[By Aaron P. Tate; From the Ithaca Times] At a crucial moment in Plato’s Symposium — perhaps the most celebrated meditation on love bequeathed to us by the ancient western world — Diotima, the enigmatic priestess, at just the instant when she is to reveal her secret doctrine to Socrates, pauses briefly to consider the semantic ecology of a particular word.
This word — “poetry” — Diotima tells us, should refer to any artistic “calling of something into existence that was not there before.” But it does not, she complains, since popular usage has restricted its meaning to compositions in “music and meters.” Turning to the nature of love, she completes the analogy: to limit our conception of love to mere physical attachment is to forget other forms of openness. Her implication is clear: poetry is the ontological act of ‘making,’ while love is an openness to existence itself.
It is impossible not to recall Plato’s account when thinking about the corpus of poet and memoirist Mark Doty, since Doty is a writer whose work radiates with love for the play of appearance, both the splendor of becoming and the grief of absolute loss. This award-winning author of more than ten books of poetry and prose, together with his partner Paul Lisicky, an accomplished prose stylist in his own right, have been denizens of Ithaca this past semester as part of a visiting writers program at Cornell University.
While here, the two have been teaching, writing furiously, and enjoying the usual haunts near and dear to Ithacans (Gimme! Coffee, and Moosewood Restaurant, for example) — and they recently sat down with the Ithaca Times to tell us about it.
“We team taught a graduate seminar with Denis Johnson [also a visiting writer at Cornell this semester] called ‘Writers at Work,’ and each of us had a different focus. We managed to get the post-modern poets into the same room as the realist fiction writers,” Lisicky says, with affection in his voice. Doty interjects, “That was one of the best things about it, that it wasn’t genre-bound or genre-defined.”
Lisicky, picking up the thread, agrees: “You’re right, not genre-bound at all. I had them writing very short prose pieces, similar to pieces that I’ve been working on recently, and I gave them examples of pieces by other writers who work in that form. It was a nice meeting ground. Genre rarely came up as an issue, and we didn’t really talk that much about people’s conflicting principles.”
Lisicky also taught a course on the short story to freshmen, while Doty offered an additional poetry seminar for undergraduates.
Paul Lisicky first came to literary prominence as a novelist in 1999, on the strength of his raw, witty, and moving coming of age novel, Lawnboy (Turtle Point Press). With the publication of his memoir Famous Builder (Graywolf Press) in 2002, however, Lisicky found himself pushing into new territory, which, to hear him tell it, is exactly where he likes to be: “I think that I have little faith in genre now, but I didn’t know that until recently. I didn’t want to be categorized. I think that what it comes down to is that there’s a stubborn part of me that does not want to be fit neatly into a classification.”
Originally a composer of church music as a teenager, yet equally in thrall to the riddling lyrics of Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell (among others), Lisicky eventually moved from music to writing, and graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Still an avid music fan and pianist to this day, he traces his musical obsessions in much of what he writes now: “I am very interested in the architecture of the sentence, in honoring the phrase. Perhaps it’s a cluster that I’m interested in, or a set of sounds that I hear in my head,” explains Lisicky, when asked about the role of music in his writing.
At the reading he gave at Cornell earlier this year alongside Doty and Johnson, Lisicky debuted a number of very short prose pieces, a direction he’s currently exploring with enthusiasm. “Some of it’s being called poetry now, though I’ve been sneaky about it,” he laughs. “I’m writing in really short forms, and I do tend to think of them as short prose pieces, though some of them have in fact been published as poems. I’m more or less giving them to magazine editors to choose the genre for them. But it’s funny, now that I’ve amassed a collection of them, I’m somewhat shocked by the fact that they do seem to think and move like poems. I don’t think that I was conscious of that as I was writing each one of them. But I’ve been holding some of those pieces up against short-shorts by other writers whom I’ve been reading with my graduate students, and a lot of those pieces are much more narrative-based, much more organized around a voice that moves through a pattern of thinking, than mine are.”
When I ask if he had always been interested in both music and literature, or if one pursuit had supplanted the other, Lisicky answers that the latter had been the case: “I think that I actually became interested in literature after becoming so deeply interested in song lyrics, the song lyrics from my youth. At one point I began to think ‘Oh, here are images, here are details,’ and that seemed really exciting to me.”
Having noticed that Lisicky includes an homage to Laura Nyro in his book Famous Builder, I ask about her influence. As it turns out, Nyro’s music figures prominently in both writers’ lives. “Laura Nyro was certainly one of the most important for me. The lyrics on her early albums are so intensely poetic and strange, and I was obsessed with trying to make meaning out of them,” states Lisicky. Doty interjects, “And they’re so passionate!” Lisicky: “Yes, passionate, beautifully crazed, and intense.” When Joni Mitchell’s name comes up in the same breath, Lisicky exclaims: “The goddesses of our household! There are other goddesses of our household, of course, but those two are at the top,” he adds with a smile, before saying, “I’ve seen Laura’s brother Jan’s advertisements for guitar lessons in the local paper, and I am very aware of her connection to Ithaca!”
