Seeing Beyond the Veil
Dominic McLoughlin in conversation with MARK DOTY
This interview took place in July 2010 at Mark Doty's home on Long Island. We sat talking in his summer house, which is a kitchen, dining room and living room all rolled into one. You can see a landscaped cottage garden at the back, on a rising slope. Mark told me that he'd been in this house at East Hampton for two summers. Before that he'd lived in another part of Long Island close to where Frank O'Hara died. Now he had settled close to the Green River Cemetery where O'Hara is buried. The interview lasted an hour and covers four main areas: how Doty's work creates a community of readers; the philosophy behind his image of 'the veil'; his approach to critical writing; and queer perspectives on English studies. The only other sounds picked up by the microphone on that summer's afternoon were the fizzing of soft drinks, and the clink of ice in glasses.
DM: An early poem of yours that I love is 'To Cavafy'. I wonder if it could be said to carry some DNA of your later work…
MD: That's an interesting question… I was living in Central Vermont in the 1980s, and there was a wonderful swimming hole in North Calais called Number 10 Pond. Was there a Number 8 Pond or a Number 7 Pond? I have no idea! I can't really remember whether my partner Wally was actually with me when I went that time or if I just put him in the poem. (That's the odd thing about one's own work, it comes to be what you remember, whether you have revised its occasion - which I often do - or not, you just remember the way the poem lays out the story). Anyway, I remember seeing this young man out on a floating wooden platform in the water, who seemed to possess such ease and self-confidence, the kind of masculine self-assurance which I don't think I've ever authentically felt. I might, as an adult man, be able to play that part to some degree, but this seemed like an assured physical confidence in the solidity of one's own being. It was very sexy, very attractive, very compelling.
And something about that moment triggered the meditation of the poem, which had to do with just that - the self-assurance of this apparition, the desire or admiration or interest that the speaker and his lover feel for that figure. And the way that we make something out of these moments that we are given. And what I love so much in Cavafy (or one thing I love in Cavafy) is that sense of how the moments of the past 'come to rest' (this is how he puts it) in a poem. He uses the Greek equivalent of that phrase. So that the poem becomes a vessel of memory, a kind of token, a composed photograph or snapshot one might pull out of a pocket and look at and touch back to again and again and again. Thus, that ending of the poem. As I recall now, the first three quarters of the poem never mention Cavafy, and then - suggested perhaps by the beautiful aura that surrounds this young man - the poem turns to think about his [ie Cavafy's] experience somewhat more directly, and to suggest that, for him, satisfaction lay not in the encounter itself - in this case the encounter was only visual - but in what could be made of it, in the way that the poem might be generated, i.e. something more lasting.
There's an external reason for that in his case. In Alexandria early in the 20th century, Cavafy and his paramours were not likely to set up housekeeping in a publicly affirmed relationship, but there is also just something about the fleeting nature of experience - that everything we see, everything we touch, is passing. What can we do to conserve, to keep something of that? He's very concerned with this problem of conservation. He keeps the bloodied bandage that's fallen from the shoulder of the man in his apartment, he turns to the mirror that's held so many reflections of passersby. He asks himself - in relation to the apartment that he and a former lover have vacated - 'Where's the furniture now, where are those things that held something of us?' All of those interests in the artefact are 'stand-ins', if you will, for the work of the poem to be a vessel, or a recapitulation of memory and of history.
DM: We are given that image of the green trunks [worn by the young man on the platform], the bar of light on his skin, which would be a great enough poem in itself. But then you investigate what this means to us. Is it memory, imagination, desire? I love the way that conversation is staged in the poem.
