SOURCE: Doty, Mark, and Mark Wunderlich. “Interview with Mark Doty.” Cortland Review (December 1998): 1-2.

[In the following interview, Doty discusses trends in recent American poetry, how events in his teens led him to pursue writing, and how being gay affects style and self-presentation.]

[Wunderlich]: In an article you published in the Hungry Mind Review about your experience as a judge for the Lenore Marshall Prize, you discussed your hopes for the future of American Poetry. I'm wondering if you could talk a little more about that. Also, and this may be impossible to answer, but I'm curious to know what vision you have for the future of your own work? What are your current ambitions?

[Doty]: I wrote the article you mention after reading a great many collections of poetry publishing during 1996 and 97, and I wanted both to complain about a certain tepidness in much of the poetry I was reading and to praise something else about it, which I would describe as a kind of formal open-mindedness. This is something I've been seeing increasingly as I travel and meet students in writing programs around the country. It seems to me there is very little pure allegiance to one kind of practice, to one school or another; the young writers I'm meeting want to forge a means of getting their individuality on the page, and in order to do so they seem just as likely to write a sonnet as they do a narrative poem, or a non-narrative piece with a less referential quality. I think that's hugely exciting; the blurring of boundaries points towards larger possibilities to come in American poetry over the next decade or three. I think we might see fewer camps, and more individual, alchemical fusions of esthetic strains present in our poetry now. That's my hope. And I fervently hope, too, that we will not settle for an esthetic practice that leaves out the social and the political. I, for one, am hungry to read poems of American life now, in all its messy complications, with its terrors and uncertainties and possible grounds for hope.

Which leads me to the second part of your question, about my desires for my own work. I've written a good deal, in recent years, along intensely personal lines. Those poems move through my own experiences of grief to connect with readers' experiences of the evanescence of what we love—or at least I hope they do! The work of the poet investigating personal experience is always to find such points of connection, to figure out how to open the private out to the reader. On one level, those were social and political poems, since they deal with a highly charged, politically defined phenomenon, the AIDS epidemic—or at least with the effects of that epidemic in my life. But the poems go about that work in a personal, day-to-day way, more individual than global.

I'm wanting my own poems to turn more towards the social, to the common conditions of American life in our particular uncertain moment. I am, I guess, groping towards those poems; I'm trying to talk about public life without resorting to public language. I am trying to address what scares and preoccupies me now. The project seems fraught with peril—part of the reason we don't write political poems in America is that most of us feel, well, what do I know? What authority do I have to speak? Where does my connection to any broad perspective on social life lie? I don't see myself ever becoming a polemical poet, or writing to advance a particular cause, but at the same time I can't believe that it's okay for us to go on tending our private gardens while there is so much around us demanding to be addressed.

I'd like to talk a little more about the notion of the political in poetry. In what ways is a poem a suitable vessel for a political subject? What is it that a poem can do with a political subject that another form of writing or discourse can't? I suspect it may have something to do with the way in which poetry engages the reader …

I've been talking about this a lot in print lately—in an essay in the Boston Review this summer, which responds to Harold Bloom's introduction to the Best of the Best American Poetry anthology, and in an argument-in-print with my friend J. D. McClatchy, which will appear in the new incarnation of the James White Review this winter. It occurs to me that my sense of what political poetry consists of is to some degree generational; I'm young enough (or old enough, depending on your point of view) to have been shaped by the notion that the personal is political. When I talk about political poetry, I mean that work which is attentive to the way an individual sense of identity is shaped by collision with the collective, how one's sense of self is defined through encounter with the social world. Such a poem doesn't necessarily deal with, say, the crisis in Bosnia or America's brutal mishandling of the AIDS epidemic, though it might be concerned with these things. Though it does do more than occupy the space of the lyric “I”; it is interested, however subtly, in the encounter between self and history.

In this sense, many of the poems I love best are political poems. Bishop's “The Moose”, for instance, is a brilliant evocation of an experience in which an outsider, defined by her separation from those perennial family voices droning on in the back of the bus, suddenly has a mysterious experience of connection, of joining a community of inarticulate wonder in the face of otherness. The isolation of the speaker in the poem to “The Bridge” is not just an existential loneliness; he's waiting in the cold “under the shadows of Thy piers” for a reason, which has to do with his position as a sexual other. That the great steel rainbow of the bridge arcs over him there is no accident; his otherness is an essential condition which helps to create the joy he feels in the transcendent promise of the bridge.

