Berry 1

Alexandre Berry

AP Literature

Dr. Cusatis

5 March 2011

Analyzing Mark Doty: Craft and Career

Poetry Project: Annotations and Notes

Primary Sources

Moyers, Bill. “Mark Doty.” Fooling with Words: A celebration of poets and their craft.

New York: Morrow, 1999. Print. 46-68. Excerpts of poetry from his book “Atlantis” consists of

central characters- friends, Wally Mark Doty’s partner who died from a complication of AIDS in 1994

Each of those characters play a certain role and significance

“No matter what you may lose it is possible to respond with tenderness” (57)

Mark Doty’s belief in humans as creatures longing to be represented.

“I was the sissy who would hide under the steps of the library and read while the rest of the class was playing soccer” (62)

In this seclusion Doty claims that experience as a child sparked his observational eye “You discover paying attentionto the signals around you to see what’s going on beneath thesurface”*(64)

Lazar, David. “Bride in Beige” by Mark Doty. Truth In Nonfiction:Essays. Iowa City:

University of Iowa Press, 2008. Print. 11-16. “Memory’s an active, dynamic force, not just a recording

one; over the course of a life, as perspective shifts; we keep moving into different relationships to the past, reconsidering so that what happened turns out to be nothing

Berry 2

stable, but a scribbled over field of revisions rife with questions, half its contents hidden” (11)

Mark Doty seeks an emotional veracity (truth of some significance)

Experience of happening seems to be an idea throughout Doty’s work

Limitations of possibility, for Doty not quite restricted but certainly constrained in first impulse be whimsical (unpleasantly)

Shinder, Jason. “Human Seraphim: “Howl,” Sex and Holiness” by Mark Doty. The Poem that

changed America: “Howl” fifty years later. New York: Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2006.

Doty’s first experience introducing him to contemporary poetAllen Ginsberg was when he was sixteen in high school.

Doty recollected Ginsberg as a “ Small figure on a huge stage that seemed to loam larger, not in a threatening or puffed up way but in an intimate one as if he were a grand, available personality” (11)

“Don’t Smoke, Don’t Smoke, Suck Cock, Suck Cock” “Ginsberg entirely transcended question of polite behavior,

of queerness, of the appropriate” “I was the sort of digging-for-possibilities-for myself kid

who searched the library for evidence, looking for writers or at least characters in books who might share my own secret life of desire” (13)

In some ways, not many, Doty’s poetry reflects Ginsberg’s Howl, in the sense that it tells some form of elegy for its characters longing to be part of “a questing company”

o Or strophes (verse or stanza) which “sexuality, shame and mortality intersect with grim power”

“Sex in “Howl” seems simply one more in the chain of experiences pursued for the potential in revealing the divine” (16)

Doty really likes to talk about a spiritual presence throughthe human body (read Atlantis, Michael’s Dream)

In reference to Ginsberg, “Neither homo, straight, but a beat whose transcendent sexuality lifts him from familiar

Berry 3

categories” does Doty think to some degree he deserves this title? (An idea for paper)

Parallax, “Mark Doty” some kind of journal entry (see bottom noteon source)

Flesh and ambivalence Doty takes a serious note on “Myst” a video game someone

gave him to look over. The extent he details this item reminds me of Spires poem about Sims in a way.

o “Planted in a landscape, one where you can actually turn around and look everywhere, move freely around the strangely detailed scene”

o “There’s longing now more clear than ever for that island roam of privacy which given over to nothing butpoetry” (40)

Doty, Mark, and Jonathan Bing. “Mark Doty: The Idea of Order on Cape Cod.” Contemporary

Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 176. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Feb. 2011.

Some of Doty’s work is categorized or described as poetry with imagery of mortality and loss.

Doty received Whitings Writing award and T.S. Elliot prize (further information?)

Doty likes to retell his brief summarized childhood as the sissy who was “hiding during kickball” (2)

In reference to Doty’s book My Alexandria, most of the work high lighted Doty’s main influence in writing who was C.P. Cavafy— Read the Collected Poems of Cavafy—

The book uses metaphysical meanings and a concise poetic structure i.e. Demolition, Heaven, Night Ferry etc.

Doty expresses the book with a sense of the observer and character finding the need to pay attention.