MD: That poem is in my first book, and I had begun to allow myself the latitude for a different kind of inclusiveness in my poems, more room for meditation, for inquiry, for taking - as you put it - the given image, that which presented itself and signalled to me the presence of the poetic, and then [asking] what do I have to say about that, what do I have to learn about that through the action of writing the poem? Like most American poets of my generation, I grew up schooled in the primacy of the image. Image was all. And, of course, the endlessly re-iterated - and useful - advice of the creative writing instructor to 'show and not tell'. But that's a good example of a poem that does a little bit of showing and a great deal of telling! A great deal, that is, of consideration. It took me a long time to decide that it was all right to do that in a poem, that I could marshal the technical resources to do that kind of more discursive writing without feeling that the poem was becoming an essay or a philosophical tract or a meditation on aesthetics. It could remain a lyric poem. Without losing its tension, its boundaries could be much more elastic.
DM And we are still thinking in the mind of the poem... Regarding the handling of the reader, in this and many later poems, we feel as if we are in a group, both as viewers, and in what we are involved in looking at. So, yes, it's a lyric poem, but this is not a solitary moment.
MD: That is really interesting. I'm often asked who am I writing for, who is my ideal reader. I generally think of myself as speaking to one person at a time. Not that I have a specific person in mind, but I would like to achieve a kind of 'open intimacy' if you will, a quality of an unguarded exchange between equals in that conversation between writer and reader. But you are right in saying that there are a number of poems that do presume a 'we'. We the collective viewers, we interested parties, we gay men, we lovers of beauty….We people interested in animals, we people who are subject to the ravages of time, we mortal creatures…
DM: The effect is of a community being created.
MD: Thank you, I like that very much.
DM: In connects up with something you wrote about Walt Whitman. You have a phrase that he '…brought the reader into being'.
MD: Talk about managing and handling your reader! Whitman is always addressing the 'other', the one to whom his poems might be connecting. The place where it becomes astonishingly overt is in 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry': 'I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born'. There is a sense that space, and time, make no difference. He is with us now speaking the poem as much as he ever was. How on earth does he do that? He simply claims it. He calls it into being. It never ceases to amaze me.
DM: In the second to last section, when as you say we are astonished into thinking: how does he know that about me? After he has unlocked that in us, the last section is like an orchestra at full tilt!
MD: Oh, the fireworks go off. Absolutely. Once he's said, '…What I promis'd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?/ What the study could not teach - what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish'd, is it not?', and you answer, '…Yes', and then, you're right, it is an extravaganza. I was teaching that poem this spring and reading it very closely, and I'm not convinced that last section even really makes logical sense. But it doesn't matter at that point. The ground has been prepared for it to make sense in another way. Or for us to simply accept what he tells us.
DM: You have talked about the different lengths of breath in a poet and how we might see Walt Whitman as wide-chested, and Emily Dickinson as narrow. If we used those terms of you, I guess you would be more expansive, you have some of those sections of a symphony, where we might think the poem's over, and then it goes into another section.
MD: Well, I think there is more hesitation in my voice than there is in Whitman's, except that there are also those poems of his (that are perhaps less usually spotlit) where he does express doubt, and he does stumble over his own words, and doesn't have quite that radiant confidence. But he never lets go of that huge, sprawling, expansive line.
DM: The hesitation…would that link Cavafy, Bishop, and your own self-corrections?
MD: Interesting. Yes. And a sense that the process of perception is unfolding before the reader as we read the poem. Of course, that is an illusion. It's a made thing, an artefact of perception. I learned from Bishop and from [May] Swenson something about this sense of the poem as a drama of perception, in which insight was being conjured up from the act of examining what one sees.
And they are splendid teachers of that. And so, for Bishop in particular, part of gaining insight is being able to call her own language into question. 'It's…no, it's not like that, it's more like this.' 'Or…' And then she'll offer another simile instead of the one she's just given us. And those are ways of foregrounding both the act of talking about experience and the act of description itself. They make us aware of the voice of the speaker. They make us see the person who is doing the looking, which is after all the real subject of the poem.
