Summer feels like no time to blog, as the distance in time between the last post and this one will attest. i want to be out in the garden, or under the high loose canopy of leaves out back, where the shadows of branches vein the slope of grass. I love it there; it's a place where the mind wants to drift downward toward the moles in their tunnels, or up toward the new screech owl nesting box I've hung fifteen feet or so off the ground. Still empty, I think, though the other night I heard the underwater ripple of their call, after twilight, from the woods behind my neighbor's house, its piercing quality softened bit by distance. Maybe it'll be next year before they find the box. The little round opening and the pile of cedar shavings for nest-making await.
I've been reading a fine new book of poems by Heather Christle called WHAT IS AMAZING; it will be out from Wesleyan 'ere long. Heather's collection is making me think about poetry as a vessel of subjectivity. Maybe one of the art's functions is to record something of what it feels like to be alive in any particular moment; it's almost accidental, for the poet, that this inscription becomes historical, preserving an aspect of the spirit of the age. Think of Frank O'Hara, and the way those remarkable present-tense poems, dedicating to transcribing the motions of eye, mind and heart in the moment, seem timeless. They're happening right now, as you read them, but they also a moment of consciousness in New York in the 1950s in a crystalline form.
Christle's book feels very particular to the 21st century, but I haven't been able to articulate to myself just how this is so. Because they're notations of awareness, both private and public at once? Because they're tentative, like pages from a secret notebook, and also oddly bold, artfully earning the reader's allegiance and bringing us into alignment with the writer's way of seeing? Because the speaker feels like a kind of psychic seismograph, recording the major and minor tremors that ripple through her awareness?
Well, what you see above is me thinking my way towards a blurb, trying to find my way to some kind of reasonably intelligent formulation about challenging work that I love. Challenging to describe, I mean, which is what a good blurbs does. Praise is easy, but the work of actually articulating what a poet seems to be up to is a whole other task.
Anyway, here's a poem from the book, one I think is just extraordinary.
THE SPIDER
The spider he is confused
b/c I am not killing him
only moving him outdoors
When I die I do not want
to feel confused
Please I would rather feel clarity
like I am a pool
and death a chlorine tablet
I want it to feel
not like I am dying
but am being transferred
to the outside
And I hope I do not drown
as I have seen happen
to hundreds of spiders
b/c I love to swim
and to drown would
wreck swimming
for a long time
But death is like none of this
I know that death is a tower
standing in the middle of the town
And the tower receives
many visits
And there's no one
but spiders inside
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Monday, May 30, 2011
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Saturday in Sag Harbor Paul and I saw Werner Herzog's new film about the ancient paintings in the Chauvet Cave, in the south of France. The paintings themselves are riveting and fresh; somehow they seem both haunting and surprisingly stylish-- as if they were sophisticated mid-twentieth century representations of animals instead of 30,000 year old paintings on the walls of a deep, long-sealed cavern. They are the oldest paintings in the world, and they represent only animals -- horses, bison, mammoths, antelope -- with the exception of one partial human female body.
It's too bad the movie isn't better. It feels like Herzog never figured out quite what to do with these images, besides point the camera at them and let us marvel along with him. That's sufficient for a while, but the nature of film is motion, and the nature of ekphrasis is transformation. It's never enough for one work of art to simply present another; what we require from poetry or lyric prose or film based in a work of art is a kind of active engagement which places that work in a new context, gets inside it, turns it inside out, somehow involves us in the process of knowing. We want to be involved with someone else's coming to terms; we want the work of art about the work of art to do something we couldn't do by ourselves.
And that's the trouble, finally, with the movie --you could have just as rich an experience looking at slides of the paintings in a darkened room, and there are a great many questions about the work that Herzog doesn't ask. Why are there only animals here ? What were the paintings for? Were they made to be seen, as a communal experience, or were they made by a solitary artist going down into the dark and working alone? Were they acts of art or acts of magic or of both? Do the grace and wit and power of these paintings have something to say about the notion of progress or development? And should we say that "we" made these, in our earliest history, or are the makers of this art so far from us as not to be part of a "we" at all; are they entirely other?
Of course these questions aren't answerable; it doesn't seem there's very much we can know about these pictures. But they seem endlessly provocative, and they trouble the mind like some lost part of our own memory.