Received the National Book Critics Circle award (date?) Doty’s second book in the sequence of elegies Atlantis

received the Boston Book Review Poetry prize. Doty sticks to a method throughout his books which he looks

for what strikes his attention and demands a need for him tounderstand i.e. dead rabbits, vacant buildings, drag queens,civic places.

Berry 4

Doty, Mark and Christopher Hennessey. “Going to the Source.” Contemporary Literary

Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol 176. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4. 2011.

Mark Doty likes his poetry to have a story, some cases an autobiography, --or what I like to call an anecdoty—

Doty nicely summarizes his books with a particular aspecto Turtle Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight are books that are

concerned with memory and mostly all the poetry which the speaker is seeking something, understanding, beauty, spirit, acceptance, reality etc.

o My Alexandria is intertwined with alternating themes such as disappearance, recollection in similarity to TS and BIBD and that relative throughout Doty’s work finding beauty and hope.

o Atlantis is a continuation of MA and the subjects entail a metamorphosis or transformation of some kind.

o Sweet Machine the trilogy of Doty’s previous elegies which marks a transition of death and what comes out ofthat experience almost a sense of life reopening to thespeaker.

“Simply to be a poet is to be outside of the mainstream of social discourse, gayness adds one more dimension of standing at odds to the collective” (3)

MA uses certain devices mostly used by prose fiction writerswhich makes his work interesting and attractive such as narratives, parallel relationships, characterization and elements of time in its passing i.e. Wings an such.

Very much involved with certain writing influences of RainerRilke (Archaic Torso of Apollo) and Robert Lowell, I don’t completely agree with that relation maybe Doty’s poem Demolition.

Doty also has a note about homosexual writers that seems open ended to a degree, “Gay writers have much less sense oftradition and of familial legacy and probably more likely tolet their influences show” (4)

o Attentiveness to the inner world Embracing complexity separates mainstream poets from craft

Berry 5

Doty’s repetition of nature of experience, a key factor in most of his work

In some regards Doty takes on this Fairchild-esque role of praising workers, makers who have poured their experience into craft.

Everything emerges from nothing, another key idea to consider.

Doty, Mark and Michael Klein. “A Talk with Mark Doty.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.

Janet Witalec. Vol.176. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1 March. 2011

Doty’s thematic preoccupation with AIDS Influence of place seems relevant Along with some other awards- Los Angeles Times Book Award

(find more information) Doty has received fellowships from the Merrill, Rockefeller,

Guggenheim foundations (find more information) Doty likes to write poems based on encounters

“An encounter usually speaks to me in some way, which demands to be written about” (1)

This interview delves into Doty’s first book Turtle, Swano Pharaoh’s Daughter- The encounter, trigger, whatever,

occurring at a time when Doty and his partner were together which can be seen in the book in several poems. This poem seems to deal more with Doty than anything else less AIDS and politics

The poem seemed to have that demand Doty referred to earliero “The image wouldn’t leave me alone—it insisted upon

being looked at—and the poem is the process of unfolding the image”

o As well as meaning with that unraveling “I discovered that it was not only about childhood memory of that Bible story, hearing that in Sunday school, but also about a fantasy of wanting to be found by the right parents—wanting to be rescued by the people who would really see you” (2)

As I have discovered from Doty’s earlier poems like Replica or Ararat, this act of unfolding reveals layers, something that keeps going and going sometimes stops abruptly when I

Berry 6

really get into the poem, or the poem just touches the surface throughout

Doty likes to think his poems are an act of discovery, creates a journey for the reader “Even though I’m crafting the poem to make it an experience for you, something like what the experience was for me—even though I am conscious atsome point of where it’s going—I want to preserve that feeling of not knowing so that the reader can be involved inthe journey of that poem” (2).

A place of difficulty Doty’s treatment of a poem

o “Letting an unpredictable, respecting the slippery predictability, the unknowability of language of language, the unreliability of language—letting that serve you. Work with it, instead of over controlling you”(2).

Language and its craft, in Doty’s words, honing language andshaping it for the reader giving him some kind of responsibility to the poem to reach for something like understanding

Language crafting compared to art, Doty makes this relationship several times in the interview and poetry.

