I know that most folks think that we spend all our time here at Casa de Armed Liberal reading Montesquieu's correspondence, obscure postmodern works by Baudrillard, or Jim Crews' excellent self-published book on urban shotgun. And we do all those things.
But I have a secret...I'm actually a poetry nut.
And the guy who triggered all this is a modern poet, fellow Slug (U.C. Santa Cruz type), and seriously over-the-top gay imagist, Mark Doty. Nine years ago, I was on a business trip to Washington, and I picked up a copy of Phoebe, the literary magazine of George Mason University. I have the issue here...Summer, 1993.
And I read his poem "Two Cities," and got floored. Here are some excerpts:
I had grown sick of human works,
which seemed to me a sum
and expression of failure: spoilers,
brutalizers of animals and one another,
self-absorbed until we couldn't see
that we ruined, finally,
ourselves - what could we make?
An epidemic ran unhalted,
The ill circumscribed as worthless and unclean;
...
The dawn was angling into the city,
A smoky, thumb-smudged gold. It struck
first a face, not human, terracotta,
on an office building's intricate portico,
seeming to fire the material from within,
so that the skin was kindled,
glowing. And then I looked up: the ramparts
of Park Avenue were radiant, barbaric;
they were continuous with every city's dream
of itself, the made world's
angled assault on heaven.
The city was one splendidly lit idea -
...
"Venice," Nietzsche said,
"is a city of a hundred solitudes."
New York is a city of ten million,
And my American Venice
- phantom boulevards rippling
and doubled in the dark - a city
of two hundred and fifty million
solitaires, the restless dreamers'
dreamed magnificence: our longing's
troubled mirror, vaprous capitol.
So now, Doty has a new book of poetry out: Source.
And it's hard to review. It's brilliant. But it mines the same vein of imagery and emotion - the weight of adult life stilled by the quick gasp one gives when confronted by beauty - and while I'm glad to own it and recommend it, the shock of discovery is missing.
Then again, it's a brilliant book.
When I was in grad school, I always had trouble grading. How did you grade casual brilliance as opposed to grinding effort?
Somehow, because of Mark Doty, I have been expecting poetry to change my life, and maybe it has, just a little, as I look in new ways at the sunlit buildings above me or the dead leaves below. Maybe I'm loading him with too much of my desire for transcendence, and maybe he's just a damn good poet.
I'll leave you with a brief snipped from the new book (it's from the poem excerpted on Amazon, so I'm not giving his work away...).
A little rabbit dead in the grass
All that was quick
Soul of dart and hurry
No soul now,
And still the body
- not even the length
of my hand -
seems poised
for springing, legs
jutting forward
and back as if
in mid-leap...
And here comes
The So? of poetry;
Just one bunny dead
Of mysterious causes,
...
Buy the damn book. Buy all the poetry you can find; it is the soul's beautiful armor.
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