Mark DotyKirja-arvosteluja

A genuine and heartfelt autobiography, as one might anticipate from a poet of Mark Doty's caliber. One of my favorite poets gave an honest presentation, which I appreciated.

Excellent. I read Herbert at 17 with no preparation or particular interest and found some kind of kindred spirit. I feel that again here.

For the poets among you.

dogs, unread, memoir, creative nonfiction, LGBTQ

"It is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we're everywhere. It is an art that points to meaning through wordlessness, that points to timelessness through things permanently caught in time."

A moving, erudite meditation on the the way we relate intimately to objects. Doty's examination of Dutch still life paintings; his memories of objects and their intimate associations from childhood; his recollection of auction days, items purchased, and how positioning objects against other objects changes narrative and therefore our relation to each piece; and, finally, the link between intimacy, time, mortality, and aesthetics -- all of these are explored with precision, grace, and with an immense compassion for visual art, poetry (e.g., Cavafy, Lorca, Glück), and how our relationships with these objects of art and memory influence our daily existence.

An amazing account that articulated in the language of a poet the emotional responses our dogs create. The sense of loss, the moments of despair, all things I wished I had words for while grappling with the loss of my dog. Despite crying profusely throughout the entire book, I loved it for a reminder of the power of a bond between human and canine.

Last night I sat down with a glass of wine and Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, by the poet Mark Doty. I read it in one go and a second glass of wine. I really don’t have words to describe the experience of reading it. Any attempt to express it seems shallow after Doty’s beautifully crafted prose. I will only say that it has been a long time since I read a book that spoke so deeply to me, but this phrase also seems shallow and clichéd. Yet, speak to me it did.

This book defies genre, and my appreciation of it maybe comes from the fact that I had no expectations about it. Reading other reviewers it seems to me that those mostly disappointed by it were the readers that tried to peg it to a genre, be it art review, memoir or poetry. And if they were looking for a specific theme they had the right to feel disappointed, because it is all of these - art review, memoir and poetry – and none of it.

Oh, I envy Mark Doty though. How can he name so effortless – as it seems - the experiences of my heart. I too have...

...fallen in love with a painting. (...) have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed.

Often I shy away from describing my experience of art, as I don’t have the academic knowledge or vocabulary to do it, and speaking of art as it tugs my heart, I tend to be melodramatic and incoherent. Then Mark Doty comes along and says it for me, so beautifully, so tenderly.

But he also speaks of life, death and grieving. Maybe this is a book about grieving more than anything else. And on grief he again puts words to feelings I have not been able to vocalize:

Not the grief vanishes – far from it – but that it begins in time to coexist with pleasure; sorrow sits right beside the discovery of what is to be cherished in experience. Just when you think you are done.

It felt surprising too that in a book so small – 70 pages – I relate so close to two of Doty’s experiences. I too love to browse through state sales and auctions. In my part of the world the state auctions are mainly of farm machinery and mechanical tools, but I have found small treasures here and there. White porcelain napkin holders in the shape of chubby chickens, tucked away in a sad box of Tupperware. Medalta pottery, cracked and beautiful in its utility. A wooden horse, its original tail replaced by a rough cord, a survivor of many children’s play. A pocket size New Testament encased in metal covers to protect the heart of a loved one from a bullet on WWI.

These excursions into people’s past, their day-to-day, now relegated to the junk pile. I always felt there was a lesson here, and again I never was able to vocalize it, to name it.

Then, there is Mark Doty’s trip to Amsterdam on his 45th birthday. I was in Amsterdam this last September, celebrating not mine but one of my sister’s 45th birthday. We are three sisters spread very evenly around the globe. I live in the middle of Canada, the birthday girl lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the baby of the family lives in Hong Kong, China. Amsterdam of all places on Earth seemed to be the epicentre of our geographical distances.

I wish that I could say that, like Mark Doty, that a visit to the Rijksmuseum was the highlight of our trip, but actually we never made it there. As it is often the case with sisters, we have very different approaches to life, art and travel, and this trip, as special as it was, was really a great exercise on compromises. I forgo the Rijksmuseum for the Van Gogh Museum and an Antiquity Art Show on Alexander the Great at the Amsterdam’s Hermitage Museum.

