[In the following interview, Doty discusses such issues as the development of his thematic and artistic preoccupations, the role of geography and public awareness in his work, and his aesthetic approach.]

Mark Doty seems to understand the origins of art's power, and his most recent volume of poetry resonates—in a new key for this award-wining poet and memoirist—with that understanding. In this interview, Doty digs deep into this new work, the aptly titled Source, and offers the stories behind each of his previous volumes. Among topics central to understanding his poetry and his aesthetic project, Doty expounds upon the interconnections of life, art, and observation.

Along the way, Doty speaks to his personal influences and origins, weaving a narrative of poems, poets and principles that have been important to his life and work.

Doty is the author of five books of poems and three works of nonfiction, Heaven's Coast: A Memoir and Firebird, and most recently Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. Among numerous awards, Doty has won a Lambda Literary Award, a National Book Critics Circle Award, Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and he has been a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in New York City.

[Hennessy]: I feel that your previous volumes each had a unique history to it. Does this latest volume?

[Doty]: The “story” of my books, their autobiographical arc, has been an important aspect of them. I've written a kind of trilogy, really—My Alexandria, Atlantis and Sweet Machine—which were all concerned, to put it abstractly, with apprehending limit, encountering the fate of the body in time. And with questions of community and memory. To put it more concretely, the shape of these books was determined by the AIDS epidemic, my late partner's illness and death, my own grief, the decision—is that the right word for it?—to live onward from there. The last of these books begins to move outward, wanting to claim a broad involvement in civic life—a sense of the self as one fragile-but-tough survivor in the ongoing pulse of the living.

This is a book much less tied to story; if it had one, I suppose it would be the tale of the poet stepping out of the retreat at the watery edges of the continent described in Atlantis and going out into the U. S. of A. I wrote these poems in Iowa, Utah, Texas, Massachusetts and New York. As well as living in all these places, I traveled a good deal as a visiting writer, and in these four years I gained a sense of myself as not being from anywhere in particular, but rather a citizen of the country. And I want this to be a citizen's book—one that rises out of our crowded, uncertain social moment. To my mind Source attempts to marry the stuff of the inner life—poetry—to a recognition of the particular social world which is this American moment. Somewhere Auden makes a wonderful statement about the way poets wish to dwell in the paradise of pure sound, the garden of pleasure—but how poems, if they are to represent the world at all, must always be ruining that paradise by admitting the fallen world. I paraphrase, but I intend something like the unity of music and heartbreak he's pointing to.

Do you think geography, place, even topography, can affect the production of poetic form?

I do. Of course it also has to do with how you live in a particular place, and the speed of your days, the focus of your attention. Think of Frank O'Hara's New York, for instance, and the way its speed and multiplicity contrasts with, say, Mary Oliver's New England landscape, which seems to mandate singularly focused acts of attention. In my case, I think you can feel in my books the shift in where I was and how I was living. Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight were written in Massachusetts and Vermont. They are books concerned with memory; their speaker seeks understanding by trying to situate himself in a personal history. The voice is relatively quiet, and there's a steady kind of attention. My Alexandria was written primarily in Vermont, though I moved to Provincetown before it was completed. The speaker in these poems is thinking of the present instead of the past; the pressures of adult life are such as to require his complete attention. Something of New Englandness percolates through the poems; maybe it has to do with the way the landscape becomes a vehicle, the way stories are told about places in poems like “Demolition” or “The Wings,” which partly locates itself at a Vermont auction. Atlantisis entirely a Provincetown book, with a few little trips to New York along the way. It's saturated in qualities of light, and is enormously interested in mutability, which is less true of the work before it. My Alexandria is very worried about disappearance, but in Atlantis things don't so much vanish as turn into something else. This has to do with living in a place that is constantly being revised. By the in and out of the tide, the shift of the fog, that famous Cape light—which isn't steady but instead continually shifts the way we view the world. That fluidity is the ground of the poems' making. Sweet Machine marks a transition; the poems were written in Provincetown and in Iowa City, and I felt my life opening after a period of constriction: a new relationship beginning, a wider world of professional life.