DM: Could I ask about the relation of your work to painting, and seeing? Where in Bishop we might have the dabs of paint which is actually a painting she's describing, and in Swenson the 'double blue' of' 'Early Morning: Cape Cod' where the sailboat is a dab. In your work we have the dabs of black and gold on the veil of morning. I wanted to ask whether the veil is an important image for you?
MD: It has been. I think it's less present lately. I lived in Provincetown for fifteen years, sometimes full-time and sometimes part-time. And Provincetown was the scene of a number of my books - part of My Alexandria, almost all of Atlantis, some of Sweet Machine- and that place is sixty-five miles out into the North Atlantic. So there's this little spit of land that is subject to every sort of atmospheric transformation: fog, sheens of moisture, strangely intense and vibrant light; which is the way people talk about this part of Long Island too - surrounded by water. The tides come in and out, veiling the marsh, obscuring, revealing. The fog rolls in during the morning, and sometimes it goes away and sometimes it doesn't. There is a sense of the liminal and the ephemeral about the landscape, and because I was living there during the crisis years of the AIDS epidemic it felt liminal in that way too, that people were departing from there, across the veil, going to the other side. So that sense that you could see through things, you could see into the reality beneath the reality only to a point. And there was this kind of beautiful fabric of appearance between you and whatever was real. I think I got that from childhood religion. I can't remember what the quotation was - a hymn or a bible verse? My grandmother was a fundamentalist Christian of a very apocalyptic bent, and there was something about this world as a veil that would be torn, pulled away so that you could see things in their eternal, correct form that was obscured to us because of the way we view them.
DM: That seems so present in your work.
MD: It's never gone away from me. I'm also interested in the idea of the veil in a different sense: where something is not visible to us we can so easily project all kinds of desires on to it. That which is hidden glows with multiple meanings, and is fraught with the possibility of carrying everything that we want and can't say. In other words, what is behind the veil is the unsayable.
DM: Could we think of the veil as the poem itself - in the sense that the combination locks, and the mnemonics to help with remembering the numbers, in a poem such as 'Heaven for Beau', are an attempt to crack through to something on the other side as it were...
MD: There is a poem in Sweet Machine called 'Fog Suite' that goes as
follows: 'What I love about language is what I love about fog
/what grants things their lustre also holds them apart…'
Language brings you closer, points towards the unsayable, but it
also puts words in between you and it. And in that
way, paradoxically, the poem is a veil. And veils reveal as much
as they conceal. Veils are made to be looked through. They
usually have a certain degree of translucence about them.
DM: Some friends and I were reading your poem 'Heaven for Arden' the other night. It made me think about the phrase in Dog Years in which you refer to a 'hinge' in a life, a turning back, and that in turn led to thinking about 'The End of March' by Elizabeth Bishop.
MD: I hadn't thought about that. School of the Arts, the book in which that poem appears, is so much about mid-life, discontent, a sense of trouble in a life. Arden's recognition that his walk, his journey, was finite, brought him pleasure, brought him the possibility of joy. The speaker [points to himself!] in that poem is trying on that notion to see if one can say that about one's own life. It might be another way of looking at the problem of being mortal: to be rounded, to be complete. You know! There is only so much you can do! You can find pleasure in the woods beside the path.
DM: It's such a gift for the reader. A poem like this really helps us to
live.
MD: You could think of that as a dark poem. But I like the way you're also positing it as a source of solace. That feels emotionally right to me. I would like to make poems that have that ability to have multiple meanings and to carry more than one strand of feeling.
I think the American master of that is James Merrill, where the poems so often seem to be brimming with tears, achingly emotional, and also wry at the same time. He never loses a lightness of touch, and he never feels just one thing. It's extraordinary how he can get that kind of tonal complexity into a stanza.
DM: Could I ask about the critical work? I love the stories you bring in to them. For example, how you found a copy of [May Swenson's] To Mix with Time in a bookstore in New York, and about the end of the piece 'Queer Sweet Thrills' where you recount the dream in which Swenson says…
MD: …Right. 'I'm not dead!'
