POET

Mark Doty (1953 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Turtle, Swan, in 1987, Mark Doty has become recognized as one of the most accomplished poets in America. Like the work of James Merrill, Doty's utterings transcend the category of "gay poetry" to appeal to a diverse cross-section of readers; fittingly, Doty has won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the Whiting Writer's Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize (of which he was the first U.S. winner), the National Poetry Series, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction. Doty, the son of an army engineer, grew up in a succession of suburbs in Tennessee, Florida, southern California, and Arizona. An ancestor, Edward Dotey, was, as Doty recounted in a 1996 Publishers Weekly interview, "the 'archetypal American scoundrel,'" who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, fought the first duel on American soil, and filed the first lawsuit in this country.

Doty described himself, in Publishers Weekly, as having been "a sissy" in childhood; frightened by his emerging sexual identity, he married hastily at age eighteen. After completing his undergraduate studies at Drake University in Iowa, he got a divorce and moved to Manhattan, where he paid his dues as a temporary office worker. He earned a master's degree in creative writing from Goddard College during part-time semesters; during the same period, he met his lasting love, Wally Roberts, a window-dresser at a department store. The couple lived together for twelve years in Manhattan and in Provincetown, Massachusetts; Wally's illness and death from AIDS, with which he was diagnosed in 1989 and to which he finally succumbed in January, 1994, was to be the central event of Doty's maturation as person and poet. (Doty himself tested negative for HIV.) In the interim, however, Doty was publishing his early work.

A first volume of poems, Turtle, Swan, was rejected by the publisher David Godine, only to be accepted by Godine after urgings from author Roger Weingarten whose works had also been published by Godine. On its publication in 1987, Booklist praised the "quiet, intimate" Turtle, Swan for turning the gay experience into "an example of how we live, how we suffer and transcend suffering," while Marianne Boruch, in American Poetry Review, called the volume "a stunning arrival." Doty's second collection, the 1991 Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, also won praise from critics. Miriam Levine, in American Book Review, appreciated Doty's gift for "simple speech," and specified that "Doty's poems work best when he finds his way back and forth between the vernacular and the elegant music of desire and loss." Booklist critic Pat Monaghan made a similar comment, delighting in the "combination of extreme formality and extreme accessibility" which made Bethlehem in Broad Daylight "one of the most satisfying of recent collections."

Poetry reviewer David Baker commended Doty for "well-ordered poetry whose primary method is anecdotal, whose speaker is singular and personal, and whose vision is skeptical." If there was a problem in Doty's work, Baker hypothesized, it was the poet's "detachment from his own story"—Doty, he claimed, approached his subjects as a "privileged observer and commentator."

If this was indeed a problem, Doty went a long way toward dealing with it in his 1993 My Alexandria, which won the National Poetry Series contest and was therefore published by the University of Illinois Press. Here, Doty wrote about the pain of life as seen through the prism of AIDS. Yet, as Ray Gonzalez noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, "Doty goes beyond the triumph of the plague to write about life beyond this dark century. . . . He has the courage to extract beauty out of the living moments created by death. . . . The pain, the memories and the surviving beauty strengthen and nourish him." Assessing the volume for the Yale Review, Vernon Shetley wrote, "Doty's writing displays tremendous craft in ways that have become fairly unusual in our poetry. . . . And one senses in the poetry as well an admirable assurance in the choices he makes."

On the negative side, Shetley felt that Doty relied too much on a rich "gift for phrasemaking"; all in all, however, he hailed My Alexandria as evidence of "a big talent at work." Jonathan Bing, the Publishers Weekly interviewer, looked back on My Alexandria in retrospect as "a watershed" in Doty's career," full of "luminous studies of urban and natural flux." Doty himself told Bing that he thought of My Alexandria as "a real change. . . . I was casting about for what would come next. And what came next for me was looking around at the present and adult life," in contrast to the poems of remembered youth in his earlier books.

In February, 1996, James Fenton wrote about My Alexandria in the New York Review of Books on the occasion of the awarding of the T. S. Eliot Prize to that volume. Fenton pointed out the explicit homage to Robert Lowell in Doty's work, especially in the poem "Demolition," whose subject was strikingly similar to that of Lowell's great "For the Union Dead." "It's a gutsy act," stated Fenton, who also praised the poem "Fog," a response to Doty's and Wally's HIV tests as "the best poem in the book." The volume as a whole, Fenton felt, was "a conscious evocation of a personal bohemia . . . tenderly evoked," and it "hangs together so beautifully that it seems like a single orchestrated work."