I'm reminded of a comment you made in an interview in 1998: You wanted to talk about the “public life.” You remain a poet of the interior and, of course, a poet who's gay; I suspect these elements are interacting in interesting ways when you write about the “public life.” Can you talk about that?

Well, no one can really write poetry about the public sphere from the public sphere, because the language is generalized and almost immediately debased. We have only to look at the events of September 11 and how an immediate and material tragedy is so quickly translated into cant, cliché, forms of speech which sentimentalize and—I suppose it's not too strong to say—degrade the character of the original experience. Mass culture commodities language. One answer to this problem is an almost complete retreat into interiority—to our private passions, concerns, impressions. Even these, of course, are shaped by those forces larger than ourselves, though our poems don't always acknowledge that. I am interested in a poetry that looks outward, in the impingement of the world and the evidence of engagement with the world. I suppose that where being gay connects with this is that it represents a further degree of remove. Simply to be a poet is to be outside of the mainstream of social discourse, and gayness adds one more dimension of standing at odds to the collective. I always remember E. M. Forster's wonderful description of Cavafy. He said he was a short, Greek man in a straw hat, standing at a slight angle to the rest of the universe. That slight angle is a degree of exile, but it is also a degree of perspective, which is the exile's gift.

Too, being a homosexual man or woman is also a perpetual reminder of the way in which public matters are deeply implicated in private ones. The state, the police and the church have, after all, been presences in our bedrooms and our nightmares all our lives. Such a condition reminds one that even the composition of, say, a love poem is not solely a private act.

I suppose there's no ignoring September 11. So, I'll ask: As one of America's most noted voices on the subject of loss, both as a poet and a memoirist, how have you responded to the events of September 11?

I don't think I've begun to respond in my work, except for a tiny poem that approaches those days in a very oblique way. It's a poem about a lost cockatiel in my neighborhood. A few days before September 11 there were posters on the street about this bird, and I found myself thinking of the fate of that creature after September 11. A little poem triggered by that came tumbling out, centering on something that's always obsessed me: What does it mean to be one among many? What does the loss of one creature entail when the life of the whole continues. So I've written just that tiny poem. But like everyone I feel the tremendous pressure of those days and the requirement to speak, and simultaneously the impossibility of speaking. Of course, that's part of what makes an event like this so hard for us. We need to respond, yet speech seems to fail in the face of events of such gravity and scale. In a way that's what poetry is for, those occasions when speech is inadequate. If we could say anything readily, then we would just do so. It's the unsayable that calls for a poem.

I have seen one extraordinary poem written since, by Frank Bidart. It's called “Curse” and speaks directly to the terrorists and wishes upon them empathy. It's remarkable—both in its content and for the fact that it has been written at all.

I want to talk about wounds, flaws. You're attracted to writing that “reminds us it's made of language,” and you pay special attention to the surfaces of things, ideas discussed at length elsewhere. But you've also said that the flaw, the wound often makes a thing more unique or beautiful. What occurs to language when, via artifice, it is made flawed—beyond, of course, the inherent flaw of language?

I admire enormously poems in which language arrives at a limit, something can't be completed or grasped, and the poem in some way acknowledges that and points to its own inability to hold. I could give you lots of examples because it's one of the things that interests me most. For instance, a poet I love, James L. White, and a poem of his called “Making Love to Myself” from The Salt Ecstasies (Graywolf, 1982). White was enormously influential to me. His closest aesthetic partners would be deep image poets like Robert Bly, but because White writes so directly from his experience as a gay man, the kind of ecstatic rhetoric we're used to meeting in those poems has a different grounding. This particular poem is an elegy to a lover who's not died, but has simply gone away. After a sorrowful description of the autoerotic act and of recalling his companion, White says at the end of the poem: “I just have to stop here, Jess. / I just have to stop.”

Stop what? Writing this poem, because I can't bear what I have to say? Stop wounding myself by remembering you? Stop masturbating because I'm coming, or because I can't finish because of these torturous memories? Or even, perhaps, that I have to stop my life because I can't continue with this absence? It's an extraordinary example of a poem that incorporates its own limits.

