The New Anthology of American Poetry: Vol. III: Postmodernisms 1950-Present

MARK DOTY

Ø Mark Doty 458 “A Red Palm” evokes the hard life of an immigrant working in the cotton fields of California ’s Central Valley. The exhausted father, home from a long day of poorly paid manual labor, encourages his son to do well in school in order to escape a similar fate. The poem focuses on a specific scene, which may be imagined or based on a childhood memory. It is a revealing look at working-class life and the bond between a father and his son. MARK DOTY b. 1953 Mark doty’s poems move in searching ways from vivid, complex surfaces toward intriguing and poignant depths. Regarding “A Display of Mackerel,” which appears below, Doty observes that “sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.” For Doty, “the drama of the poem is its action of thinking through a question,” and in this he resembles such poetic precursors as Elizabeth Bishop. Doty’s father was an army engineer, and Doty, who was born in Tennessee, moved with his family from base to base in the American South and West. Doty would later observe that “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.” Doty would ultimately earn a bachelor’s degree from Drake University and—while working various temporary jobs in New York City—an M.F.A. from Goddard College. Following an early, brief, and unhappy marriage, Doty gradually came to terms with his homosexuality . He later noted that, “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.” His poetry took on a new urgency and engagement after his longtime partner, Wally Roberts, was diagnosed with HIV in 1989 and died in 1994. Doty wrote the intimately touching elegy “The Embrace” in the aftermath of his partner ’s death. Doty for many years taught in the graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and now teaches at Rutgers University. further reading Mark Doty. Atlantis. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. — — — —. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. A Display of Mackerel Ø 459 — — — —. Sweet Machine. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. David R. Jarraway. “Creatures of the Rainbow: Wallace Stevens, Mark Doty, and the Poetics of Androgyny.” Mosaic 30.3 (September 1997): 169–83. A Display of Mackerel They lie in parallel rows, on ice, head to tail, each a foot of luminosity barred with black bands, which divide the scales’ radiant sections like seams of lead in a Tiffany window. Iridescent, watery prismatics: think abalone, the wildly rainbowed mirror of a soapbubble sphere, think sun on gasoline. Splendor, and splendor, and not a one in any way distinguished from the other —nothing about them of individuality. Instead they’re all exact expressions of the one soul, each a perfect fulfillment of heaven’s template, mackerel essence. As if, after a lifetime arriving at this enameling, the jeweler’s made uncountable examples, each as intricate * * * Ø Mark Doty 460 in its oily fabulation as the one before. Suppose we could iridesce, like these, and lose ourselves entirely in the universe of shimmer—would you want to be yourself only, unduplicatable, doomed to be lost? They’d prefer, plainly, to be flashing participants, multitudinous. Even now they seem to be bolting forward, heedless of stasis. They don’t care they’re dead and nearly frozen, just as, presumably, they didn’t care that they were living: all, all for all, the rainbowed school and its acres of brilliant classrooms, in which no verb is singular, or every one is. How happy they seem, even on ice, to be together, selfless, which is the price of gleaming. 1995 The Embrace You weren’t well or really ill yet either; just a little tired, your handsomeness tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead. I knew that to be true still, even in the...