My Alexandria also led to the National Book Critics' Circle Prize for 1994, and to the publication of Doty's next volume, Atlantis, by a commercial house, HarperCollins, in 1995. Atlantis was a response to, and in many respects a description of, Wally's illness and death, and a Commonweal reviewer, the poet and memoirist Patricia Hampl, called it simply "miraculous." Hampl loved Doty's casual voice and his ability to make something universal—"an emblem that springs open for us all"—out of an individual tragedy. She compared Doty to Keats in being "poised on exact perception. When he sees the ocean—the salt spray hits you." Library Journal contributor Frank Allen praised the poems' painterly descriptions, while Yale Review critic Willard Spiegelman applauded both the works' visual quality and their "smooth, graceful" music. Savoring, as other critics had done before, Doty's ability to create beauty out of grief, Allen discerned the influences of Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, and above all, Walt Whitman, and concluded, "No recent book so strongly warrants both tears and laughter."

After Wally's death, Doty found himself unable to write or even read. However, the solicitation of a poem by a friend who was editing an anthology led him to the writing, not of a poem, but of a book-length memoir, Heaven's Coast, in which he came to grips, in prose, with Wally's life and death. "It was a real gift to be able to write it" at that troubled moment, Doty told Bing, and readers evidently felt the same way, for the book achieved high acclaim and was widely read. Doty deliberately refrained from organizing the book carefully; it was a patchwork quilt of memories, including quotations from friends' letters. Bernard Cooper in the Los Angeles Times Book Review expressed keen appreciation for this literary strategy: "How else, except with tentative, borrowed strength, can one grapple with the indifference of death?" Cooper called Heaven's Coast a "powerful memoir."

Jim Marks in the Washington Post Book World found the book "unique among AIDS memoirs" for its author's "refusal to become dominated by his anger" and for his questioning of the appropriateness of beauty as a response to death. Marks found a great deal of appropriate beauty, however, in Doty's prose: "Even his considerable reputation could not have prepared readers for the astonishing beauty of these opening pages." Responding to the scene of Wally's death, Marks wrote, "[Doty] takes us into the moment of death . . . in language that, purged of anger and grief, comes close to being transcendent."

Following Heaven's Coast was the 1998 poetry collection Sweet Machine, a work in which "the poems . . . contemplate nature and art as the closest thing we have to an extravagant, if not transcendent, presence," according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Though the collection "is the book of a freer, altogether less burdened spirit," maintained a reviewer for Economist, Sweet Machine nevertheless appears to contain less intense subject treatment and "slacker" writing, according to the reviewer. However, in a review for Progressive, Joel Brouwer stated: "In Sweet Machine, we see an already masterful poet refusing to lapse into nostalgia or to unthinkingly reuse the poetic strategies that have served him so well in the past. Instead, we find Mark Doty exploring new territories and questioning himself at every turn."

In 1999, Doty published a second memoir, Firebird, which a reviewer for Newsweek described as "The poet's beautifully written, hallucinatorily evocative memoir of growing up gay in baby-boom America." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly said that the memoir is "beautifully and sensitively written," but has less of an emotional impact and more of a mental one. In Firebird, Doty recalls his experiences as a young boy growing up, including those of an often difficult family life and an increasing awareness of his homosexuality. The Publishers Weekly reviewer commented as well that in the book the author "is at his best when describing his relationship to the idea of beauty and how it influenced his growth as an artist."

In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Doty presents an extended meditation on a Dutch still-life painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem, painted in Antwerp 350 years ago. The slim volume "takes [the] reader deep into the painting," according to Peter Marcus in the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Marcus noted, "Doty's prose sentences read much like lines of his poetry: they beg the reader to pause, to reread, to consider all their complexities. . . . Still Life is a meditation on how a painting can capture the ephemeral." In Lambda Book Report, Jim Gladstone wrote that the book was "slim yet infinitely rereadable," and in Library Journal, Carol J. Binkowski commented that the volume "should be lingered over and reread to uncover the full depth of its beauty and insight."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WRITINGS:

POETRY

• Turtle, Swan (also see below), David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1987.
• Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (also see below), Godine (Lincoln, MA), 1991.
• My Alexandria, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1993.
• Atlantis, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1995.
• Sweet Machine: Poems, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1998.
• Island Sheaf, Dim Gray Bar Press (New York, NY), 1998.
• Turtle, Swan [and] Bethlehem in Broad Daylight: Poetry, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2000.
• The Source, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.