DM: Would you like to say anything about how you manage to bring yourself in to your critical work in such a compelling way?
MD: I just am not interested in writing standard-issue literary criticism. I tried earlier on to write some book reviews on commission. It wasn't for me. I feel moved to write about literature that I love. I feel moved to address it through the vehicle of a personal essay, or a personal/critical essay, rather than try to position myself as an authoritative reader who comes to you from some distance and makes a pronouncement about the text. I want to characterize who I am as the person reading these poems (or whatever it is I am talking about), and give the reader the opportunity to participate in an action of reading with me. So it's like what I'm also saying in the poems about wanting to make a kind of model of perceptual process because I think that criticism can do exactly the same thing. Come along with me. Let's read this. Let's think about what's in front of us. How does it effect us? How does it make us feel?
I am writing a book now - much more slowly than I wish I were - about Whitman. And this attitude informs my approach to that book too. It's an experiment. There is more of my own life in the book than I would have allowed myself to do in something like the Swenson essay or in previous pieces of criticism. I am really talking about myself as well as talking about his poems. I haven't got this all sorted out yet!
DM: I suppose that it gives the reader a certain permission. Reading becomes a shared adventure. He or she can think: I've had an experience similar to this one.
MD: Absolutely. There is no correct meaning of the poem, locked in a celestial vault some place to which - you know - Harold Bloom might have the key. Meaning is what we make in context, in the now. One of the great pleasures for me as a teacher - it doesn't matter if it is a group of college students, a group of anybody on earth. We sit down together, read a good poem, and let's see what we find here. And invariably what we see will be different, from one conversation to another, and we will find ourselves being spoken to… I've done that with philanthropists in Houston, and gay kids at risk of being homeless in Minnesota, and everybody you can think of. And it is always true that when people read poems together without a sense that there is an interpretation to be decoded, but rather we are looking for what does this poem… what does it say to us, what do we feel when we read it, what does it suggest to us. It is an intrinsic pleasure. People love reading poetry. And it is heartbreaking to think that that is so often taken away from us by shoddy instruction or by teachers who themselves fear or mistrust poetry. Because it is everybody's birthright - this vast store of human experience and feeling. What a gift!
DM: Could you develop that idea in relation to queer poetics? You have said that gay writers manage to key into something that is a very familiar part of the American experience, that experience of always being on the edge of the dominant culture.
MD: It's very curious because when you think about American poetry, the homosexual tradition is not the minority, marginalized tradition. It is the mainstream. Think of Whitman, Crane, Bishop, Ashbery. I think it is not much of a stretch to claim Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, and plenty of other figures as at least team members in spirit or in - what? - imaginative affiliation, or something like that. That is where American poetry has discovered itself. There's this sense of a vexed relationship between the person who is both part of the community and also on the edge of it, looking in. And I think probably Americans recognize themselves there. We have this expectation that we are part of the group - that we are a federation of States, a federation of individuals - and yet we also have such a romance of individuality, and of going off to our Walden Pond for our years alone in the wilderness or our sense of rugged survivorship, or 'I don't need this sense of the church or this state or the institutions of society to tell me who I am'. So we have both those things going on at once. We have an enormous desire to belong, and we have a real sense of ourselves as out at the edges, and so therefore those have been our poets, and I suppose they are likely to continue to be. Or at least those poets create a tradition. It is really out of the back and forth between Whitman and Dickinson that 20th century American poetry comes into being, this remarkable, complicated fabric. You could say too that it is out of Stevens and Williams that that comes into being, but these kinds of dialectic exchanges that produce great diversity and complication are our legacy.
DM: Could we link that to the teaching we were talking about before? If you give the opportunity to the reader to be both an individual with their own ideas, and to be part of the group?