Owing to the fact that they’ve been living in a rented house and did not have domestic projects to distract them, both writers feel that they’ve been able to get much writing done during their time in Ithaca. Lisicky’s new novel Lumina Harbor, for one, has gone through further revisions this year, while he continues to write essays in addition to the new short works.
Doty, in fact, has almost finished a new book, which will come out in a series with Graywolf Press devoted to The Art of…. Doty’s assignment was the ‘art of description,’ a task he savored, though he did so with caution. “I’m particularly talking about poetry, which represents the visual world, the sensual world, in this project. And, it turns out, of course, that when you’re talking about description, you’re talking about everything: you’re talking about how perception is rendered in language, and why. One must ask: Why do we want to do that? Why is it satisfying? In any case, I’m almost finished with it,” he adds.
When I inquire as to how one goes about organizing a book so broadly defined, Doty is quick to answer: “Well, that was the challenge. To figure out where to start, and how on earth to thread one’s way through that sort of thing. Because I really did not want to write a textbook, it seemed boring to me, the correct way to write a how-to book of description and so on, as if I knew how to write such a thing in the first place! I wound up writing four little chapters on perception … and then I thought that I needed to break loose from that, so I began to make an abcedarium of description. A, B, C … art, brevity, color … an entry for each letter, ranging from one-sentence entries, to longer ones. I hope that there will be pleasure for some in reading it, as there has certainly been pleasure in writing it.”
The fact that Mark Doty is a celebrated memoirist is doubly impressive when one remembers that he’s one of the most accomplished American poets of his generation. In 1993, with the publication of Doty’s third book of poetry, My Alexandria (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), the reading public became aware of this major young voice in American poetry. The collection was wise, tough, and heart-rending, addressing AIDS and grief in brave ways (among other topics). Not only did it win multiple awards (chosen for the National Poetry Series by Philip Levine, for example), but it was to become one in a series of critically lauded collections, which include: Atlantis (1995), Sweet Machine (1998), Source (2001), and School of the Arts (2005). Doty’s selected poems, Fire to Fire (Harper Collins, 2008), which was just published in March, is yet another weighty reminder of his contribution to the landscape of contemporary poetry.
One dimension that reaches throughout the entirety of Mark Doty’s literary work is the unmistakable attention paid to mortality and loss — and the fact that from these bereavements come love, awareness, and a buttress for survival. Doty is too smart and too challenging a thinker to leave us only with hope for healing, though healing is often there; he is not afraid to allow the lacunae to remain lacunae, and for the missing parts to stay missing, in order to embrace the passing moment for what it is.
This intensification of the experience of time and limit is nowhere more evident than in Doty’s recent work, in particular last year’s meditation on the human-animal relation, Dog Years (Harper Collins, 2007) — a New York Times bestseller that has been reprinted in hardback seven times and is now available in paperback. To say that it’s been well received would be an understatement, as it’s also been published in Brazil and England, and will soon appear in Italy and France.
Prior to Dog Years, Doty was already a successful nonfiction author, having written two stunning memoirs: Heaven’s Coast (Harper Collins 1996), a heartbreaking account of the loss of his lover, Wally, to AIDS; and Firebird (Harper Collins, 1999), a memoir of Doty’s migratory youth.
For Doty to turn to the commemoration of two deceased pets, however, presented new risks for the writer, of which he was highly aware. In fact, he embraced them: “I actually really enjoyed the challenge posed by it, because I had this sense that I was doing something that could be potentially mawkish or embarrassing … and so being acutely aware of that, I had to work all the harder to make the book not be about my feelings. To a degree, it is about my feelings, of course, but hopefully it’s much more than that,” Doty explains.
Much more than that it is indeed, as it’s equal parts elegy for two beloved animal friends and a lucid phenomenological analysis of the human-animal encounter, including present-tense descriptions so potent that they will stop readers cold in their tracks. This is not merely a beautiful book about animals, penned with a wise poet’s eye, this is a full-bore philosophical investigation of the limits, possibilities, and joys of encountering a non-human awareness.
When I ask Doty about the frequent quotes from Gaston Bachelard in Dog Years, and in particular the way that Doty has carefully considered his dogs’ relations to language, space, and time, he responds with a story. When invited to attend a conference on the theme of “The Resistance of the Poem” at a leading center for contemporary philosophy, Doty chose to read certain poems of his own and to discuss their origins. “It’s nice to be read by philosophers,” Doty says enthusiastically.
“I like it a lot. What was so delightful to me was that the philosophers just got it immediately, and as a result we ended up having a wonderful conversation. What they were experiencing in the poems was a kind of active work in doing philosophy.” He adds: “I do love Bachelard, that way of thinking about experience — that naïve kind of slate-clearing approach of the phenomenologist is very attractive to me. I really do think of writing poetry as a way of doing natural philosophy. What we can know about this moment, what we can bring to it.”
Doty’s response points in yet another direction altogether: if the age-old quarrel between philosophy and poetry is, in fact, after all, a true quarrel, then Mark Doty’s writing will probably be claimed by both sides. But if instead the opposite turns out to be the case — namely, that the quarrel was never a quarrel to begin with — it will be writing such as Mark Doty’s that proves it.