American Poet Mark Doty at the Key West Literary Seminar 2015
Photo Credit: Nick Doll
from Messiah (Christmas Portions)
Aren’t we enlarged
by the scale of what we’re able
to desire? Everything,
the choir insists,
might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
quickened, now,
by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
Still time to change.
Mark Doty ( August 1953 – ) from Sweet Machine: Poems, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998
American poet Mark Doty embodies a deep and caring humanity that pours out of his face. Pours out of his poems. And it comes at a price: the personal suffering evident in his face and his poems. But joy is there too, earned, not naïve, joy. A joy connected to a choice he has made in his life to stay present with his suffering but also to choose joy. That joy especially comes through in his poems about his dogs and his latest book, Deep Lane, nominated for this year’s prestigious U.K.-based T.S. Eliot Award, has more of those to add to his oeuvre!
But another theme is central to Doty. It came out at his talks at the Key West Literary Seminar last January and is caught inside many of his poems including Messiah which he recited last January. It is the necessity of longing, of having appetite. I might add that longing can be its own suffering but it reminds me I am alive! For a link to a review of his main talk on desire at Key West click here.
Aren’t we enlarged/ by the scale of what we’re able/ to desire?
What a huge question and coming as it does at the end of his poem Messiah, which is included in its entirety below, it seems perfectly placed. From what comes before it in the poem I can say: yes. I can believe it. I also believe it knowing about his life. About his suffering as a gay man and especially as a gay man watching his beloved partner die of AIDS at the beginning of that epidemic in the 1980’s. With what he has suffered by longing, what courage to keep longing, and to remind us to keep longing as he does in this poem from his new book:
HUNGRY GHOST
Even if I understood what the teachers said,
that my desire was a thirst
for something beyond forms,
I believed I would be incomplete
if I did not know longing;
I would miss nothing,
wanted to be marked by the passage,
wanted to be inscribed.
And then I was given the key
to a wanting that won’t stop as long as I live.
Where was my gracious consent to attachment then?
I was taught to say, Please, Sir,
may I have more? Taught by craving, by the roar
in the blood rising without volition.
no place to stand that did not lean
forward, no still point. I harrowed sleep
and memory, descended into
the purely physical howl of the world,
learned my size in relation to appetite,
from which I could no more step back
than I could change eyes
through which I read this page.
When I’m gone, will I stop wanting?
Perhaps this is also a form of immortality:
submission to a craving without boundary.
To be ravenous, and lack a mouth.
Mark Doty from Deep Lane, W.W. Norton and Co., 2015
Oh, how I like how big a world Doty makes with his longing. How he descends into/ the purely physical howl of the world. How he wonders if wanting is also a form of immortality:/ submission to a craving without boundary.// To be ravenous, and lack a mouth.
To be ravenous and lack a mouth. That is a huge longing but how human is the longing unleashed inside him as he hears countless mouths singing the Messiah and becoming transported to another reality and taking Doty with them:
These aren’t anyone we know;
choiring dissolves
familiarity in an up-
pouring rush which will not
rest, will not, for a moment,
be still.
Aren’t we enlarged
by the scale of what we’re able
to desire? Everything,
the choir insists,
might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
quickened, now,
by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
Still time to change.
Here is Messiah in its entirety. Enjoy!
Messiah (Christmas Portions)
A little heat caught
in gleaming rags,
in shrouds of veil,
torn and sun-shot swaddlings:
over the Methodist roof,
two clouds propose a Zion
of their own, blazing
(colors of tarnish on copper)
against the steely close
of a coastal afternoon, December,
while under the steeple
the Choral Society
prepares to perform
Messiah, pouring, in their best
blacks and whites, onto the raked stage.
Not steep, really,
but from here,
the first pew, they’re a looming
cloudbank of familiar angels:
that neighbor who
fights operatically
with her girlfriend, for one,
and the friendly bearded clerk
from the post office
—tenor trapped
in the body of a baritone? Altos
from the A&P, soprano
from the T-shirt shop:
today they’re all poise,
costume and purpose
conveying the right note
of distance and formality.
Silence in the hall,
anticipatory, as if we’re all
about to open a gift we’re not sure
we’ll like;
how could they
compete with sunset’s burnished
oratorio? Thoughts which vanish,
when the violins begin.
Who’d have thought
they’d be so good? Every valley,
proclaims the solo tenor,
(a sleek blonde
I’ve seen somewhere before
—the liquor store?) shall be exalted,
and in his handsome mouth the word
is lifted and opened
into more syllables
than we could count, central ah
dilated in a baroque melisma,
liquefied; the pour
of voice seems
to make the unplaned landscape
the text predicts the Lord
will heighten and tame.
This music
demonstrates what it claims:
glory shall be revealed. If art’s
acceptable evidence,
mustn’t what lies
behind the world be at least
as beautiful as the human voice?
The tenors lack confidence,
and the soloists,
half of them anyway, don’t
have the strength to found
the mighty kingdoms
these passages propose
—but the chorus, all together,
equals my burning clouds,
and seems itself to burn,
commingled powers
deeded to a larger, centering claim.
These aren’t anyone we know;
choiring dissolves
familiarity in an up-
pouring rush which will not
rest, will not, for a moment,
be still.
Aren’t we enlarged
by the scale of what we’re able
to desire? Everything,
the choir insists,
might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
quickened, now,
by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
Still time to change.
Mark Doty from Sweet Machine; Poems, HarperCollins Publishers, 1998