MD: Yeah, absolutely, because I think it is dishonest to teach poetry as if there is a fixed way of speaking about a poem. And likewise it would be a misrepresentation to say the poem says anything you want it to, at the same time. It is in that middle ground, it's in a liminal space - between writer and reader, between fixed and open - and in that way it lends itself to thinking about queerness as well. It's neither this nor that, it's slippery, shape-shifting, the boundaries are uncertain.
This is one of the things that makes Whitman so endlessly interesting. It really doesn't make sense to claim Whitman - obviously you can't, although people do it every fifteen minutes - as a straight poet. It really doesn't make any sense. Likewise it doesn't really make sense to claim Whitman as a gay poet because, not only does the category not exist at the time of his writing, but he is very elusive, and fluid in many senses of that word. He is always slipping around in his subject position, and I think he wants to - especially early on - leave this kind of funny open space that is less gendered, less fixed in terms of who is desiring whom. And, you know, that's more queer than it is gay!
DM: Would you develop the idea from an earlier interview about influence for a queer writer, and whether we want to claim or create families rather than use a Bloomian model of overthrowing forefathers?
MD: It seems to me that we go and claim the ancestors and paste them in our family albums, we hang their pictures on our living room walls! Speaking personally, you can't get very far in a collection of mine without being sent to Crane, without being sent to Whitman, without being sent to Bishop, without being sent to Merrill. I want those people in the room with me, in my company. I think readers have mixed responses to that. There are people who seem to want you to be purely yourself without reference to anyone else. And I just don't think there is any such thing. I am who I am because of the presence of those ways of speaking and seeing in my life. They are my internal company, so of course they're going to be in my work. I do think this is a real tradition when you think about Bishop and Moore, Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser, Crane and Whitman, Crane and Dickinson. Those presences are being brought onto the page in the poem.
DM: I think that is so helpful for a nascent writer, that sense that it is okay to bring other people in.
MD: Don't you think? I feel like I was taught early on that it was sort of somehow bloodless or academic (academic in the pejorative sense) to allow your poem to be about poetry. Or for poetry to be too much in the poem. 'It ought to be about life!'. But I just think that is a load of American [..] bullshit - that you should be out having real experiences and writing about them from the gut. Reading is a real experience! Reading touches my inner life.
DM: I am also interested in what you might call a queer perspective on aging, the generations, legacies …
MD: It's so curious. I don't know that I have much understanding of it. I'm 56. I have been writing seriously for pretty much forty years. And you know there are young poets who look to me as somebody who is holding a door open. There is a grain of truth in that - and an oversimplification. You become historical in the poetry world with extraordinary speed because time… well, maybe this is just because I am getting older, but it seems to me that our experience of time in the poetry community has speeded up. So that my students tend to read what's really hot right now - and the classics. And they don't know nothin' about ten years ago! This is very odd - that ten years ago is ancient history. So, because my first book of poems came out twenty-something years ago, that feels like I now span a considerable period of time in the world of poetry, and I find that quite peculiar. In a relative life of things that's not long at all, but in a life of poetry culture… So I'm just kind of babbling about this. I don't know what to say about it exactly.
DM: No, it's fascinating. I wasn't quite sure what I was seeking, but …
MD: I tell you one thing that I love…I have a number of friends now who have just showed up, who are these young gay male poets in New York, guys in their 20s, MFAs, making their work now, working their ways towards a first book, and I just love them to pieces. It is really interesting to me to spend time with these men who grew up very differently than I did, and to watch them try to make sense of their own aesthetics and figure out how to proceed. It's thrilling.
DM: I love when you write about some of your older friends and mentors, such as Stanley Kunitz.
MD: Stanley was a great teacher about time because he had been in it for such a long, long time. So time for him had I think become increasingly dreamy.
DM: Can we talk a little about embodiment, incarnation, the sort of knowledge that is felt as well as known? That is a key for me in creative and critical work.