Now that it's been a couple of days, I've mostly forgotten my frustration with the film, and what lingers is the memory of those images, especially the four horses lined up one behind the other, with their open mouths and wide eyes. Paul thinks that some art is made to be satsifying in the moment, and some made to resonate in memory, and that these different modes of making represent different styles and values. I didn't like Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but I won't forget it. You can look up Goggle images of "Chauvet Cave," and you'll see why.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Fame and Notoriety in Little Rock
Thursday morning, a new experience. First leg of a day's journey to Little Rock, Arkansas. I'd made it, a little groggily, from home to Penn Station to New Jersey Transit to the AirTrain. I checked in at Terminal B and found my way to my concourse. I waited in a short security line holding my boarding pass and my driver's license. When I got to the front of the line, I handed the youngish, open-faced woman with dark red hair the required stuff. She said, "Mark Doty the poet?"
I said, "How did you know that?" and she replied, "I'm a huge fan, it's an honor," and waved me on. Now I've had readers say hello in restaurants and on the street, and occasionally I discover that someone who seems to be cruising me is actually an excited poetry reader. But the TSA? I dislike the entire system of surveillance, and I worry about how easily we've said yes to whatever we're told needs to be done for our protection. Sometimes it seems like the TSA exists simply in order to keep us alarmed, so we'll cede power to the state. But I have to say this did put the whole thing in a brighter light.
Before you think I'm just basking in the light of readership, here's part two of the story. That evening I was welcomed to Little Rock by my warm and lively hosts at the library, who brought me to the nicely-appointed room where i'd be reading. There were a few early audience members already there, and one or two looked up eagerly when we came in. A man asked me to sign a book; as I was walking past the front row to go fetch a pen, a woman greeted me and said she'd seen my face on the current issue of APR. "There was your mug, right on the cover," she said. And then, "I like some of those new poems, and some, of course, I do not."
I didn't question her about this, though I might have if I'd really wanted to have the conversation. It was the "of course" that did it. A couple of the new poems have to do with substance abuse and recovery. There is no explicit reason to assume that the first person speaker in the poems is me; after all one of the poems in this same group of new pieces is spoken by a baby mammoth who's been dead for forty thousand years. But people assume that "I" means "I", and there's a certain degree of truth to it. Whether an experience is literally ours or not, we make it so, finding in it a way for something in ourselves to be spoken that might not otherwise be articulated. There's a poem in Anne Sexton's second book, an elegy for her brother who died in the Korean War. It's not her best poem, but it's a moving one, and the reader who's interested enough to dig for biographical information will discover that Sexton never had a brother. The poem's a fiction, but one that was clearly necessary for getting at some emotional truth.
What difference does it make, the relationship between the poem and the biography of the poet? I'll be the first to say that I'm terrifically interested in poets' lives, but a poem is not a report on an experience. A poem can't really be "about" drug use or recovery; it has to create an experience in language, and then to reach inside that language in the direction of making meaning. If a poem merely tells us a story -- well, is it a poem at all?
In truth I don't care what the reader in Little Rock thinks about my life or what she assumes about me. Are those poems autobiographical? I don't believe in the question. I'm not trying to be coy, it's just that I think that making such assumptions about anyone's work is not a helpful way of reading. What keeps bothering me is that "of course." Is it an automatic response, to dislike a poem that talks about what it's like to experience the unsustainable ecstatic produced by getting high? Or a poem that names the commonality of the pain of people in rehab? That "of course" posits a stable set of middle-class values, shared by readers, that the poet had better be aware of. And is that what we want poetry to do, reinforce our agreed upon standards, shore up the moral principles of enlightened readers? Ugh. If that's the project, I'm not playing.
And so, fame in Newark is balanced by being notorious in Little Rock. I'm okay with it.
I said, "How did you know that?" and she replied, "I'm a huge fan, it's an honor," and waved me on. Now I've had readers say hello in restaurants and on the street, and occasionally I discover that someone who seems to be cruising me is actually an excited poetry reader. But the TSA? I dislike the entire system of surveillance, and I worry about how easily we've said yes to whatever we're told needs to be done for our protection. Sometimes it seems like the TSA exists simply in order to keep us alarmed, so we'll cede power to the state. But I have to say this did put the whole thing in a brighter light.