Another marvelous example is a poem I've just been writing about, by James Wright, called “On the Skeleton of a Hound.” The speaker's considering the fate of a hound's bones—he calls them “a ruin of summer”—when he changes his mind about grieving, because once he saw the hound chasing a rabbit in a pursuit so fierce and splendid that the dog followed the hare “to the moon, to dark, to death, to other meadows where singing young women dance around a fire.” Completely weird. The poem's left the terrain of the field and gone to some other, transcendent place, “where love reveres the living.” Then there's a bit of silence, of white space, a stanza break occurring in the middle of the line, then, all by itself at the beginning of the next stanza, these words: “I alone.” It's as if we've gone to a place where no more can be said, and thus the poem must incorporate this rupture; only a breakage can allow for any further movement. And what comes after that break? The solitary, tentative self. It's a remarkable moment. Probably the greatest poems always point us toward their own unraveling, the place where they cannot succeed in what they have set out to do.

Permanence and impermanence are significant themes in Source. Do I hear a shift from other volumes, something I'd track as tone of confidence? For instance, “Paul's Tattoo” begins with this firm statement: “The flesh dreams toward permanence.”

I think it's true that one writes one's way toward a greater sense of permission to make the bold claim. It has to do with a sense of building a context for one's own statements over time, certainly building a context within the body of a book. My hope is hat when you arrive at an opening line of a poem that asserts “The flesh dreams toward permanence,” the poems or books that have preceded it have prepared you to entertain such a claim. So that you're not thinking, Who is this guy?

This directness of assertion has been influenced by my work as a prose writer. During the time I was writing the poems in My Alexandria, I was very interested in raiding the fiction writer's toolkit: using multiple lines of narrative that intersected or paralleled one another, dialogue, characterization, allowing time to pass, things that are not primarily the ingredients of a lyric poem. That's continued to be true in my work, but having the vehicle of nonfiction prose (for telling extended stories and for meditating on those stories, writing a different kind of inclusive text) has pushed me as a poet to—well, get to the point, as it were. If I had written a poem like “Patti's Tattoo” a few years ago, I might well have begun in story and sidled up to making that statement. The prose work has pushed me in the direction of compression and perhaps forthrightness. I hadn't put it that way to myself, but now that you point to it, I think it's probably true.

In Source you describe a scene in a crowded beach changing shed in which “… so much flesh / in one place it seemed to be of the soul.” The body linked to permanence—will we see more of this in your work?

Hmm—depends on whether you think the soul is permanent!

Seriously, the body for me has been so much a location of instability, having lived through the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic. The body had been, and continued to be, the source of pleasure, much of what made experience matter and life worth living. But then it also became the location of so much danger and uncertainty, a place where there was so little control. That was very much reflected in my work. And now that you point it out, this idea of being part of a physical ongoingness is something that very much possesses me. I think the poems in Source are [asking]: is the self bounded in me and my old bag of skin, or does it reside in the common human whole? Also, where can we locate our ongoingness? Five thousand people disappear on September 11. The city continues in some way to carry those bodies, to carry no just all those names and photographs, but the dust of those bodies. We breathe it in.

The lines you mention are written in response to Whitman, to his view of the grass as “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” We continue through matter in permanent flux; we're part of that ongoing, larger, vibrating thing.

The body electric! Speaking of Whitman, he seems to be one of the strongest influences I hear, but I also hear Bishop, and not exclusively in Source.

I have been educated by Bishop in profound ways. I read her first in the early 70s, and didn't get it; I'd been schooled on the flamboyant intensities of neo-surrealism, and thus I found her poems cold and hard to get at. I read her again in the late 70s and my perspective shifted to allow me to appreciate her precise and evocative detail. But it wasn't until the late 80s and early 90s that I found myself drawn to her way of revealing the self by means of the “how” of seeing; the character of the perceiver was made available to us through the way in which attention was paid, through the choices by which attention made itself felt through language. There's an epistemological project there: We know her by virtue of how she knows. Perhaps the suggestion is that this is what poetry can give us—knowledge in context, historical, specific, the self caught in the act of knowing.

