in a gentle, insistent voice. "Of course, talking about poetry and writing it are two
very different things, but there’s something about that dialogue between teacher and
student that is nurturing for me as a writer. I enjoy that kind of structured contact with
other people and their stories, with their struggles to shape themselves on the
page."
Reading poetry to audiences, he says, helps his writing. "I learn
about new poems in the process of reading aloud. You listen differently when you’re
reading to an audience – it’s as if part of you is in that audience listening to that new
poem. You hear weaker lines, glitches, rhythmic problems, and that helps in the revision
process. Of course, the real work of poetry happens when one reader is alone with one book
because, when we read a poem by ourselves, we can stop and start, daydream about what
we’ve just read, take time to examine. What you hear in a poetry reading is always the
skin of a poem. You can’t apprehend the depths and complexities of a good poem when it’s
simply read to you once."
He thinks of himself "as a literary writer with roots in a tradition
that values complexity and a certain sort of thickness of language; a poetry I hope that
can’t be gotten in one hearing."
But why was poetry worth listening to anyway? Why was it so humanly
valuable? "Poetry is a kind of distillation of individuality amidst a world where the
unique, the one-off, is at some risk. Driving through Devon this morning, I was startled
to come upon a branch of Staples, an American office supply chain, a store that you can
walk into in almost any medium-sized city in the States. Let that stand for the
universalisation and standardisation of so many kinds of experience. Poetry is absolutely
resistant to that . . ."
So poetry is a bulwark against consumerism? "It is in a way. Of
course there is a tiny degree in which poetry can be commodified and sold, but it can also
of course be endlessly xeroxed, published on the Internet, memorised and possessed by many
people. And what is a poem but a sort of replica or model of an individual process of
knowing, and since each of us knows a little bit differently, and each of us has that
combination of voice and internal rhythm and ways of seeing which are capable of making
something idiosyncratically and unmistakably ours, then the poem keeps putting the self
into the forefront in a way which is profoundly valuable . . ."
Poetry, then, establishes a kind of world-wide community of interior
lives? "That would be my hope, yes, that it continues to put interiority into the
foreground. Also, happily, a poem can’t just live in the interior. If it did it would be
perhaps just a journal entry. It might just be solipsistic. Or purely private. The best
poems, real poems, reach out to include readers, and so they model the process of
interiority meeting the exterior, the self in a community. Hooray for that . . ."
Doty’s voice sounds Southern – and that’s where his forebears come from.
His mother’s family, Irish immigrants who left during the potato famine, settled in
Sweet-water, Tennessee. "My great-grand-mother remembered riding in the back of a
covered wagon from Georgia to Tennessee, fleeing Sherman’s return march. They were
dirt-poor millet farmers."
Doty’s parents left the rural South at the beginning of the second world
war. His father was an army engineer, so they moved from town to town, sometimes in the
South, sometimes in the West, from one anonymous place to another. "I grew up with a
sense that home was something one constructed or carried around inside. I grew up loving
books because they were reliable company. You could take them with you . . ."
Aged 16, Doty met a poet, realised that "poetry might be a way to
live" and enrolled at the University of Tucson, Arizona. He then dropped out, married
at the age of 18, got into school teaching, graduated and took an intensive poetry course.
He didn’t begin to accept that he was gay until 1981. He gave up on a bad
and stultifying marriage and, with $600 in his pocket, headed to Manhattan. "I got a
job as a secretary," he says, "and began what seemed to me a real life because
in my early twenties, like many gay men of my generation, I had been in flight from my
sexuality. I had issues of identity to work out before I could begin to live a life that
was founded in something more authentic . . ."
He had two poetry collections published. Then his life and work were
dramatically changed by the discovery that his lover, Wally Roberts, was HIV-positive.
Wally’s subsequent decline, culminating in his death in 1994, transfigured Doty’s art
rather as the intimate and terrible experience of war transfigured Wilfred Owen’s 80 years
ago.
In two poetry collections – My Alexandria and Atlantis -
and a prose memoir entitled Heaven’s Coast, Aids became, in Doty’s words,
"the great intensifier", and the poetry itself an increasingly anguished and
complicated negotiation with imminent death. During Wally’s decline, the couple settled in
Provincetown at the very tip of Cape Cod; in the poems that little town, with its salt
marsh and shifting dunes, seems to embody the very idea of transience.
I asked Doty how his poetry – and his image of that coastal town (he still
lives there for six months of the year) – had changed since Wally’s death. After the
removal of the Damoclean sword, what next? "Well, the poems I have found myself
writing over the last two years are much less about grief than they are about a passage
back to participation in the world, about the renewal of that contract that we make with
life to be a part of things. In some ways I think these new poems are more public because
they are less involved with some desperate negotiation with mortality. I am turning my
attention out to other things. I think they have some different sorts of colour to them,
too, a different music, and a different harmonic character maybe . . ."
But did he see Provincetown differently now? "I’ve spent much less
time there over the past two years. In part, that was because I wanted to clear the slate,
to get away from its intensity and small-town character. It’s a place that’s so fraught
with history for me – not only my life with Wally, but so many people I knew there have
died in such a short period of time. In some ways I feel like I’ve lived there for decades
even though I’ve in fact only lived there for about seven years.
"The character of the community’s changing, too. When I first came
there, it was very much a refuge for people who didn’t expect to live long. Now, because
of new drugs and the sort of strange new hopeful position of the epidemic, suddenly people
aren’t moving to Provincetown planning to die any more . . ."
When I asked him about his politics Doty replied with an uncharacteristic
lack of assurance and fluency. He said that he had consistently voted Democrat but that,
in his heart, he was something much closer to a libertarian. "The places where I’ve
been most politically engaged have been with gay issues, but I think that the best use of
my energies is not in organising but through writing . . .
"That does not mean necessarily writing overtly political poetry,
though. The reason for that is as follows. I’ve mostly written from the principle that I
wanted to make a discovery in the course of writing a poem. If I knew what I thought or
felt, I would be less likely to write because I depend upon the energy of uncovering what
I think and feel about any subject. Which makes political poetry – overtly political
poetry – particularly difficult."
What next? A new collection of poems is due out in America next spring; he
plans to write a prose memoir on his earliest years in the autumn. "It’s a story
about childhood and the love of poetry," he told me. "I bet you didn’t know I
used to do interpretative dances to Stravinsky at the age often, Michael . . ."
No, I hadn’t known, but I could easily have imagined it.
Copyright ? 1997 New Statesman, Ltd.