What these poems can do which discursive writing cannot is dwell in that rich imaginative territory of the interior connection, in imaginative engagement with the troubling fact of self-in-the-world. I don't really believe there is such a thing as “pure” esthetics; the esthetic is always a response, a formulation, an act of resisting outer pressure, or rewriting the narratives we're given.

And you're right, it is about engaging the reader. Not with our opinions about things, but with our felt involvement in the world, the self's inextricable implications with culture and time.

I'd like to ask you about your work's relationship to autobiography. Your poems are full of details of the lived life. They are poems of intimacy, rather than ones that draw attention to the mask the poet wears. You also published a very successful memoir about the loss of your partner, Wally, which is a very frank meditation about a period of great personal difficulty. What are some of the challenges presented by this kind of openness? What are its benefits?

I don't exactly feel that this openness has been a choice, although of course on some less-than-conscious level it must be. Rather it feels to me as if it's simply the course my life has taken, beginning in the early eighties with the process of coming out. I felt then a great thirst for directness, an imperative to find language with which to be direct to myself, which is of course the result of having been, like many young gay men, divided from my self, from the authentic character of my desire. I felt I had to hide for years! And the result of that for me, once I began to break through the dissembling, was a thirst for the genuine.

And I like poems in which one gets the feeling of meeting a person; it's one of the reasons I read poetry—for that experience of encountering another sensibility in its context, a mind in its skin, as it were. So I would like my own work to be furnished with the stuff of my life. There is an element of illusion to this, in that the self on the page is always a construction; one can't put all of oneself on paper; there are always contradictions, divergences, complexities. Thank goodness! Any poem creates an “I”, a character who is its speaker, and on one level this creation is always a performance; one shouldn't mistake the authenticity of art for the facts of autobiography, necessarily! I am interested in getting at something with the feeling of the lived life on the page, and that often involves rearranging the facts, compressing, heightening—lying, if you will. That said, I don't really make much up; my imagination's fired more by trying to limn what is!

There is an esthetic risk to this, of course, which is that what feels deeply resonant to the maker, who knows the context of his tropes, may not carry such a charge for the reader. The more immediate our investment, the harder it is to find the degree of distance the poem requires. To some extent, that's what the composing process is: discovering the degree of distance at which we can stand in order to make our emotions and experiences available to the reader.

And there's a funny personal risk, too, which is the oddity of discovering that people who I don't know sometimes know me, at least in a way; if the reader's entered deeply into a book, she or he may feel profoundly intimate with the author. And, in a way, they are, though on a more worldly level, they aren't at all. I have sometimes found this jarring, but I have to remember that it is a great compliment. I have felt this way myself with writers whose work I love. When I first met James Merrill I felt deeply confused, because I seemed to know him intimately, though of course what I knew was the Merrill of the books, and how startling it was NOT to know the man!

One last note about this. When Heaven's Coast came out, I went through a terrible (and fortunately brief) period of feeling that I had turned my memory into a book; that there was nothing left of my relationship with Wally except what I'd turned into stories. I felt bereft for a while, until I remembered something which I'd left out of the book, which felt like such a gift—the returning awareness that my life was larger than the story I'd made of it, that it resisted being reduced to a single narration.

I understand you're working on a new memoir. How does this one differ from Heaven's Coast?

I've finished it, actually. The new book's called Firebird and will be out from HarperCollins next year. It is a very different book than Heaven's Coast which was more meditative, nonlinear, and drew at least part of its form from the journal (though it also has elements of nature writing and literary criticism, but that's another story). Firebird is an autobiography from six to sixteen, with a particular eye towards matters of esthetic 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.

The book is formally quite different, in that it behaves more like a novel—a continuous narrative which traffics less in reflection and discursive writing and more in scene and in character. Its project is to place the self in context, to think about my own peculiar family and about American life in the fifties and sixties. 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.

You mention the esthetic education; how would you describe the link between sexuality and esthetics? Do you believe there is such a thing as a tangible gay esthetic—one that goes beyond camp?