My experiences at both Museums felt short of Doty’s experience at the Rijksmuseum, and short of my own visits to other art museums in previous years. I found the Van Gogh collection and museum to be too small for the amount of visitors. It was crowed and hot in there. Too many people elbowing each other for a view of the masterpieces made it impossible for me to achieve an emotional connection to the paintings. Yes, rationally I admired then, but I never experience, as Mark Doty would say, being pulled into it, held there and instructed by it. How sorry I feel to say it even, as Van Gogh’s works, above most, generally provoke and emotional connection and response from me.

As for the show at the Hermitage, it was an historical show. Not that the pieces were not artistic, but their value was in the historical exposition of Alexander’s life and influence at his time. An experience that was much more rational than emotional for me.

Yet, I relate to what Doty says on having his senses sharpened by this trip to Amsterdam, and by the viewing of a painting, or art object. And I related to what I think is his bigger message on this book, of how the essence of life impregnates the objects around us. How a chipped china plate carries the memories of other times, other people, and how its intrinsic beauty can affect us and our own lives.

If the museums I visited in Amsterdam did not provoke this, the house of Anne Frank certainly did. Had I been travelling by myself, the line up of people waiting outside would have driven me away. I also suffer from mild claustrophobia, and felt anxious in anticipation of the small spaces that the Franks had to live in. But again, this was a trip of compromises, and one of my sisters felt strongly about visiting it, so we went.

The Frank’s hiding place was actually bigger than I had imagined, and what really disturbed me was its emptiness. As per requested by Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, all furniture has been removed. The walls still have the collages the girls did from pictures in magazines that they cut and pasted on a few walls. An open widow in the attic, which they would open from time to time, framed the autumn colours of the trees on the street.

But it was in the absence of personal objects that their suffering was more poignant. The nothingness of life exposed almost brutally. Who were those people? Where are the chairs were they sat to eat and talk? The plates and cutlery? Where are the echoes of their voices, laughter and cries if nothing of their surroundings, the objects of their daily lives, were also taken from us.

Could a painting of the trees outside replace for the Franks that open window?
No, I don’t think so. As I see it, art does not replace life. But a painting of the view of that widow could let us glimpse into their existence. And sometimes I painting, an installation, and sculpture do just that. It allows us to share an awareness beyond past and future, and we are faced with an essence of feelings and life.

Would I be betraying their pain if I said I felt as if I was viewing an artistic installation while visiting the actual rooms where the Franks hided? I felt detached from the particular individuals that lived and suffered in there, but was embraced by all the suffering represented in the void of this space; the vacuum of their deaths and the deaths of many others in the same time period.

But, here I am again trying to say something of my experience of art and becoming melodramatic... So I better stop right now. Go read the book. Mark Doty says it with so much more poetry and coherence than I could ever do it.

Long a fan of Mark Doty's work, both poetry, and memoir so relished diving into this exploration, and loved the discussion of Whitman's [Leaves of Grass], along with some biographical context. To date I've only read verses in anthologies.

However, I felt the volume slightly ill balanced by the aspects of memoir, with particular focus on Doty's sex life, which didn't quite work for me. It isn't new in Doty's writing, maybe for me now it's just a bit old. That said, there were some moments in the memoir that really shone.

When Whitman wrote [Leaves of Grass] large numbers of the general population read it without noticing the homoerotic aspects of some poems. Something unlikely to be the case now. In some ways I felt that Doty was addressing this book to those long dead readers. Perhaps he intended a reverse echo of what Whitman was doing addressing readers of the future.

I have pulled [Leaves of Grass] from the shelf, ready to read the whole thing in the near future.

