Mark Doty

THE POET AND THE POEM:

An Interview with Mark Doty
by Grace Cavalieri
The Poet and the Poem

Mark Doty is one of America’s most beloved poets. He’s

written 12 books of poetry, 3 memoirs, among other writings. He
holds the National Book Critics Award, the LA Times Award,
Britain’s T S Eliot Prize, The Lambda Literary Award, Bingham
Poetry Prize, Whiting Writers Prize, NEA and Guggenheim
fellowships. He was finalist for the National Book Award plus
other honors. Mark’s recent book is FIRE TO FIRE:
New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008.)

Grace Cavalieri:
More than any other poet, you shine light on the things of this
world vividly, brilliantly. How do use material objects - furniture,
houses, oysters, lemons – serve you, to convey what you want to
say?

Mark Doty:
Thank you, I'm honored. I've tried to write about this
phenomena, how material things serve as the vessels for feeling
and thinking, how we invest them with ourselves, in my book on
Dutch still life painting, STLL LIFE WITH OYSTERS AND LEMON.
And I'm working on a little book now for Graywolf Press called
THE ART OF DESCRIPTION, which also tries to answer this
question. The short answer is that the world of sensory
perception is a vocabulary for us; it's the lexicon we have to use
if we want to convey embodied experience and not just ideas.

GC: A forthcoming book from the Univ. of Iowa Press features

your essay on “Memoir.” How do you see a writer’s personal
memoir as being able to take readers back to their own
experiences?

MD: That's what the reader is always doing, finding his or her life
mirrored in the text. The more a memoir evokes the world of
sense perception, the more it tries to come close to how it feels
to be alive, the more readers will see themselves there. When
you write a memoir, as with a poem, you usually begin in self-
expression, but by the time you've come to the end, it's
something more of a gift for the reader than it is a vessel for the
writer's feeling.

GC: We all know your dogs’ aches, pains, trials and tribulations
as well as our own. Why don’t your cats get much PR? (This
question was provided by my cat)

MD: Ha! I've had many cats in my life, beginning in childhood,

and then as an adult there were two who were with me for years,
Portia and Thisbe. They are the cats who remain nameless in
DOG YEARS. I think cats like to lurk in the background, or hang
out on top of the furniture watching the action, so that's where
they are in my memoir. Seriously, I think cats may be less
narrative by nature.

GC: Prometheus stole fire from the Gods and brought it to earth
but paid a price. What does this myth mean to you as a poet?
MD: Any making has its price, doesn't it? It strikes me as odd,
though, that it's the gods who punish Prometheus, when it fact
we know he's going to burn himself with the fire. Possessing fire
is a gift, but it's a great danger, too. Human artistry, human
inventiveness, is always two-sided; the knife that we use to carve
an altarpiece can also be used to maim an enemy. Creation nearly
always carries the potential for destructive use. Fortunately
poems are not particularly destructive objects, not in the usual
sense, though they may contain ferocity and fire, and might go
off in a life like an explosive.

GC: You have won a cachet of top literary prizes. How long to do
you feel good after the news and what does it mean to you to
receive an award?

MD: Your question implies that you already know the answer --
not long! It's wonderful to be recognized, and to have one's work
singled out so that more readers will find it. But it isn't in itself
sustaining, just as publication isn' t either. Those are fleeting
pleasures -- though I understand that it's hard to say this to
someone who would like to win an award or publish a book -- and
the real sustenance seems to come from doing your work, being
involved in making something new.

GC: Not since W. C. Williams Pictures from Brueghel has a poet

been so renowned for featuring paintings in poetry and prose.
How many ways do you look at a painting?

MD: These questions make a guy feel good, thanks. I love

looking at paintings, surely in part because I am a person who
dwells so much in language, working both as a writer and a
teacher. The immediacy of painting is thrilling to me, the sudden
complete experience of a color, or the way a canvas opens up to
you as keep looking. I guess I would want to think about seeing
in the same way I'd think about the composing process -- to keep
returning to the image, asking questions, walking around it,
letting the eye (and mind) wander, allowing oneself to be
educated by perception.
GC: What was the last film you say and tell us your thoughts
about it?

MD: Robert Altman's lyrical 70s western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller,
which I hadn't seen since it first came out. I've been watching a
lot of his movies again lately, some of them for the first time. He
was a masterful director and there's an amazing way his early
work channels the spirit of his day; McCabe is like the visual
equivalent of one of those Dylan songs in which larger-than-life
characters out of American myth enact their pursuits of love and
satisfaction. It's also a movie that cares about landscape and
local incident more than it does about plot in the usual sense, and
I really like that immersion in the particular.

GC: When you wrote Murano, how did it make its way to become
a book length piece?

MD: The first drafts of the poem were written in Venice. I'd been
at an artists' colony in northern Italy for a month and I decided to
end that trip by spending a week in Venice, very early in the
spring. I'd never been there before and I was overwhelmed by
the sensory world of it, and I soon realized that the person I most
wanted to tell about what I was seeing was my friend Lynda Hull,
who had died in a car accident the year before. I began writing
these notes to her, and the poem metamorphosed from a
celebration of Venice to a meditation on the allure of artifice, the
dangerous appeal of the toxic, and the dual nature of making.
(See question 4!) After the poem was finished, a curator from the
Getty Museum contacted me because she saw in my work an
interest in surfaces, and in what are called the "decorative arts"
-- stuff like glass-making or ceramics or fabrics , and a term that
has a certain dismissive character to it. Her feeling was that my
work entered into thinking about such surfaces in a different way,
and that's how we began to make a couple of little books together
. Books that are in themselves very handsome objects I think!
The Getty press does beautiful work.
GC: In light of your love for the visual arts, what do you see on
the scene now that you want to write about?

MD: Well, I have written a bit about Lucien Freud, an heroic

painter, and about Sam Taylor-Wood. I like Bill Viola's video work
a great deal, and Jenny Holzer's words made of light. I never
know when I will want to write about visual art, though, because
sometimes I have a very complete experience with it, and have
nothing to say, as if it just doesn't require talking about. And
other times, works of art lend themselves to what I'm
thinking/worrying/wondering about already, and then they find
their way into the poems and prose.

GC: In teaching poetry, what is one thing you realized that had
not occurred to you before?

MD: This semester I am a guest at Cornell, where I've been

teaching a workshop for advanced undergrads. We read a group
of poetic sequences -- ranging from Hart Crane to Terrance Hayes
-- and then work shopped a poem by each person with an eye
toward how it could be expanded into a sequence. Then they
went off and worked on it, and came back with a long poem, or a
poem in parts, or several related poems. It's been amazing; it
turns out that what developing poets really need to do is practice
extending their thinking, complicating their ideas, reaching
further into feeling. And that's what writing a sequence asks you
to do. So I feel I've stumbled on something useful, and now my
students are all trying their hands at writing long poems. It
doesn't matter if they keep writing in longer forms or not; the
important part the practice at complicating the picture.