“Desire to make or encounter a form” (2).o Like art for the most part i.e. “sculptures, monuments,

vessels of human longings, of human identity, of human memory” which leads to that future crutch I think in his writing which that art form takes on a presence in EVERTHINNNG

o To make a story of life which Doty follows in Turtle, Swan

A note about BIBD, “poems come out of a grappling with the present as opposed to looking back and attempting to position oneself in the dynamic of the family”.

o A poem about “redemption where one can find possibilityin the ordinary harsh, uncompromising world”

MA, “HIV created an urgency to make some kind of meaning of mystery” .

Berry 7

o Inspired by Cavafy’s Alexandria which was considered byDoty “A museum of memory and desire” poems like “The Old Neighborhood” (read CF’s book can pay the late fee)

o It seems Doty really wants to believe he conveyed different elements of Cavafy in his book MA, the ideasof transformation seem relational but not nearly in depth

o Eroding, being erased, and other ideas of disappearancethat Doty has mentioned

“How do we love what we will inevitably lose?” question to consider for Atlantis

Poems about places, or belonging, have a lot to do with light, that flamboyance, possibility and grace.

Elizabeth Bishop’s model for landscapeo Describing what she saw, through metaphor or

objectivity, this can be seen to a degree in some of Doty’s poems.

Marianne Moore’s exactitude of language can also become apparent in Doty’s workHe uses Moore as a reference many times to compare his poetry which in some cases makes quirky use of reminding thereader that he is in fact writing a poem i.e. –Heres the so of poetry—

Atlantis is a poem about exploring underwater places, plenty of nautical titles that reflect ideas of loss, reappearance which confuses the title (Atlantis never reappeared)

Doty has a bit to say about AIDSo This “great intensifier” that brought out Doty’s

insecurities, fears. o Writing mostly about AIDS in different places, AIDS

created a sense of “necessity about being able to name experiences; what it means to love what is passing; what it means to be temporary” (5)

In Atlantis, the poem “Homosexual Will Not Inherit” is one of Doty’s more explicit poems and what he calls “poems that aremore poems of a grand queen.” Atlantis definitely celebrates flamboyance, glam writing.

He wrote a poem about seasonal foliage and drag “Couture”

Berry 8

He calls the book a more “pronounced aspect of his queer character” (6)

He does express his feelings more openly and seems natural for him to do so

And he immediately recognizes main stream poetry when he sees it however he neglects to look for that “canned, responsive programmed way” of writing in his own work

An the formality of a poem coinciding with free form of expression (does Doty meet this concept?)

Secondary Sources

Rendell, Joanne. “Drag acts: Performativity, subversion and the AIDS poetry of Rafael Camp and Mark Doty.” Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 5. 2010.

Essence and identity, some note from the author about the complexity of gender acts, enacted desires creating illusions of an interior and organizing gendered core. In some ways Doty does this in his poetry not necessarily when taking an identity of neither male nor female but certainly fogging the distinctions.

Poetry has taken a format in which the care giving express their responsiveness to the AIDS.

There is an abundance of references, images, and allusions to drag throughout Doty’s work.

Doty’s poem “Crepe de Chine” for an idea of such topicJarraway, David R. “Creatures of the Rainbow: Wallace Stevens, Mark Doty and the Poetics of

Androgyny.” Poetry Criticism. Ed. Timothy J. Sisler. Vol. 53. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 5. 2010.

Stevens and Doty, “Living in difference” side note, Frank O’ Hara also seems to be an influence of

Doty’s in some way Ross Ponock, author of Trial of Curiosity, had notes from his book

regarding androgyny and the art of poetry. “Artistic practice at the highest level of intensity erodes

distinction between doing and feeling, male and female” (200) from his book (See library for information)

Berry 9

Doty shows an allusion to Stevens in his book Atlantis with the two introductory lines from Stevens poem “Montrachet-le-Jardin”

In Doty’s poems he reflects the idea of Stevens’ poetry thatentails night as the “nature of man’s interior world” (333)

In further reference to drag acts, “Perfect emblem for that partiality of human perception foregrounded by androgynous poetry” i.e. Chanteuse.

“Unseeable in its entirety, knowable only in its parts, eachpoint yielding a different vision” (4)

An idea of desire as portrayed by Doty, participation than possession.