I've always had a mixed relationship with Walt Whitman's poetry: there's a gloriously liberating quality in the way he digs out handfuls of names and trade-terms and idioms, formal and informal, and takes it for granted that there is a poem in there somewhere; there's his endless fascination with breaking down the barrier of skin between himself and the rest of humanity (especially beautiful working men...) — but there's also his brash self-promotion, his arrogant assumption of American primacy in the world, his Wordsworth-like descent into celebrity-prophet status in old age, and the way that so many of his best lines have been turned into clichés that make it difficult to read them afresh. And — perhaps above all — he's a poet who gave implicit permission to generations and generations of lesser imitators (especially, but not exclusively, in his own country) to rant endlessly in free verse.

Doty has a go at overcoming these problems, in a book that's a mixture of critical biography of Whitman, seminar-room close-reading of parts of "Song of myself" and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", and a confessional memoir of Doty himself as gay man, poet, teacher and Whitman-reader in the 20th century. He digs into the early editions of Leaves of grass and the circumstances of their production to help us see what was so radical and new about what Whitman was giving himself the authority to do: not only breaking away from strict forms and integrating vernacular language in ways that Coleridge and Wordsworth could only dream about, but writing directly and almost without evasion about sexuality and the physicality of our desire for other bodies (much of this got toned down in later editions). Doty reminds us of the relative freedom Whitman still had to write about love between men in the 1850s, before the medicalisation of same-sex desire made readers start looking in such texts for the criminal and perverted. Even then, I think you'd have to be very blind to coded messages not to see at least some of the queer sexual imagery Whitman thrusts at us...

I did find it a little bit disturbing how smoothly Doty switches between his blackboard voice and his bedroom voice. Obviously there's something deliberately Whitmanesque about that technique: he wants us to understand that reading a poem isn't just a matter of analysing the words in a classroom, you have to be able to find parallels in your own experience to project it onto as well, even if most of us aren't called upon to do that publicly. Sometimes hearing about Doty's life and the men in it and what they meant to him was interesting and wonderful, but sometimes it felt like being trapped with an embarrassingly confessional stranger in a railway compartment.

Still, a worthwhile book, and one that seems to deal very fairly with Whitman.

Still Life With Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty 5.0

I read this book for my Delve Class, now being held on Zoom. I am totally loving it even if we can't access the Portland Art Museum where this class was supposed to be held. (COVID-19)

Doty explores what makes paintings so precious, and furthermore, why we value art at all, or the objects around our house. Where does the meaning come from, the value? It's not just their monetary worth that counts. He evokes subtle colors, rough textures, rich scents, and eternal love. (I used 27 book darts, marking passage I want to revisit, which is saying a lot since the book is only 70 pages long.)

Doty is a poet, and the richness of his words cannot be surpassed as he describes the beauty of these paintings and of life. There are no pictures in the book, which forced me to use my imagination to translate his lines of prose into strokes of imagery. Only afterwards did I venture to the internet to look up these Masters' works of art.

And then there is his exploration of the meaning of life.

Here are just a few quotes:

"On one side of the balance is the need for home, for the deep solid roots of place and belonging; on the other side is the desire for travel and motion, for the single separate spark of the self freely moving forward, out into time, into the great absorbing stream of the world.

A fierce internal debate, between staying moored and drifting away, between holding on and letting go. Perhaps wisdom lies in our ability to negotiate between these two poles. Necessary to us, both of them--but how to live in connection with out feeling suffocated, compromised, erased? We long to connect: we fear that if we do, our freedom, and individuality will disappear." (p. 7)

"...a poetic field of objects arrayed against the dark, things somehow joined in a conspiracy of silence, taking place...in the time of art, which is a little nearer to the time of eternity than our poor daily gestures." (p. 15)

"...Goethe commented that he would rather posses the painting of the thing than the sumptuous object itself; the image, as rendered in oil, was more lovely and, finally, more desirable. I agree, but it is the image of the daily world I prefer to own. When both are made of paint, is a cabbage any less precious than a golden cup?" (p. 36)

Read this!!

