Ahead of the Cúirt festival, opening tonight, Mark Doty tells Belinda McKeon how his writing - and his dogs - have helped him get through difficult times
He would grow up to become one of the most important poets of gay identity and the devastation wrought by Aids; but even as a schoolboy in 1960s Arizona, Mark Doty knew a thing or two about the relationship between poetry and struggle. About the need to fight for his right to articulate, in poetic form, his own experience. Aged 15, and with "a noisy, overwhelming interior life which demanded some kind of form", Doty found refuge of sorts in the local bookstore, with its modest shelf of poetry by American and international authors.
"There were so few of them that they were all faced out on the shelf," he remembers. "There was the selected Lorca, with a blurry photograph of trees on the front, and there were early books by Charles Simic, illustrated with these beautiful kind of surrealist collages, and there were all these other gorgeous, hand-made poetry books. And I just started reading these things and feeling very drawn to them. There was language there that said more than words could say. That went beyond the denotative to point to something outside of itself - something saturated in mystery and feeling and colour. And I was really drawn to make something like that myself."
Which was precisely where the struggle began; not just the poet's struggle to create the line, and to go beyond it, but the artist's struggle to be taken seriously, to be believed in, to be read at all. "I was doing little notebook things, and scribbling out poems," he explains. He showed the work to his high-school drama teacher, and was promptly accused of having plagiarised the whole thing. "She said, 'no, it's supposed to be something that you wrote' . . . she didn't believe me," he smiles. "It wasn't that the poems were good poems, but they were precocious in some fashion; not everybody was reading Lorca, and so forth."
To teach him a lesson, the teacher took Doty's "little baby surrealist poems" to the office of Richard Shelton, a poet who taught at the University of Tucson, looking for confirmation that the work was, indeed, lifted wholesale from some book or other. But Shelton's response was not what she anticipated.
"He invited me to come down to the poetry centre in Tucson, which is an old house on the campus, completely lined with hand-made broadsides, and photos of poets, and so on, and he said I could hang out there any time, and I could come to readings. He gave me suggestions about my poems, and about things that I could read."
Shelton also showed Doty that it was possible to be a poet, to live a life dedicated to the crafting of words, and the early encouragement proved fruitful.
Now 52, Doty lives in New York and has published seven collections of poetry and three books of prose, and has garnered several awards. He has been, so far, the only American poet to win the TS Eliot Prize for poetry. His 1993 collection, My Alexandria, and his memoir Heaven's Coast (1996) are fundamental documents in the understanding of the Aids epidemic, of the suffering it brought and the reorientation it necessitated. Emerging out of the illness and eventual death (in 1994) from Aids of Doty's long-term partner, they, and the books which follow, are intelligent, moving explorations of loss, and of the relentless questioning that drives and deepens grief.
Aids, the speaker in the title poem of Atlantis (1995) says, is:
"not even a real word
but an acronym, a vacant
four-letter cipher
that draws meanings into itself,
reconstitutes the world."
The need to realise this painful reconstitution of the world is met, in Doty's work, with an energetic and beautiful reconstitution of another sort; the poetic reconstitution, the piecing back together, albeit in a very different form, the world of experience that has been cruelly, unforgettably shattered.
HIS LATEST COLLECTION, School of the Arts, is preoccupied, he says, "with time and a meditation on the fact of living in time . . . Arguing. Regretting. Constructing a justification of sorts for time passing". Several poems are concerned with the idea of heaven, the tension between the unknown future and "memory's furious land". With regard to the trauma from which earlier books emerged, School of the Arts represents not a healing, but a handling of a more knowing sort, an acceptance of vulnerability.
Looking back at the period following his partner's death, Doty says he could not imagine having survived without the outlet of simply writing down words. His attempt to map his loss, both in poetry and in prose, began, in fact, before that loss had truly occurred, during the final weeks of his partner's illness.
"I couldn't finish those poems, but I had to write something, even during the crisis of the illness, because that was what I've always done, to know what I think, know what I feel," explains Doty. "If I don't write I feel that I'm half alive, that I'm not present within the world. So I was working on some things, and I couldn't finish anything. When he died, I found myself entirely unable to write at all, and in that state of shattered concentration which new grief brings."
But he began to work on an essay, a piece commissioned by the editor of a book about gay men and faith. Washing the dishes one night, he found his opening sentence. Over the course of a few weeks, he found the sentences which followed. "I just kept working, and these sentences felt literally like footsteps . . . if I just paid attention to the sentences in front of me, I could keep going through this feeling.
"I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't been able to make a book," Doty says of the process of writing Heaven's Coast, which saw him through the first 18 months after his partner's death. "When I finished it, I thought, what do people do? How do people live through a loss, who don't have something to make? Maybe it's that most of us make, but what we make might be a story we tell over and over. It might be that we construct an experience, we make a kind of memorial."
Soon after finishing Heaven's Coast, Doty went on to write another book which can only be described as a memoir, Firebird, dealing with a childhood lived in the shadow of his mother's alcoholism - a childhood which ended, at 17, with marriage to another alcoholic woman, 20 years his senior. The marriage lasted nine years. "At first, I thought this was going to be a very different process, because I was writing about things that happened 30 years ago," he says. "But then childhood turned out to be right in the next room. I mean, I was again grateful to have the tongs of form to use to touch that difficult stuff."
TO HAVE WRITTEN two memoirs by his early 50s is unusual for any writer, but the form of memoir suits him, he says, because he is interested in how experience "keeps providing different kinds of contexts, different ways of seeing". He has written beautifully (in a recent essay in the magazine The Writer's Chronicle) on the relationship between memoir and memory, and on what he calls the phenomenology of memory - the unique ways in which each individual remembers, say, his mother, which will be different to how she is remembered by her other children, or by her husband.
Seeking words to express the task of the memoir, he quotes the poet Alfred Corn, who says that the idea "hard to get in focus/is not how things/Looked but how the look felt /then - and then, now." "I couldn't write a historical book," says Doty, "in the sense of trying to reach an agreed-upon constructed truth. I like memoir that honours the instability and the flux of memory." Which is perhaps why he has just finished the manuscript of a third memoir, Dog Years, which will be published later this year, and deals with that quintessential New Yorker obsession: the relationship with the dog.
Doty had, until their recent deaths, two retrievers, who lived with him through the hardest periods of his life, and the hardest period in the life of his adopted city. The new book is, he says, "an eccentric project" which looks at life after 2001 through a very alternative lens. Intriguingly, for a writer who has dealt so unshirkingly with the human condition, Dog Years works, he says, by "keeping people somewhat in the background". In a city like New York, people function, he says, by investing emotionally in their pets.
"When we can't bring ourselves to apprehend, say, the suffering of other people, the animal becomes a vehicle. People use them to negotiate their relationships . . . and as a social solvent. You bring them into a room and everybody talks to each other - about the dog." Has he found new companions to fill their place? Doty smiles, and shakes his head a little sadly. "Right now I'm between dogs," he says. "I wrote a book instead."
Mark Doty reads at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, Fri, 4.30pm, at Cúirt International Festival of Literature, which opens tonight. www.galwayartscentre.ie/cuirt