Masculinity and femininity to drag volatility, disguising natural truths.

Bergman David. “The Ineffable Being of Light.”Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet

Witalec. Vol 176. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4. 2011.

Issues of sexuality in poetry, the mainstream, explicit topic.

Doty’s channeling spirits of different writers such as Marianne Moore (see library for further information)

o Searching for solidity, discovering ambiguity and dangers

“Doty casts the edgeless light of the illuminist to discover in ambiguity, comfort and reconciliation” (2)

Almost of Doty’s writing tries to transcend the poems limitations and strive for that impossibility, a bold attempt.

Marcus, Peter. “Reflections on Intimacy.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec.

Vol. 176. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4. 2011.

Poetry that begs the reader to pause, reread and consider all its complexities, Doty certainly reflects this demand in his verses.

Doty’s language in most cases seems a competing relationship rather than the words complementing each otherin the reader’s understanding of the poem in its entirety.

Berry 10

Gonzales, Ray. “Something from Nothing.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec.

Vol. 176. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Feb. 2011.

In reference to MA, AIDS created a sense for Doty to write about life beyond darkness

As well as create a need to extract that beauty out of the moments that death creates

Doty rebuilds language where poetry is the only vessel to move on in its immunity to the disease

o The elegiac poetry blends celebration and an energy to speak with the dead i.e Fog, Lament to Heaven.

This idea to find beauty in almost everything comes from that idea to turn ugliness into something else, this is a serious crutch Doty leans on waaaaaay too much.

Bedient, Calvin. “These AIDS Days.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed.Janet Witalec. Vol.

176. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Feb. 2011.

Doty likes to put a great deal of emphasis on the speaker’s departures in his poetry.

Some of Doty’s poetry can also be compartmentalized into a sect of remarkably homoeroticism i.e. Tiara and other poems (reread for further insight)

Some of Doty’s stronger poems are few in number of pages i.e. Becoming a Meadow, Night Ferry.

Narcissistic Illusions Doty can create harmony in his poetry which the world has

its rhythm in arrival and departurePadel, Ruth. “Songs of Myself: Mark Doty’s poems explore the ideas of selfhood and

Americanness.” The New York Times Book Review 17 Mar. 2005: 15. Literature Resource Center. Web. 22 Feb. 2011.

Lyrical glitter Doty- Poetic, Political and Sexual Doty falls between a certain spectrum where he can detail a

certain subject but then falls under the impulse to go into a full-fledged lecture

Over abundance of glow and iridescence

Berry 11

But like the old gray poet and Don Delillo he celebrates that epiphany then goes back to the crutch finding somethingbeyond the ugliness or making every moment more than itself.

Logan, William. “Gravel on the Tongue.” MLA International Bibliography.Web. 4 Feb 2011.

Doty falls under the mainstream gay poet that seems to reflect minor aspects of strong writers such as Whitman, Lowell, Moore.

Using his homosexuality (or at least the surface of it) in pretty much all of his poems doesn’t make the poems any deeper than cumming in a lace stocking.

“Being gay didn’t stop Auden from writing good poems” (read some of his work, see library for further insight)

“You can see what he’s holding back in the poem then its back to talking about flowers”

Slavitt, David R. “Eastward Ho!” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 176.

Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 1. Mar. 2011.

A side note about Cavafy and his making poetry a “metropolis of imagination”

I have already gathered that Doty has already acquired a serious reference of Cavafy, however the difference between both these homosexual poets is the fact that Doty likes to be abrupt and explicit

Cavafy shows an element of what Slavitt says “restraint, implication, delicacy, finesse”

Doty can write accomplishing poems, I think that this the part when he actually puts craft in the poem, not sure about this one in particular but Slavitt likes it for whatever reason—I just have to read it again—Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Mueseum

Logan, William. “Sins and Sensibility.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol.176.

Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web 1. Mar. 2011. Doty’s fascination with light has turned from method and device

to compulsion and unnecessary which Sweet Machine follows in that idea

Berry 12

AIDS is present in the writing as well, the elegies show little emotion (Probably need to read more into it, theres only so many poems in his selected writing)

Writing that’s “Full of pizzazz, but you can take only so much pizzazz” (2)

McInerney, Stephen. “A Glimpse of Bright Wings.” Literature Resource Center. Web. 1. Mar. 2011

“There is something mundane about much of the new poetry and few individual voices have emerged in the last quarter of a century to fill in the spaces left by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Stevens and Frost” (1)

The author seems to dwell into an idea of contemporary writers confronting a problem in verse. In Doty’s case a hackneyed theme

“Doty has done for clapboard and old houses what Whitman did for steam engines and stevedores” (2)

Doty’s nostalgia “Look beyond the Whimanesque posing and you will find a poet with

a unique voice with to offer” (2)

Poetry Analysis

Turtle, Swan (1987)

Turtle, Swan

Based on some previous notes, Doty likes to use animals as vessels of his poetry to resemble different aspects of humanexperience

He also likes to combine language with certain images “White architecture rippling like a pond’s rain pocked skin…”

o Unconventional use of wordso Also Doty tends to go to far with his language to the

point the sound is a little unsymmetrical to the poem’ssound and overall intake

The poem is also a verse of vulnerability, definitely something Doty experienced when he was coming to terms with his sexuality

Berry 13

This poem also addresses his deceased partner Wally Roberts.Although in the writing of this collection of poetry Doty and Roberts were still together

Turtle Swan introduces this theme of remnants and disappearance that continues through Doty’s poetry

Something to call yours, a place in society The poem is also the introduction of Wally as an appartition

like figure, creating an unassurance in reader’s mind to grasp death or life

This the poem which we also learn of Roberts illness And really see Doty’s style and voice emerge in a sense,

trying to avoid bird metaphorical imageryo Narrative uncertaintyo Speaker’s brief asideso Parallel structures

Turtle, Swan overall is about wanting to keep something alive and deny the realities

Charlie Howard’s Descent

Doty started to express more explicitly his politics and thoughts regarding homosexuals in society and the community

o This is one of many of Doty’s poems elegizing historical figures

Even though there is a concrete definition of the poem thereare still other elements interconnected

o Ideas of captivation followed by an inevitable release o Beautifying deatho Unjustified discrimination o Perception of different images, multiple meanings

Taking tragedy and making beauty Inability to understand magnificence

Berry 14

One can’t help but think Doty could spent more time with thepoem and actually make an attempt at conveying his poetry with craft elements

Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991)

Ararat

Reread poem for further insight Doty likes to write about a specific object then provide

further significance and meaning This poem displays an ambiguity as to what the poem is

about In Doty’s earlier poems he displayed a great sense of craft

and use of narration to a degree it was tolerable His use of metaphor and imagery coincide very well in the

structure

Death of Antinous

This poem is one of Doty’s many elegies throughout his poetry collections, this is the historical figure and a partof the concern Doty shows about “art, reading, physical loveand memory as the necessary step to personal and cultural history”

Most criticisms agree that Doty’s second book of poetry openup doors into Doty’s posterity, MA and SM

In this poem in particular Doty reestablishes death and the loss of loved ones in this poem about Hadrian and his lover Antinous which acts as a parallel in some cases to Doty and his late partner Roberts.

In the beginning Doty already displayed a narration and within it an uncertainty which makes the poem that much moremysterious and open ended

o “The beautiful young man drowned/accidentally, swimmingat dawn/ in a current too swift for him,/ or obedient

Berry 15

to some cult/ of total immersion that promised/ the bather would come up divine”(94)

o Doty also really dwells into a particular imagery that separates his poetry significantly from earlier writing, more erotic and physical but still necessary to a degree “the beloved figure would be there/ first: the turn of his shoulders,/ the exact marble nipples,/ the drowned face not really lost/ to the Nile”

Tiara

Like the previous poem, this too is an elegy although less ancient historical context and more of a political poem regarding an encounter Doty experienced and written off of that

Doty likes to write poems about a certain artifice or an element of i.e. paper tiara, statues, taxidermy, fortune tellers, crossdressers.