NONFICTION

• (As Mark A. Doty) Tell Me Who I Am: James Agee's Search for Selfhood, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1981.
• Heaven's Coast: A Memoir, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1996.
• Firebird: A Memoir, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1999.
• Murano: Poem, J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA), 2000.
• Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 2001.
• Dog Years (memoir), HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2007.

OTHER

• Has contributed poems to magazines (some under the joint pseudonym M. R. Doty), including the magazine Kayak! Coauthor of the chapbooks (under the joint pseudonym M. R. Doty) An Alphabet, An Introduction to the Geography of Iowa, and The Empire of Summer. Contributor to Fooling with Words: A Celebration of Poets and Their Craft, by Bill Moyers, Morrow, 1999. Contributor to The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Michael Collier and Stanley Plumly, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH).

FURTHER READINGS

FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

PERIODICALS

• Advocate, April 28, 1998, p. 62; October 12, 1999, p. 78.
• American Book Review, February-March, 1992, pp. 20, 27.
• American Poetry Review, July-August, 1988, pp. 39-41.
• Best Sellers, August, 1981, p. 177.
• Booklist, December 15, 1987, p. 671; November 15, 1990, p. 596; February 1, 1998, p. 894; October 1, 1999, p. 338; September 15, 1999, p. 215; June 1, 2000, p. 1808.
• Choice, November, 1981, p. 378.
• Commonweal, December 1, 1995, pp. 20, 22.
• Economist, August 15, 1998, p. 72.
• Gay and Lesbian Review, spring, 2000, p. 52.
• Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, September, 2001, p. 42.
• Georgia Review, spring, 1998, p. 168.
• Lambda Book Report, December, 1999, p. 20; April, 2001, p. 15.
• Library Journal, August, 1995, p. 79; March 15, 1998, p. 67; September 15, 1999, p. 83; October 1, 1999, p. 90; April 1, 2001, p. 100.
• Los Angeles Times, January 14, 2001, p. 11; December 30, 2001, p. R10.
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 31, 1993; April 14, 1996, p. 2.
• Modern Fiction Studies, summer, 1982, pp. 315-317.
• Nation, July 15, 1996, pp. 33-38.
• National Catholic Reporter, November 21, 1997, p. 14.
• New Statesman, May 30, 1997, p. 44.
• Newsweek, October 25, 1999, p. 86; November 15, 1999, p. 5.
• New York Times, May 15, 1997, p. B7.
• New York Times Book Review, February 29, 1996, p. 52; April 14, 1996, p. 2; October 10, 1999, p. 30.
• Parnassus, 1995, pp. 197-231.
• Ploughshares, spring, 1999, p. 183.
• Poetry, February, 1992, pp. 283-299.
• Progressive, October, 1998, p. 43.
• Provincetown Art (annual), 1994.
• Publishers Weekly, April 15, 1996, pp. 44-45; January 26, 1998, p. 87; July 26, 1999, p. 84; September 6, 1999, p. 92; September 25, 2000, p. 48.
• Ruminator Review, fall, 2001, p. 13.
• San Francisco Chronicle, October 31, 1999, p. 5; November 3, 1999, p. B1.
• Times Literary Supplement, September 4, 1998, p. 23.
• Washington Post Book World, April 7, 1996, pp. 11-12.
• Writer's Digest, November 1999, p. 8.
• Yale Review, October, 1993, pp. 138-166; April, 1996, pp. 171-177.

OTHER

• Academy of American Poets, http://www.poets.org/ (January 15, 2000).
• Atlantic Unbound, http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/ (January 15, 2000), interview with Doty.
• Cortland Review, http: //www.cortlandreview.com/ (January 15, 2000).
• Life on the Coastline, http://www.vtpride.org/april/ (January 15, 2000).
• Salon.com, http:// www.salon.com/ (January 14, 2002).
• University of Toronto Library, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/ (January 14, 2002).*