3.5 i love poetry, it is often soothing to me, makes me look at things in different ways. This book came in my Strand book box, and it was a poet of which I had never heard. It highlights the beauty of the natural world, some striking images are invoked. It is also about death, death due to AIDS, but also the natural death due to their natural cycle in nature. Sunflowers, green crabs and even mackerel. It is hard to describe poetry without including a sample, unless it is a widely known poet. Unfortunately, however, all the poems are too lengthy, and I would be thing way to long. So you'll have to take my word for it, if you enjoy poetry give this one a chance.½

This slim volume contains the words of great poets (Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings, May Swenson and more), as well as beautifully crafted sentences. The chapter "Description's Alphabet" is genius. Two favorite quotes: "Description is an ART to the degree that it gives us not just the world but the inner life of the witness." "ECONOMY is a virtue, albeit an overrated one ... EXCESS, which is seldom understood to be a virtue, can certainly be a pleasure."

Mark brings Beau home from the shelter when his partner Larry is dying. Beau joins Arden, their black retriever. There is so much joy in the book, but also so much loss (both human and canine.) For anyone who has loved (and lost). The chapters are almost like short essays. Have tissues nearby, for your tears of joy and sadness.

With this collection of thoughts and essays. Mark Doty shows that not only is he a fine poet, he is also a great explicator of poetry and advocate for its craft. He argues effectively for description of the world and the inner experience of it, and the informing of each by the other.

Doty also points to a critical problem with so much current poetry:

"Startling, to go description-hunting and realize that I can thumb through whole books of recent poems with very little evocation of sense perception within them. Why is this the case? I declare myself here on the side of allegiance to the sensible, things as they are, the given, the incompletely knowable, never to get done or get it right or render it whole: ours to say and say. The mightiest of our resources brought to the task, to make the world real."

There is a loss of faith in the ability of language to be more than solipsistic, and a concomitant loss in the craft of making things sensible in both definitions of the word:

"Now everybody in creation mistrusts language, and half the poems we read make a nod toward the unsayable. What’s to be done? Language won’t do what we wish it would, but we have nothing else—so we have to go forward and behave as if it could do what we wanted (with some faith in the miraculous fact that it does, from time to time, give us a “Song of Myself” or a Tender Buttons, something the world wouldn’t be the same without).
"Perhaps we can inhabit the interesting middle ground that lies between, on the one side, giving up on referentiality altogether, and, on the other, cleaving to an outdated notion that words can be controlled, can say what we mean to say when we wish to make use of them."

This a book for lovers of beautiful words and the desperate craft of believing that their distillation in unexpected liquors still makes life more alive.

A courageous and emotionally powerful collection, "Fire to Fire" exhibits Mark Doty's poetical range and aesthetic. He speaks with clarity of language and image, is not afraid to allow the natural world to speak for him, and faces death and life after the deaths of so many close to him with honesty and impossible hope:

"All smolder and oxblood, these flowerheads, flames of August: fierce bronze, or murky rose, petals concluded in gold— And as if fire called its double down the paired goldfinches come swerving quick on the branching towers, so the blooms sway with the heft of hungers indistinguishable, now, from the blossoms."

"Sometimes we wake not knowing how we came to lie here, or who has crowned us with these temporary, precious stones."

He reveals the survivor's wonder and guilt when he survives when so many friends and a lover die in the great AIDS crisis:

"And why did a god so invested in permanence choose so fragile a medium, the last material he might expect to last?"

Doty is not afraid to come close to the sentimental when talking about Beau and Arden, his dogs, as they age through their briefer lives and die before he was ready.

Every poems is crafted for this world. And while Doty acknowledges the great rift created by the 1970s Postmodern experimentation and loss of faith in language, he believes in the power of words well-chosen to carry us through our individual and collective search for meaning: He knows the surprise that comes when the poem reaches beyond what the poet thought he wanted:

"The poem wants the impossible; the poem wants a name for the kind nothing at the core of time,"

Read this collection. You will be heartbroken at times, but that is our lot. And Doty is a great voice and his gentle but courageous presence is welcome on this journey.

I stupidly hadn't realized this little book was about poetry before I started reading. I'm not a poet, and I hate poetic analysis, so I was unimpressed by the number of pages Doty dedicated to criticism. That said, those pages were very well done, so if I was a poet, I probably would have been wowed.