MD: Absolutely. Poetry is a natural vehicle for that because it is always of the body to some degree, right? The fact that it is rhythmic sound, that it's breath, that it isn't like reading prose that invites you to just keep going in order to find out what happens or to complete an idea. There, your eye keeps moving across the page. Reading a poem, the line break wants to arrest the motion of your eye, and you are subtly asked to sound every line. The ideal reader of a poem is either reading it out loud or is silently moving his or her jaw muscles and tongue and teeth as you move through the poem, as you want to feel the physicality of consonance and assonance and rhythm - everything that's at work in those lines. So a poem by nature is a material thing. It becomes a model of this possibility of the embodiment of idea and emotion inside flesh, within flesh. So, it seems entirely natural for poetry to be a vehicle for that.
And… 'I too received identity of my body' Right? Whitman in 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'? He's talking about the fact that it was through the body, and he knew who he was. And this might be a place where queer identity comes into play too because it's the life of desire, the life of physicality that tells one that one is different, that one doesn't fit. So the physical is disruptive. Maybe that's a call to make something? If the physical is a source of difficulty, that problematises your life, then working with the materials to make something that will satisfy you becomes a way of harnessing and mastering the physical.
DM: Which takes us back to Cavafy and shaping something of experience.
MD: Yes. And you think of all those little gay boys becoming make up artists and lighting designers, and that desire to make and to shape appearance, to re-style, to re-fashion.
DM: Mark, was that very heightened moment in Dog Years, where you are on the ferry and having suicidal thoughts… could we link that to [Whitman's] '…Brooklyn Ferry' ?
MD: Oh my God! I never thought about that. That ferry! It would be like the 'anti-'…Brooklyn Ferry'! Whitman never entertains the notion of throwing himself off the ferry.
It's a difference in faith. Actually that's a really perceptive point, Dominic, because he believes absolutely that men and women of generations hence will look at the shadows of their own heads in the water with the spokes of light around them in exactly the same way as he does, and they will see the clouds and the seagulls and the same sights that he is seeing. I think in that passage in Dog Years, my sense - the speaker's sense - of faith in the future is voided. There isn't any. And thus there is the temptation to go down with the dog.
I think there is a way in which depression, or the suicidal impulse, is always narcissistic. You are down in this pit of self, and you can't see over the edge to even imagine the possible impact on other people. I mean, what is a more hostile thing to do than kill yourself, right? Whitman's poem is - you know we think of him as this enormous ego in a way - but that poem is so not narcissistic. It is so pouring itself out to people of the future, and everybody else on that boat - 'We're all in this' - right?. And that is what is invisible to that mess of a speaker at that moment in [Dog Years].
DM: And there is another encounter [in 'Oncoming Train' from, School of the Arts] on the subway, where the image of the train rushing towards the speaker, who is thinking of self-destruction…Once again, a self-absorbed moment is being described, but to make something out of it is then to be released.
MD: Exactly, yes. When one makes a poem out of it… My late friend Andre Dubus used to say 'Art is affirmative because it's art!' Somebody made something out of it, and no matter what it says, it is a made thing. So in that sense, and also in the sense that to have an impact upon time is to make a mark on the world: speed it up, slow it down, take control. I feel certain there are easier and better ways to do that than by jumping in front of trains!
DM: It's wonderful to follow you, as you decide - 'Okay now I'm going to write about painting, now I'm going to write about dogs' - and to watch you travel between these forms of memoir, criticism and poetry.
MD: Yes, I just go off and do whatever it is I'm going to do. And of course, the coherence of one's concerns means that the same issues get turned around and looked at in difference ways, but it's actually the difference in the vehicles - this is a book about painting, this is a book about dogs - that allow you to turn the crystal so that you can see another facet. My concerns, I think, are as follows: time, evanescence, love. Memory, loss, disappearance. Conservation, making.
DM: And now you're working on a critical work about Walt Whitman, but with a personal perspective.
MD: Yes. And I'm writing poems. That just goes on all the time. Not as often as I wish, but it's going on!