Adonis Theater

This poem is one of many Doty talks about a sense of transformation from one thing into a significant other, thispoem in any case is about an old cinema turned gay porn theater

What is fantastic about this poem is the implicit words and language he uses to suggest whats going on, he doesn’t blatantly say something then go into a stream of consciousness and ask himself questions over and over

o “whether we watch/ Douglass Fairbanks escaping from a dreamed,/ suavely oriental city, think of those leaps/ from the parapet, how he almost flies/ from the grasp of whatever would limit him/ or the banal athletics of two or more men who were/ and probably remain strangers” (102)

Berry 16

Fire to Fire, Selected Poems (2008)

Pipistrelle

Doty writes a lot of his later poetry about writing poetry And the composition of his language as a kind of music Although I notice descriptions and Doty’s usage of certain

words that seem out of place in the poemo “two-twilight mares in a thorn-hedged field” this is

pretty but doesn’t further any understanding to the poem or the speaker

All of Doty’s poems contain narration that also seem unnecessary

o “Though when we approached they ignored us and went on softly tearing up audible mouthfuls, so we turned in the other direction, Lough Pool” (3)

o Both quotes are examples of Doty’s language and his particular craft that shows throughout his new poems and earlier ones

As mentioned before in other notes, most of Doty’s poems comes out of an encounter or experience in this case a pipistrelle or bat.

Doty’s poetry offeres beautiful phrases and structure in some cases as well as collected understanding that he wants the reader to take in through his diction

Something that I’m also discovering is Doty’s constant switching as the objected observer to subject through his poetry, he does this and it changes the tone and mood of thepoem along with its specific flow

The poem and the rest of the new poems are rife with weak lines that do the poems absolutely no justice in the end of the verses and just sit on the page with the satisfaction oftaking up space

o Its not much saying Doty becomes slave to the fluffy language or too much in a description i.e. comparing

Berry 17

the bat to a purse “The little Victorian handbag dashing between the dim bulk of trees?”(4)

I feel like this poem and others were written for a specificaudience and not entirely written to register with everybody, it is possible to find a deeper meaning in the language but that goes for everything written and its interpretations so Doty still offers something just not fully instead reserved and in some cases pretentious

The poem overall in inconclusive in content nothing really suggests an ending except for Doty practically saying its over.

In The Airport Marshes

Doty likes use very colorful words in his poetry This is a case which he wrote a poem about one of this words

and the process of writing about it, he actually talks aboutlooking it up in a dictionary, I like to think this is craftbut this is Doty’s eighth ensemble of poetry and he is trying to show new tricks and pioneer different elements andthey don’t work in the benefit of the poem but himself in page fill up.

At some point in his career not sure really when, Doty has developed a habit if not tendency and annoyance to be a maternal figure in his poetry kind of leading the reader into the poem explaining everything and by pointing things out

o “These definitions wait to be lived, actual as these frogs, who chorus as if there’s no tomorrow”(7)

But he also only focuses on one thing in his poetry and leaves everything else out in his language making the poem feel unfinished

Apparition

Berry 18

This is one of many of Doty’s theme poems which he finds himself in different encounters with people that take on identities of poets or other significant figures

This poem is about Doty observing a young man recitation ofa poem Ozymandias

Doty writes of this encounter with a diction that suggests many ideas but the meaning of the poem becomes obvious really quick after the second or third stanza

Fancy words only go so far, but Doty insists on using such throughout all of his writing

In addition to his writing in other poems, Doty has also taken on the role as a prosey journalistic writer who has some beautiful language in a sentence but for the poem overall it’s just story telling and makes me feel like I’m an article in the New Yorker, the language isn’t really attractive except in a number of sentences

o Such introduction probably best summarizes my point “Ihave joined a student theater group, an insurrection in the motherly gray capital/ battered by invasion andoccupation” (10)

Apparition

Taking on the same title as Doty’s other poem, this one is also an encounter but instead Doty thinks he saw John Berryman at a café.

This poem is stronger and more ideal to Doty’s craft than the other but this poem also shows Doty’s development of empty descriptions that don’t satisfy the reader with the poem

o The poem starts out like “Chilly noon on Seventh,/and Iswear in the window/ of the Eros Diner, corner/ of 21st

street”(15)

House of Beauty

Berry 19

This poem is a serious reminder to me why I love Mark Doty for all he is as a writer, none of the poems in his new collection remotely compare to this piece

Instead this poem takes on an identity closer to Demolition from Doty’s MA, the beautiful phrasing and language makes the poem sound like it has some craft and discretion

