "
Firebird is an autobiography from six to sixteen, with a particular eye towards matters of aesthetic education: How do we learn to identify what we find beautiful, and what are the uses to which beauty is put? It's a sissy boy's story, and thus an exile's tale, and a chronicle of a gradual process of coming to belong somewhere, to the world of art." He goes on to add, "I hope the book is not so much about me as it is an examination of a whole constellation of experiences and ideas -- personal and collective -- about art, sexuality, identity, gender, and the survival of the inner life."

On summer afternoons in Provincetown, students from the Cape Cod School of Art are seen throughout the town, painting landscapes of various local scenes. Very often, groups of them set up easels in the street in front of Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky's two-century-old house. With its rose arbor, white clapboards, and vibrant, overblown flower beds, it's the perfect New England subject. With each stroke, the painters try to get at something Doty noted in his poem "Fog" -- "some secret amplitude . . . in this orderly space" -- which exemplifies what Doty has been able to reveal, with grace and mastery, in his work and life.

Mark Wunderlich is the author of the poetry collection The Anchorage,
which will be published this spring by the University of Massachusetts Press. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and the managing director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.