Before you think I'm just basking in the light of readership, here's part two of the story. That evening I was welcomed to Little Rock by my warm and lively hosts at the library, who brought me to the nicely-appointed room where i'd be reading. There were a few early audience members already there, and one or two looked up eagerly when we came in. A man asked me to sign a book; as I was walking past the front row to go fetch a pen, a woman greeted me and said she'd seen my face on the current issue of APR. "There was your mug, right on the cover," she said. And then, "I like some of those new poems, and some, of course, I do not."
I didn't question her about this, though I might have if I'd really wanted to have the conversation. It was the "of course" that did it. A couple of the new poems have to do with substance abuse and recovery. There is no explicit reason to assume that the first person speaker in the poems is me; after all one of the poems in this same group of new pieces is spoken by a baby mammoth who's been dead for forty thousand years. But people assume that "I" means "I", and there's a certain degree of truth to it. Whether an experience is literally ours or not, we make it so, finding in it a way for something in ourselves to be spoken that might not otherwise be articulated. There's a poem in Anne Sexton's second book, an elegy for her brother who died in the Korean War. It's not her best poem, but it's a moving one, and the reader who's interested enough to dig for biographical information will discover that Sexton never had a brother. The poem's a fiction, but one that was clearly necessary for getting at some emotional truth.
What difference does it make, the relationship between the poem and the biography of the poet? I'll be the first to say that I'm terrifically interested in poets' lives, but a poem is not a report on an experience. A poem can't really be "about" drug use or recovery; it has to create an experience in language, and then to reach inside that language in the direction of making meaning. If a poem merely tells us a story -- well, is it a poem at all?
In truth I don't care what the reader in Little Rock thinks about my life or what she assumes about me. Are those poems autobiographical? I don't believe in the question. I'm not trying to be coy, it's just that I think that making such assumptions about anyone's work is not a helpful way of reading. What keeps bothering me is that "of course." Is it an automatic response, to dislike a poem that talks about what it's like to experience the unsustainable ecstatic produced by getting high? Or a poem that names the commonality of the pain of people in rehab? That "of course" posits a stable set of middle-class values, shared by readers, that the poet had better be aware of. And is that what we want poetry to do, reinforce our agreed upon standards, shore up the moral principles of enlightened readers? Ugh. If that's the project, I'm not playing.
And so, fame in Newark is balanced by being notorious in Little Rock. I'm okay with it.
Monday, April 4, 2011
In Shakespeare
Here's a beautiful poem by James Richardson, with his signature mix of apparently casual wit turning effortlessly into something darker and incisive. This is from THE NEW YORKER, back in February 0f 2007, but I ran across it just today and found it so pleasurable and so acute that I wanted to post it here.
IN SHAKESPEARE
In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die—yes, finally—in glad pain.
You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. Oh God, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.
Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.
IN SHAKESPEARE
In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die—yes, finally—in glad pain.
You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. Oh God, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.
Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Moonlight, Dog, Bell
It's three in the morning in the Springs, on the night of March 20, when the moon's at the perigee of its orbit, as close to the earth as it gets. Ned -- who is now nearly eleven months old -- woke me up a little while ago with a paw on my shoulder. I got out of bed and walked to the door to let him out in the garden, and a clutch of perceptions happened all at once. First, the moonlight was wonderfully bright, a foggish glow like theatrical lighting. Second, something was happening just outside the gate, where I'd piled a big stack of euonymous branches from a tall spindly shrub I'd just put out of its misery. Deer think this plant is beyond delicious, something I'd understood better when i cut the branches that had been stripped to the heighta doe could reach. I kept noticing a sweet, lightly spicy scent, like a much watered-down odor of carnations.
Just as I registered that a deer I could hear but not see was just a few feet away, grazing on the leaves, Ned did too, and the deer noticed us; it must have leapt and turned -- I heard the strike of hooves on gravel once and then the faintest sound of hurry, gone almost before it was there. Ned has been in the vicinity of any number of deer and never really paid attention. Until recently he's been absorbed in his puppyish ways, playing with a stick or chasing a leaf while a doe ambled twenty feet away on the path. Not long ago we slowed down in the car, and together watched a mule-ish looking younger one walk across the asphalt. Ned observed but did not comment.
But that changed tonight; he went flying at the gate, barking, and I told him he'd have to stay in -- he has ways of besting the fence, when he really wants to -- and he went wandering off into the garden.
