Ouija and Garden and Fog, an Interview with Mark Doty

                                                                                                                                            -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum                                                    

 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: There are countess ways in which we measure art.  Obviously, the way we do this depends on all sorts of factors.  But one of the elements that we don’t attribute to poetry very much is memorability.  I’m not sure why that is, but I think that one reason I’m drawn back to “Demolition” again and again, is this memorability, particularly in images like “the oldest concrete structure in New England” and “the ghost of their signs” and “the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, / a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head.”

 

I think that all poets hope their poem is remembered, but we sort of have a love/hate relationship with this ideal.  How important is it to you that we remember "Demolition?"

 

Mark Doty:  Memorability is mostly a pre-20th century value in poetry, since traditional patterns of rhythm and rhyme served as mnemonic aids, and having a supply of poems at the ready was a valuable source of entertainment. Free verse is nowhere near as easy to recall, but how important is that to us?  I don't love, say, Bishop's "At the Fishhouses" any less because I don't remember every line of it. I certainly hope that people will remember my poem, recalling the shape it makes, its argument or way of viewing experience, maybe particular figures of speech. The poems I love best are those that become ways of seeing for me, internal reference points or guideposts I go back to, in order to navigate the world.

 

AMK: Is there a way, in particular, to create a poem that’s memorable?  Do you think about this while in the drafting/revising process?

 

MD: Well, I'm working for musicality in the language, and for accuracy, and to be as clear as I can about complex things. I'd guess that if you attend to those, then memorability will take care of itself.

 

AMK: My teacher, Rodney Jones, said in class the other day that “all of us as writers do things for other people…”  To what degree do the various moves in this poem exist due to a concern for your readers, rather than for yourself or for the poem?

 

MD: Interesting question. The poem wants to tie together several frames of reference: the building being demolished, the monument to Colonel Shaw that Lowell touches upon in "For the Union Dead," and Lowell's own biography as well as Oscar Wilde's. I guess it would have been possible to write a version of the poem with less narrative "glue," placing these elements side by side in a Pound-like juxtaposition. But I am interested in taking the reader along on the journey, and likewise in tracking the motion of association myself, and thus there are phrases like "All summer I've been reading biographies..." or "A month ago, at St. Gaudens's house..." These gestures of transition felt necessary to me, since I'm putting together relatively disparate elements of cultural history. I can't tell you now which of these associations might have occurred while I was watching that old building hit the ground and which came in the writing process, but it doesn't matter. Unfolding and investigating the connections -- that, to my mind, IS the composing process.

 

AMK: For a poem that seems so obviously fixed in the 1st person, I think we can all learn a lot from this poem; the word “I” only occurring a few times.  From what perspective is this poem written and how do you think this poem works within this perspective so successfully?

 

MD: I think of Buckminster Fuller saying "I seem to be a verb." The self's revealed in the action of looking, inquiring, thinking, and looking some more. That's my hope. And of course nothing's duller syntactically than lots of sentences beginning with "I" and then a verb.

 

AMK: What are your thoughts on the relationship between a speaker in a poem and the poet his/herself in Contemporary Poetry?  How should we be reading your poetry?

 

MD: I think in all my published work, there are maybe four poems that aren't spoken by some version of myself; there's a monologue by a dog, by a heroine of the Paris Commune, by a friend in a hospital watching his sister die, and one by a woman who thinks she's a reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian. And of course all those are versions of me, too!

 

But the fact is, what you put on the page is always a version of self, even if you feel you are being strictly allegiant to the truth. You can't get the whole, complex, hard-to-know self on the page. I believe in performing as many aspects of myself, and therefore there are plain spoken poems and more markedly wrought ones. And poems which seem to come with my biography attached and poems wherein "I" is much more of a placeholder, an open space for a reader to step into.

 

AMK: “Fog” is, hands down, one of my favorite poems.  I remember the first time I read it and, talking to a colleague, admitted I didn’t understand what the poem was about.  Later, giving it a closer reading, it became clear what was going on in the poem, and once the basic narrative of the poem was clear to me, I simply fell in love with the sad, searching movement of the lines that take us from the blood tests, to the ouija board, and to the ghosts who yearn to live.

 

I think this is an important aspect/problem of poetry…that it sometimes asks a lot of a reader, which can be a delight if he or she goes along with it…

 

Now, looking at this poem, I realize I wasn’t a great reader when I first came to “Fog,” but I’m wondering what you think is reasonable and unreasonable to expect of a reader and how you convince someone to work with a poem that they find “less than easy” to read.

 

MD: It would be a mistake for them all to be immediately transparent, since experience isn't like that. I do my best to be clear, but I understand that some poems may require greater patience on the reader's part, or that there might be a delay in getting at what's taking place. But if I do my job well, then you want to stay with a poem; you grant it a line of credit, as it were, believing that it may resolve before your eyes, as you keep looking, in the way that a challenging painting might.

 

AMK: Similarly, do you think “Fog” is a difficult poem?  And if so, were you aware of this when you wrote it…how did this awareness affect its writing?

 

MD: I think it's emotionally difficult. It's sidling up to a feeling of utter and complete devastation, the emptying-out of the speaker's future. Therefore it needs an array of vehicles -- ouija and garden and fog -- to approach the

molten core of the matter. I wonder if anyone ever thinks their own poems are difficult? My friend Jean Valentine, who is notorious among readers for a certain degree of opacity, always says that she could not be any more clear.

I thought I'd been very clear here, and then I was surprised when a reviewer said that my poem lacked courage because it would not inscribe the word "positive." I've done everything in my power to point to that word, which had newly become terrible, late in the 1980s, and to portray the speaker's horror of it. Do I need to make it more plain than that?

 

AMK: Another element of “Fog” that I think is particularly beautiful is the dualistic nature of its voice, which, at times, speaks from inside the poem and, at others, from outside the poem. 

 

When I say inside, I’m thinking of lines like “The crested iris by the front gate waves / its blue flags three days, exactly” and

 

Sitting out on the back porch at twilight,

I'm almost convinced.  In this geometry

 

of paths and raised beds, the green shadows

of delphinium, there's an unseen rustling…

 

lines that seem to come from within the experience. 

 

By outside, I mean lines like

 

Maybe because it contains so much dying,

         all these tulip petals thinning

 

          at the base until any wind takes them.

I doubt anyone else would see that, looking in,

 

and then I realize my garden has no outside, only is

subjectively…

 

lines that emit from some other place, a more reflective voice; a voice looking back.

 

Do you see the poem in this way?  Is this an element of form that we should read as a reflection of what the poem is about?

 

MD: I spoke earlier about perception and inquiry. The lines you point to are an example of that: here's a place in the poem where a scene is evoked, and here's a meditation on that scene. I like this kind of yoking because it feels to me like consciousness.  This is my departure from the old "show don't tell" advice that grows out of Imagism; I like poems that show and then go on to "tell" -- that is, to examine, consider, question, propose.  And in this particular poem, the speaker is desperately trying to get out of the experience, trying to find some way to stand at a remove from an oncoming train, as it were.

 

AMK: Thank you so much for your time.