Besides the overused phrase repeated through the poem “Houseof beauty is burning” or some derivation of the phrase, the poem is very strong with beautiful verses such as

o “In the dark recess beside the sink/where heads lay back to be laved/ under the perfected heads rowed alongthe walls/the hopeful photographs of possibility darken,”

o The timing is also very steady with the structure, Dotyhasn’t sacrificed any sound or page space just to keep to his usual poem structures “The skyway beetles in theringing cold/trestle arcing the steel river and warehouses, truck lots and Indian groceries, a new plume of smoke joining the others,/ billow of dark thought rising/ from the broken forehead of the House of Beauty” (16)

o This poem is also a centralized theme Doty had developed from his previous writing about death and passing, this idea of beauty in disaster, lines suggestthis idea with the weak introduction of “Propose a new beauty, perennially unhoused:/ neither the lost things nor the fire itself,/ but the objects in their dresses of disaster,/ anything clothed in its own passage: padded vinyl char burst into smoky tongues, Lucite helmet sagged to a new version of its dome” (17).

Theories Of The Soul

Doty continues his book trying to pioneer new structures and ideas into his poetry, but this poem’s composistion or

Berry 20

the appearance of, doesn’t make the poem any better just unattractive.

The incident of the poem seems to drift into a stream of events that have nothing to do with each other, first Doty is being treated, which he passes out for ten minutes and wakes up then “I’m talking to the Claudia I carry around inmy head… I don’t why I tell her about the black kid in the dingy passageway to the L yesterday singing early Beatles with a radical purity” (19)

This poem also reveals what criticisms call Doty’s “fascination” with light almost all of his poems have gleam, fire, burning and this iridescence “everything distilled to a bright arcing liquid vulnerability spilling over” (19)

Another thing Doty does in all of his poetry is apply elements of prose like characters in his narration that aresupposed to further understanding of the poem and the speaker’s encounter with that particular person sometimes complex sometimes a part of the scenery i.e. the nurse, “John Berryman”, tattoo artists, drag queens.

One of the serious problems with Doty’s poems is the fact that they are long and tangent and don’ t leave any room for the reader to think for himself about a certain line because the speaker has already said everything in a very non poetic way, some cases he’s practically forcing me by the collar to look at a certain aspect of the poetry line “And when you turn away again,/ there on the sidewalk/ is aperfect instance of the category sink” (24)

Theory of Multiplicity

The only reason I submit this poem to be mentioned is because it contains a line that reflects some of Doty’s craft that is evident in his writing but not enough unfortunately

Berry 21

o “on the edge of the sidewalk, spilling onto the pavement,/ surprisingly wild, with prairie grasses, a shrubby coneflower,/strapping and frowsy black-eyed Susan, even a few bees frowsing through it” (25)

o Despite the rest of the poem this language defines Doty’s craft to a significant degree

Theory of Beauty (Grackles On Montrose)

Doty displays a great sense of introduction with craft and attractive language then drifts in and out of his wanting totry new tricks and then going back to his mastery with language i.e. stanzas one, two, six, seven, ten, eleven. Also Doty can conclude a poem beautifully if he isn’t subject to his new identities as a “poet” who goes into consciousness every freaking poem. In this case its nicely done “Incendiary rippling, pure delight,/imperious, impure singing:/ traffic in tongues, polyglot,/ expansive, awry” (28)

Theory of Marriage

Doty writes his poetry as if he and the reader have some kind of bond that he can just say something about a person (or mostly places) and assume the reader completely understands what he’s trying to convey. All this tells me ishe wrote his poetry for a specific audience preferably the people his book was written about, everything else I relate to is very little in the poem.

The poem comes off as that journalist writer too. I feel a lot of Doty’s poetry is an attempt to combine the

two writing styles he’s been consumed by and it doesn’t workin the end for most of his poems i.e. Angel in Prague, Theory of Narrative, and other poems not mentioned in the annotations.

Berry 22

Doty still has messages and ideas that are worth writing which makes his more attractive poetry that much better thanthe rest of his writing i.e. Theory of the Sublime, To Joan Mitchell, and the stronger lines of Doty’s final poem in thecollection Theory of Incompletion

o “I am stilled now, atop my ladder,/ leaning back onto the rungs, am the rapture/ of denied disclosure , no need to go anywhere,” (52).