My book traces the development of an esthetic sense, and connects that development to a sense of being an outsider; if I couldn't belong to the world of people, the many new towns and schools in which I'd find myself as the son of an Army engineer, I could find my place in the world of made things. I could join my smaller, uncertain life to the ongoing, confident life of music, or painting, or books. I suspect that some kind of a sense of self-as-other—because of sexuality, or sensitivity, or any form of exile—is a prerequisite to the artistic life.

As for a gay esthetic—well, it's a complicated question, isn't it? My years in Provincetown—which fills up every summer with gays and lesbians from all over the world—have taught me that gay people come in as many sorts of varieties as everyone else, and therefore it's impossible to essentialize them; I wouldn't want to claim that gay people are by nature this or that, or like this or that.

But there is, on the other hand, a kind of esthetic sense which has been historically identified with us, and for good reasons. It is a sense of disjunction between surface and substance, and it has to do with our understanding of style as a way of presenting ourselves—both as a way of communicating who we are and concealing our identities when we choose to do so. It is a single characteristic of gay experience, because our parents look at us, as children, and they don't necessarily SEE that we are, on the inside, quite different. Children know this; we can have a queer interior which the outside world may not see, and so we begin to think about this difference between the world of being and the world of seeming. I think this split is often the beginning of a way of seeing the world.

J. D. McClatchy quotes a funny statement of Ravel's in his book of essays, Twenty Questions. “Does it not occur to these people,” the composer said, “that I may be artificial by nature?” His remark points to the way that style—in music or poetry or anything else—is far more than mere decor. Gay life teaches us to read the stylistic signals of others, the codes of dress and conduct, which, far from being just fashion, mean intensely. We understand that style's the visible aspect of identity, something which we choose, over which we have power. I believe we understand that who we are is, to a large degree, a function of how we are, that our self-presentation is deeply allied to our sense of identity. That costume is, as John Ashbery said somewhere, “a kind of visible core.”

Literary style is a sort of costuming; and writing marked by a gay sensibility is always concerned with allowing us to read beneath the often gorgeous elements of surface to the bare, desiring body beneath. Merrill is the perfect example; his grace and allusiveness and formal elegance is far more than a kind of elaborate theatrical get-up. Instead, it's the elaborate robe which both conceals and reveals the body, as all good outfits do.

And that is camp, of course, in a way—that it goes beyond the merely ironic when it becomes a central way of making meaning.

You are a very sought-after teacher. How does teaching affect your work as a writer? Are there other kinds of work you want to do?

The effect of teaching on my work is, by and large, salutary. For one thing, it allows me to be part of a conversation about poetry and poetics which continues to stimulate and engage me; I teach very accomplished graduate students and their questions and struggles are ones I often share. I'm always finding that the work of poets I'm bringing into class for students to read, the kinds of issues I am addressing in student work—those are the things I'm wrestling with myself. The work also allows me to have friendships with people I probably wouldn't meet otherwise; as you get older, you don't meet much people younger than yourself unless you have some sort of structure which enables that. Just as grad school provides a community for student writers, so it does for me.

The hesitation in “by and large” is, of course, that the demands of teaching are serious, and they often mean that the work I'd be doing myself gets put on hold for a while. But it gets done! And I have a very good arrangement now, teaching every other semester, and that time is a huge gift.

A good question, about the other work I'd like to do. I think I have folded a number of ambitions into my poetry: the desire to paint has expressed itself in visual imagery and a vocabulary of color, the desire to sing or make music emerges as an interest in sonic texture, and the desire to be a cabaret performer makes itself felt in a certain theatricality, as well as in giving poetry readings!

Of these, only the desire to paint still nags at me; I hope that I will be able to realize that at some point in my life. And I might like to write a novel, though I am completely intimidated by the form. I do not ever want another job besides teaching writing, really! At least not at this point. I've been teaching steadily for about fifteen years—perhaps in a while I will feel differently.

You mentioned earlier the relationship of esthetics to sexuality; that being an outsider also led you, in part, toward art-making. What other forces contributed to your becoming a poet? When did you first see that it was possible to live a life as an artist? Were you mentored in some way?

I'll send the reader in the direction of my Firebird, first; that book's an extended meditation on this subject, in a way—a consideration of how the artistic life comes into being, and the ways in which it first began to serve, for me, as a source of rescue and sustenance. But as the book's not coming out till next fall, here's a bit of an answer!