What I enjoyed the most about this book was the "Description's Alphabet," an A to Z assemblage of random thoughts on description that I found readily applicable to prose as well as poetry. Hooray.

It's definitely a sophisticated book on craft--I'd recommend it to a poet looking to take their art to another level. Not so much to someone looking to start dabbling in poetry

dog years offers some compelling reading,
but the author lost me when he refused to ignore his partner's words and so left a small, starving female dog
on the street of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She had chosen him. He rejected her.

As he wrote, he could fairly easily have taken her, but decided not to show the compassion for which
he readily faults others throughout his book. If she would not have worked well with Arden, he could
have advocated for another good home in New York City or beyond.

This is an amazing book. It is sad throughout. If the book were a painting, and you can imagine sadness as a color, the entire background would be that color.

However, the purpose of the book (in my opinion anyway) is to point out that sadness is just the background, while life is the foreground, the real object of the painting. Sadness just provides context that makes the reality of life even more vibrant.

We will all experience loss in varying degrees throughout our lives. It doesn't really matter what we believe happens after someone dies, there is still a hole they once occupied. One measure of our connection to others and our humanity is how willing we are to make room for more holes. After all, what could be more humane than to accept someone into our lives who we know will eventually leave a hole?

There is nothing wrong with the book, or memoir, but it is all me. I went in to it not knowing what it was or who it was written by, and there is no fault there but my own. I can say nothing more.

Read this for my continuing ed class...beautiful writing! It gave me a new perspective on still lifes, something I had never thought much about. It's a pretty short book, so I will probably read through it again before the class meets.

I borrowed this ebook from my local library and pretty much read it in a single sitting. As Mark Doty shared his story I laughed, I teared up, and having recently lost my own dog, I related to it.

Mark and his partner Wally, are dads to Arden, a black Retriever. Wally has AIDS and is bedridden and dying. He was the one closest to Arden and the dog now sleeps in his bed, rarely leaving his side.
Although some thought it was not a good idea to bring a new dog into the house while his partner is terminally ill, Mark winds up going to the shelter and adopting Beau, an underweight, yet rambunctious Golden Retriever. Not too long after, Wally passes away leaving Mark and the dogs behind.

During a time of devastating grief over the loss of his partner, Mark says his dogs gave him the will to live. They needed him to care for them just as much as he needed them. Mark gives glimpses of his daily life with his dogs and with the new man in his life, Paul, whom he starts dating a year later.

As the years pass, dogs Arden and Beau both start to become ill. When Arden was sick and Mark described the visits to the vet and how he was trying to save him but deep down knew the end was near, I truly teared up. Then there were moments I laughed out loud, like when one woman took one look at Arden, who was obviously an older dog and getting towards the end of his life, and she makes a comment about how it's all part of the cycle of life. Mark shares the colorful reply that popped in his head but that would be too rude to say aloud.

I'm not surprised to see the author has published poetry as there is a distinct poetic flair within this candid memoir. I also enjoyed the Emily Dickinson snippets and references throughout.
Overall, I found Dog Years to be an interesting, heartfelt memoir and a lovely tribute to Mark's dogs.

"Somehow, memory, seems to slight a word, too evanescent; this is almost a physical sensation, the sound of those paws, and it comes allied to the color and heat of him, the smell of warm fur, the kinetic life of a being hardly ever still; what lives in me."
-at 79.8% e-copy, Dog Years: A Memoir by Mark Doty

disclaimer:
This review is my honest opinion. I did not receive any type of compensation for reading and reviewing this book. While I receive free books from publishers and authors I am under no obligation to write a positive review. I borrowed my copy of this book from the local library.

Hard to read, and hard to put down.

Gorgeous, lovely. A nice transition book for Z, who is falling somewhere between "kid" poetry and more adult stuff.

20 of these poems are good enough to re-read. About 5 good enough to read out loud to someone else. That's really not bad for one of these anthologies. Snag a used copy of this one--as long as you're not paying full price, you won't be disappointed.