A week ago I bought a bronze bell which is probably about the size of my own heart at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in Chelsea. Well, probably not bronze, but some cheaper amalgam of metals cooked up in Tibet, where it was cast or hammered into its pleasingly rough shape. It has a wooden tongue, and makes a startlingly clear tone when it's struck. Wake up, it seems to say, every time it's rung just once. I'd planned to hang it on the doorknob so Ned could use it to tell me when he needs to go out; Arden had a string of bells from Pier One, back in the day, and he'd jingle them with his nose when necessary.
When I brought the bell back to the apartment, Ned was clearly enchanted. He heard that tone, raised his head and drew up his spine in that way dogs have of physically demonstrating their complete attention. Then he came bounding to the bell: he wanted it. So I wasn't sure my plan would work. it would work. But the afternoon I went to hang the bell on the door, Ned was already outside. a dozen feet away. I rang the bell accidentally, as I was trying to figure out how to suspend it, and Ned turned and came trotting in.
So now the bell, instead of meaning go out, signals that it's time to come in, and to my astonishment it has worked every single time. He can be off in the far reaches of the garden, but when that cool metallic chime vibrates through the air (and it has a way of cutting through all other sound, of which there's not much out here anyway) he's right there at the door.
I didn't think this could possibly work with a doe in the driveway and serious moonlight drenching the garden, and the spring peepers going like engines across the road. But sure enough, after a few minutes, I rang the bell once and Ned came trotting into the house.
I wanted to write this tonight, just as it's happened, because I was struck by this sudden moment so full of things taking place,
all at once, and how the the moonlight and the deer and the dog trotting happily into the house all seemed to fuse with the sound of that bell. But look, it's taken me eight paragraphs to clumsily narrate something so effortless and brief It wants to be a poem, maybe, the moonlight ringing through the garden and the happy dog attending. Or it already was.
Just as I registered that a deer I could hear but not see was just a few feet away, grazing on the leaves, Ned did too, and the deer noticed us; it must have leapt and turned -- I heard the strike of hooves on gravel once and then the faintest sound of hurry, gone almost before it was there. Ned has been in the vicinity of any number of deer and never really paid attention. Until recently he's been absorbed in his puppyish ways, playing with a stick or chasing a leaf while a doe ambled twenty feet away on the path. Not long ago we slowed down in the car, and together watched a mule-ish looking younger one walk across the asphalt. Ned observed but did not comment.
But that changed tonight; he went flying at the gate, barking, and I told him he'd have to stay in -- he has ways of besting the fence, when he really wants to -- and he went wandering off into the garden.
A week ago I bought a bronze bell which is probably about the size of my own heart at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in Chelsea. Well, probably not bronze, but some cheaper amalgam of metals cooked up in Tibet, where it was cast or hammered into its pleasingly rough shape. It has a wooden tongue, and makes a startlingly clear tone when it's struck. Wake up, it seems to say, every time it's rung just once. I'd planned to hang it on the doorknob so Ned could use it to tell me when he needs to go out; Arden had a string of bells from Pier One, back in the day, and he'd jingle them with his nose when necessary.
When I brought the bell back to the apartment, Ned was clearly enchanted. He heard that tone, raised his head and drew up his spine in that way dogs have of physically demonstrating their complete attention. Then he came bounding to the bell: he wanted it. So I wasn't sure my plan would work. it would work. But the afternoon I went to hang the bell on the door, Ned was already outside. a dozen feet away. I rang the bell accidentally, as I was trying to figure out how to suspend it, and Ned turned and came trotting in.
So now the bell, instead of meaning go out, signals that it's time to come in, and to my astonishment it has worked every single time. He can be off in the far reaches of the garden, but when that cool metallic chime vibrates through the air (and it has a way of cutting through all other sound, of which there's not much out here anyway) he's right there at the door.
I didn't think this could possibly work with a doe in the driveway and serious moonlight drenching the garden, and the spring peepers going like engines across the road. But sure enough, after a few minutes, I rang the bell once and Ned came trotting into the house.
I wanted to write this tonight, just as it's happened, because I was struck by this sudden moment so full of things taking place,
all at once, and how the the moonlight and the deer and the dog trotting happily into the house all seemed to fuse with the sound of that bell. But look, it's taken me eight paragraphs to clumsily narrate something so effortless and brief It wants to be a poem, maybe, the moonlight ringing through the garden and the happy dog attending. Or it already was.
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