Fire to Fire - Mark Doty

Lord knows, I love Mark Doty. He's one of my favorite writers, as both a poet and memoirist - he does things with words and themes that make my gut clench and my "wow" reflex pump into overdrive. And, for me, that's what poetry is about, at its deepest, most elemental core: establishing a visceral connection with a reader, pulling the reader inside a poem with nearly terrifying momentum. Doty does that to me more than almost any other contemporary poet.

I went to the bookstore looking for one of his memoirs I hadn't read but instead came away with Fire to Fire, his 2008 collection of new and collected poetry. Since the only collection of his poems I own is My Alexandria, I figured Fire to Fire would be a nice addition to the shelf and also a way to view his twenty year career retrospectively. The volume is organized with his new work first, then skips back to the beginning of his career in the late 1980's and follows his succession of volumes published up through the 1990's. In this way, it's very easy to compare most recent Doty with earliest Doty, as they fall next to each other in the organization of the volume. As must be the case with most artists, the differences are are both surprising and revealing.

My familiarity with Doty's poetry is admittedly rooted in his earlier work, when he was considered an "AIDS poet" (and I suppose still has that reputation). It must be difficult, now that I think of it, to spend your entire career laboring (and trying to live up to) a definition created in your younger days and which is in some ways no longer relevant. Though the American AIDS crisis is no less tragic now than it was in the 1980's, it's less immediate. Its definition has changed, as have its voices. Reading a recent Doty poem about the ravages of AIDS would be like watching a recent production of Rent, and Doty understands that. He is no longer the "AIDS poet," and his new poems reflect a quieter, less outraged Doty, one who has settled into contented domestic bliss but who still has a keen eye for observing the world around him.

Take, for instance, "Apparition," in which Doty describes a peacock named "Hommer" at a garden center - he relies on his knack for writing birds, asking, "is the peahen/that hard to attract,/requiring an arc of nervous gleams,/a hundred shining animals/symmetrically peering/from the dim/primeval woods?" And yet, despite the shimmering beauty of his language, Doty ends the poem with a cute wink that seems a bit too characteristic these days: "And then the epic/trombone-slide-from-Mars cry/no human throat can mime/--is that why it stops the heart?--/just before he condescends to unfurl/the archaic poem of his tail." The man writes damn good animal poetry these days, but he has a tendency, as in this case, to spoil it with a neatness that doesn't suit.

It's this new(ish) tone that left me a little disappointed. His poems are clearly still quite beautiful, quite well-observed, still containing that spark of immediacy and contemporaneousness that makes his earlier work so jarring, and yet Doty is no longer interested in shaking us out of our suburban, traditional, middle class malaise - in fact, one might argue that he has in some respects become the person he once tried to awaken. Drenched with scenes from his NYC island, Doty's poems are finished with the sheen of well-fed, well-lived upper-middle-class city-dwelling liberal placidity. Does that sound too harsh for a poet I still love very deeply? Perhaps it's only because I wish I were at that place and had found the measure of peace he seems to have found in his life... perhaps it's that my affection for him (my desire for his well-being) pushes me to excuse the limpness of his recent verse. Whatever the reason, I can't bring myself to dislike his new poems, despite their shortfalls.

Maybe the real reason is that I have his searing early verse to look forward to when I finish Fire to Fire's initial segment, selections from his first volume, Turtle, Swan, which includes the titular poem, a lyric piece with gorgeous descriptions of the animals, ending with this verse:

I only know that I do not want you

--you with your white and muscular wings

that rise and ripple beneath or above me

your magnificent neck, eyes the deep mottled autumnal colors

of polished tortoise--I do not want you ever to die.

It's in poems like these that Doty marries his facility with language to the deep, unerring themes in his early work of love and, more presently, death. These themes are evoked throughout the selections from his earlier volume, including the beautiful "Tiara," from Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, and "Grosse Fugue" from Atlantis.

Through it all, though, as I trace my way through the timeline of his oeuvre, I am waiting for, comparing all poems to his magnum opus, "Atlantis," one of the great poems of the last fifty years and one of the timeliest of the twentieth century, in which Doty marries his lyric and elegiac tones so seamlessly, evoking not only the poignant beauty of his surroundings but also the hollow specter of a disease that affected his life so acutely. A long poem in six parts, "Atlantis" appears at first glance to be a rambling meditation but is in fact a tightly controlled exploration of a slow death, utilizing Doty's usual arsenal, as well as a persistent dream narrative and his penchant for grappling with the body/spirit dichotomy. In section three, a friend describes a dream:

Michael writes to tell me his dream:
I was helping Randy out of bed,
supporting him on one side
with another friend on the other,

and as we stood him up, he stepped out
of the body I was holding and became
a shining body, brilliant light
held in the form I first knew him in.

This is what I imagine will happen,
the spirit’s release.

Michael,
when we support our friends,
one of us on either side, our arms

under the man or woman’s arms,
what is it we’re holding? Vessel,
shadow, hurrying light? All those years
I made love to a man without thinking

how little his body had to do with me;
now, diminished, he’s never been so plainly
himself—remote and unguarded,
an otherness I can’t know

the first thing about. I said,
You need to drink more water
or you’re going to turn into
an old dry leaf. And he said,

Maybe I want to be an old leaf.
In the dream Randy’s leaping into
the future, and still here; Michael’s holding him
and releasing at once. Just as Steve’s

holding Jerry, though he’s already gone,
Marie holding John, gone, Maggie holding
her John, gone, Carlos and Darren
holding another Michael, gone,

and I’m holding Wally, who’s going.
Where isn’t the question,
though we think it is;
we don’t even know where the living are,

in this raddled and unraveling “here.”
What is the body? Rain on a window,
a clear movement over whose gaze?
Husk, leaf, little boat of paper

and wood to mark the speed of the stream?
Randy and Jerry, Michael and Wally
and John: lucky we don’t have to know
what something is in order to hold it.

"Atlantis" is quintessential, perfect Doty... the form with which I will compare all other Doty poems. It's not his fault that he wrote his best work ten years ago, nor that I consider it his best work. What's lovely about Fire to Fire is that the volume pulls it all together - the pretty, the honest, and the gut-wrenching - and provides a nice platform from which to view the career of a poet who has been, and remains, an important voice in contemporary poetry.