I don't believe we should go in fear of influence. The fact is that poetry never exists in a vacuum; it's written in dialogue with other poems, part of a vast web of utterance and response and further response. Each of my books seems to me to be animated, in part, by a conversation with another poet or poets. My Alexandria speaks, of course, to Cavafy, but it also very much involved with Rilke and with Robert Lowell.

Hart Crane and James Merrill are present in Atlantis, too, but nowhere near the extent that their stylistic characters are engaged in Sweet Machine. That book is a broader and more inclusive book than its predecessor, and concerned—on a formal level with intensification of the verbal surface, which becomes increasingly wrought, more assertively musical than in previous books. At the core of it is an argument about art, about the power of what we make, which both distinguishes us as human and threatens to be the agent of our damnation. Those two powerful ghosts are tutors of both formal complexity and emotional nuance. There are shadow presences of other poets here as well—my late friend Lynda Hull (in “Murano” and “Emerald”), Jorie Graham (in “Lilies in NYC”) and Stevens (in “Dickeyville Grotto”), and I'm sure others I'm not thinking of at the moment. I guess I think of a book as a kind of arena of response.

Do you feel gay writers approach their influences differently?

I suspect that gay writers tend toward a different stance than the Oedipal notion of inheritance propounded by [Harold] Bloom, that one is always trying to kill of one's influences and hide the evidence of: their presence, like bodies under the carpet. Perhaps because we have much less sense of a tradition and of familial legacy, literary or (often) literal, gay writers are probably more likely to let their influences show, to pay public homage. That's why practically every gay and lesbian writer in English has a poem called “Days of Something-or-other.” We want to claim our allegiances; we want to stand in a line. Lineation is lineage!

Like Bishop, you're a careful observer of the living (and sometimes dying) world. How important to your work is observation?

I am almost always disappointed by poems that don't attempt, in some fashion, to represent the world. I don't agree that “representation is murder.” The world survives any attempt we make to portray it. I do think representation is always a failure, but a noble and fascinating one. I believe in a poetry of attentiveness—which of course can mean attentiveness to the inner world, too. A poet like Michael Palmer may practice representation through an attempt to portray the action of thinking, or to embody a set of ideas about reading or signification. Brenda Hillman's poems observe people and landscape with the same precision they employ to look at interior processes of prayer and meditation.

For me, revision is the great paradox. Operationally and perhaps logically, “revision” suggests taking the poem further from its source, but I often find that the process pulls the poem closer to the work's origins, to its most urgent needs. How do you see it?

Increasingly this seems to me a very delicate negotiation. I used to be a wholehearted believer in the notion that, if revision carried you far away from where you set out, good! The deeper intentionality of the poem might reveal itself, and its larger realms come into play. I think poets often quit too soon, before they've explored the shadow possibilities that lie around the edges of what they can see clearly. We tend to flee complexity—for very good reasons, since it might be emotionally messy, and will almost certainly challenge our craft. But the willingness to embrace complexity is often what makes the difference between an ordinary poem and an extraordinary one. So I am all for prolonging the experience of submerging oneself in the draft of a poem, trying to remain uncertain about where it is going for as long as possible, in order to see what you can find out along the way.

This means that often one writes a great deal that is thrown out, or that turns out not to be connected after all—but such exploration inevitably winds up enlarging the world of the poem. If one has investigated the other rooms in the house, as it were, then one knows what's in them, and that knowledge winds up informing and pressurizing what the poem does ultimately include. Bishop is a wonderful example of this: What she knows and doesn't say is the shadow presence in the poem, and that shadow raises the stakes immensely, throwing what is said into a kind of high relief. What you know and don't say is crucial to the poem, whereas what you don't know (and therefore don't say) does you no good whatsoever!