From the time I could read, I was always writing something: stories, plays, soap opera scripts, little novels, who knows what. I think I always saw language as something that came rather effortlessly, and offered great elasticity, room to play. I didn't come to poetry until I was a teenager. I'd love Tolkien, and found myself compelled by the little songs his characters sing. I was keeping a notebook, not a diary of what happened but a sort of commonplace book of quotations and bits and pieces of imagery, scraps of language which seemed to contain some of the shine and tumult of the inner life. I stumbled across some poets in a bookstore, an alternative place on Fourth Avenue in Tucson, which was the counter-cultural hotspot of about 1967 or so. The bookstore was called The Hungry Eye, and in reality didn't have all that many books, but it seemed like an outpost of another world. I read Garcia Lorca there, and Charles Simic, and the way their imagistic, evocative language seemed drenched in interiority pulled me right in.

Then I met a poet, Richard Shelton. He was teaching at the University of Arizona, and we were introduced through a drama teacher of mine. Dick was phenomenally generous; he used to have conferences with me, at the Poetry Center, when I was just fifteen or sixteen. I wasn't writing well, of course, but there must have been a certain precocious surreality about my fledgling poems which interested him. He used to read my poems, make some comments, and point me in the direction of things to read I'd never have found on my own. Most importantly, 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. That wasn't the easiest thing to see, in suburban Tucson in the sixties, and it was thrilling to me. One day I went to Dick'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.

I suspect that all artists are mentored in some way, some way like this—we need to be shown that a passion might become that which a life is built around.

I met Charlie Simic right around then, too; he came to my high school creative writing class! My teacher asked me to read Mr. Simic one of my poems, and when I was done he looked at me rather owlishly and appraisingly and said, “Read me another one.” Which was the best thing he could ever have said!

I'm so happy to hear about the generosity of those senior poets toward a young aspiring writer!

Have you ever turned against something you've written and published? I'm thinking of the dramatic story of Louise Glück buying copies of her first book from bookstores so she could destroy them …

Oh, of course! Like most young poets I was eager to put my work out into the world and be heard, and since I was raised as a neo-surrealist (and in an odd workshop atmosphere wherein we talked about imagery and form, the how of the poem, never the when) I think I was an irresponsible young writer. I didn't take what I said seriously; these were just poems. So I published work during the seventies, in literary magazines and in three now happily-out-of-print chapbooks, to which I have no allegiance. I have since claimed Turtle, Swan as my first book, though I know those old poems are still out there somewhere, and they will be back to haunt me. I recently saw that a rare book dealer on the internet was selling a copy of one of them for ＄650, which means that I will not be following Louise's example.

My disaffection for those earlier poems also has to do with having been in the closet—to myself to a degree, and certainly to others, though I'm sure many people could see what I couldn't own—when I wrote them. Therefore they seem to come from someone else's life, since their foundation is false.

I am curious to hear why you think poetry survives as an art form today. It seems to me that the most perfect art form would probably be film making: You get to use visual images, sound, music, the spoken voice, actors, etc. Why when we have so many choices of kinds of art-making, do people still keep returning to poetry?

Poetry certainly doesn't have the “totalizing” quality that film does, a medium which just surrounds one and hostages the viewer's attention. It lacks painting's immediacy, or photography's odd marriage of the esthetic and the palpable sense of the “real.” One would think that our late-century engagement with arts which combine media, which seek a sort of seamless experience for the viewer, would supplant poetry. But far from it. My sense is that, while still a minority preference, poetry is thriving. Audiences for readings increase, a great deal of poetry is published, and it seems that among young people especially there is genuine interest in and respect for the art.

Who knows why? My guess is that somehow poetry is a vessel for the expression of subjectivity unlike any other; a good poem bears the stamp of individual character in a way that seems to usher us into the unmistakably idiosyncratic perceptual style of the writer. I think we're hungry for singularity, for those aspects of self that aren't commodifiable, can't be marketed. In an age marked by homogenization, by the manipulation of desire on a global level (the Gap in Houston is just like the Gap in Kuala Lumpur, it seems), poetry may represent the resolutely specific experience. The dominant art forms of our day—film, video, architecture—are collaborative arts; they require a team of makers. Poems are always made alone, somewhere out on the edge of things, and if they succeed they are saturated with the texture of the uniquely felt life.