Last month I shared a piece I wrote about Charles Bukowski when I was in the Vermont College Adult Degree Program and thought I’d continue to post these essays/book reflections from time to time as a way for me to revisit my thoughts on the poet and their work and to see if you have any thoughts on them you’d like to put out there. Mark Doty has been a favorite poet of mine since I first started reading his work. After I heard him read and speak at the 2004 Dodge Poetry Festival he became even more dear to me because of his honest and generous nature. He always speaks of poetry in the highest terms and he seems clear that he is a servant of poetry, not the other way around. I like his playfulness and his profundity, his earthliness and spirituality. I appreciate his devotion to the art of poetry and to the art of life. To read more about him and hear him read his poems go to his website at www.markdoty.org.

Mark Doty

Source, Harper Collins, Publisher

Here’s the essay followed by a complete poem of his. If you want to read Fish R Us it is in Poems I Love.

The poems of Mark Doty in Source ring like clear bells through the heart and soul. His brilliance in language is clearly evident as he is completely competent writing in the most simple, straightforward vernacular, as well as a highly honed and studied one. One aspect of his poetry that can never be doubted is his ability to paint intensely vivid images intertwined with acutely personal perceptions. Doty writes angular poetry. There are few straight or curved lines of thought. I had to read many of his poems two or three times to tune into their rhythm and flow. Many times the leaps from one stanza to another, or one word to another, would leave me a bit baffled as in the first two stanzas of the poem, “Fish R Us”:

Clear sac
of coppery eyebrows
suspended in amnion,
not one moving –

A Mars,
composed entirely
of single lips,
each of them gleaming –

The jump from the first stanza to “A Mars” turned my logical mind around a few times before I just allowed it to be and enjoyed the thought of another planet, the concept of a totally foreign place where we have no point of reference.

“Fish R Us” is a perfect example of Doty’s playful sense of humor, his ability to build a metaphor that is original and subtly presented and to insert a pressing and profound spiritual question into the poem to bring the reader to attention. The following stanzas illustrate these qualities:

In this clear and
burnished orb, each fry
about the size of this line,
too many lines for any

bronzy antique epic,
a million of them
a billion incipient citizens
of a goldfish Beijing,

a Sao Paulo,
a Mexico City.
they seem to have sense
not to move but hang…

Calling the fish “fry” and likening them to the “size of this line,” it is like you can hear him chuckling with the reader about the silliness of writing about these insignificant fish in a poem. Then, in the next few lines, the fish are propelled onto the world stage as we view the crowded populations of Beijing, Sao Paulo and Mexico City. The metaphor slides into the poem just as the narrator might have thought it watching these fish swirling around in their tight confinement. As the poem draws to a close Doty hones in even more to the question of being one among the masses when he asks: “Who’s going to know / or number or even see them all?” He asks the question and then lets the reader take it from there as his last line is, “They pulse in their golden ball.” It is a question we can only find through faith, or perhaps it is completely irrelevant as this is the context in which we find ourselves and can only keep swimming in the water into which we are born.

In his narrative poem “Letter to Walt Whitman,” Doty writes a playful and tender “letter” to Whitman, a poet and man he clearly respects and admires. Doty and his partner Paul visit the home of Whitman in a run-down neighborhood of Camden, New York where Whitman lived out the last few years of his life. Doty seeks to know Whitman beyond the “photobooks” he has seen and his own fantasies of the famous poet. In the middle of the poem Doty asks a question of Whitman: “Did you mean it? / Democratic America joined by / delight in the beauty of boys, / especially working-class ones?” Doty then goes on to have a conversation with Whitman about where he has found fellowship, and it is not in a church but “men held in common by our common skin.” There is certainly a homosexual connotation to these lines, as the narrator looks for reconciliation as a man, among men, who is different in a fundamental way.

Doty continues to search for answers to questions posed from his soul to the soul of the dead poet, pressing on with describing a time when he was “once, in a beach side changing shed packed / with men, all girths and degrees of furred / and smooth, firm and softened, fish belly…” He is aware of how all these men are at this point aware of their vulnerability and their “singular, shared lot.” When each man returns to the parking lot and “the expressway back to the city, / headed home to the song of my self, self, / self,” Doty asks, “That moment, unguarded / skin to skin, why didn’t it make us change?” This question is central to the poetry of Doty writes in this collection, “Why are we something other than our true selves? Why do we wear masks and turn away from our interior world and refuse to see that world in others?” He is fully aware of the façade of the culture and of the individual, and his own, as well. It is probing into the “why” that keeps Doty writing the poetry that asks the question and it is his compassionate nature which allows him to love himself and others without bitterness or judgment.

Doty’s final, and title poem, “Source” is like tumbling down the rabbit hole with Alice. He is traveling in the countryside and sees three horses grazing. Although he goes on into the town to shop and browse the bookstores the thought of the horses never leaves him. He returns to them and offers them what the reader might assume is an apple. This is where the poem starts to go into new territory:

Experience is an intact fruit,
core and flesh and rind of it; once cut open,
entered, it can’t be the same, can it?

Though that is the dream of the poem:
as if we could look out

through that moment’s blushed skin

The poem alternates between three-line and two-line stanzas, keeping it fluid and fresh, just as Doty alternates between the present of being with the horses and his underground thoughts about poetry and the human desire to always know:

the poem wants a name for the kind nothing
at the core of time, out of which the foals

come tumbling: curled, fetal, dreaming,
and into which the old crumple, fetlock
and skull breaking like waves of foaming milk…

Cold, bracing nothing, which mothers forth
mud and mint, hoof and clover, root-hair

and horse-hair and the accordion bones
of the rust-spotted little one unfolding itself
into the afternoon.

We want to be able to nail everything down, give it a name, a place in our catalog of things, so as to provide a sense of safety and superiority. The mare does not need to know the name for the place where her foal comes from, does not need to catalog the hair, the bones, the spots of her baby’s body. Doty looks into the eyes of nature and sees her acceptance, above all, acceptance. We cannot be the horse or the bear or the tree, but we can find the wounds inside of us that they can heal through their essential nature. The horses simply go about being themselves in his presence. They do not seek to impose any lessons or judgments.

The poems of Source are the musings of a man willing to examine and expose his own quest into the “why” of human nature. Doty has clearly struggled with his own identity. He expresses a great capacity and longing to understand the dynamics of separateness, whether self-imposed or culturally dictated. Doty’s sense of humor and his compassionate nature are key in his ability to convey, through his poems, the value of embracing each other, the world around us, and most importantly ourselves.

*****

At the Gym

This salt-stain spot
marks the place where men
lay down their heads,
back to the bench,

and hoist nothing
that need be lifted
but some burden they’ve chosen
this time: more reps,

more weight, the upward shove
of it leaving, collectively,
this sign of where we’ve been:
shroud-stain, negative

flashed onto the vinyl
where we push something
unyielding skyward,
gaining some power

at least over flesh,
which goads with desire,
and terrifies with frailty.
Who could say who’s

added his heat to the nimbus
of our intent, here, where
we make ourselves:
something difficult

lifted, pressed or curled.
Power over beauty,
power over power!
Though there’s something more

tender, beneath our vanity,
our will to become objects
of desire: we sweat the mark
of our presence onto the cloth.

Here is some halo
the living made together.