All that said, on the other hand, I find myself valuing what emerges spontaneously, forcefully, with that sense of a pressurized utterance from the interior. I think my poems have often undergone a good deal of work before they emerge into consciousness; if I wait till I feel that undeniable urge to write, what comes tumbling out is often rather orderly, and sometimes (lucky ones) oddly dose to complete. Not that it doesn't need polishing, consideration on the level of craft, but in some fundamental way the poem may be born close to whole. I think this has to do with a lifetime of reading, with the internalization of influence we just talked about. The imagination, confronted with a new problem to solve, reaches back toward all it's encountered, seeking the resources it needs. And this often goes on without our knowledge, so that a poem, given grace, might emerge with a greater wholeness.

But it's very difficult to tell when you're done, isn't it?

What to withhold, what to give over, how not to “protect” oneself—all necessary decisions and all seem tied up in something like an act of faith, faith in the poem's needs. Are you comfortable with the term “faith” in that context?

Oh, absolutely. I have very little faith in myself [laughing] and I actually have a great deal of doubt about my work—its value, its success—after the fact. While I am making a poem, I have a great deal of faith in the potential for integrity, the possible completeness of what I'm doing. I feel it needs to be done, and that there is a way in which it can be written that will make it matter, meeting my own needs for investigation but also reflecting the reader's questions or experiences, too. As soon as I have brought the poem to something like completion, my faith begins to evaporate. It's a kind of operational faith. If you can't believe in it while you're doing it, then you're in trouble. After you've completed a draft, then every sort of doubt in the world may be appropriate. All the questions—Who is it for? What is it worth? Are there ways in which it can be larger?—all seem perfectly legitimate to me, and useful. But they have to be, to some degree, banished during the initial act of writing.

Is that the same for prose for you?

Prose allows me a good deal of room to talk about those dates. If my faith is wavering, that will probably become part of the subject.

Through reading your memoirs and poetry, I've developed this image of you as someone who studies life as one might study an art object.

I do, decidedly, see myself as a student, and my work as one of inquiry into the nature of experience. Making art is a discipline of paying attention. That's what poetry and nonfiction have in common for me, that work of attending to what we see, attempting to know it in a more profound way—through saying what we see—than can be done simply by experiencing often feel that I have not lived something fully until I've written it—not that I want to write about everything I live, by any means! But rather those experiences of depth and complexity, those that call out to be written, do so because there is more there to be known, further gradations to be seen, deeper complexities to be found.

I am a little uncomfortable with the idea of studying life as if it were art. Art is always selected, arranged, chosen, whereas experience arrives, as John Ashbery says, “flush with its edges”—that is, connected to countless other experiences, part of the flux and maelstrom. It diminishes experience to think of it as art.

On the other hand, I very much like the idea of looking at art as though it were life—which indeed it is: The vessel of lived experience, the forms into which the makers have poured the texture of their experience, through which they have attempted to render subjectivity. What it was to be Garcia-Lorca or Marianne Moore.

In a poem in Source you write:

that there is something stubborn in us
—does it matter how small it is?—
that does not diminish.
What is it? An ear, a wave?
Not our histories or who we love
or certainly our faces, which dissolve
even as we're living. Not a bud
or a cinder, not a seed
or a spark: something else:
obdurate, specific, insoluble.
Something in us does not erode.

Persistent questions, ontological searching, a longing for definition—these themes run throughout Source. A worldview?

Of course. And that is the spine of a life of making poetry, that there is a certain degree to which we can rely upon reporting of one's experience, the expression of feeling, following what living gives us. And then it becomes necessary, as one continues to practice, it becomes necessary to articulate—for some people it's a mythology, for others a kind of philosophical platform. It's a staking of claims on ultimate matters. One doesn't finish that. Whatever claim I might make in Source will be subject to further argument and revision. The book begins with a poem that insists on the question, “So?” and ends with the title poem, in which that question is literally embedded in the word “source.” Those terms—“so?” and “source”—are intended to delineate a paradox; I suppose it's in paradox that my faith abides. The statement you quote, “Something in us does not erode,” feels like a contradiction to what the title poem claims, that everything emerges from nothing, that everything returns to nothing. And that contradiction is energizing.