Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Review of Atlantis by Mark Doty

Mark Doty: Capturing Essence in Description

In its colors, seasons, landscapes, and life cycles, nature has an infinite capability to answer and explain human curiosities, and as Aristotle said, “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” In Atlantis, Mark Doty uses the power of natural metaphor as a backbone for each poem in the collection. He touches on topics of loss, beauty, life, and courage, addressing each of them with an air of relaxed reflection. A brilliant palette of color, vocabulary, and structure feature boldly in these works, while a tone of casual insight gives the poems a smooth, polished feel.  Atlantis is broken chronologically and thematically into five distinct sections each containing between five and seven poems except for the third section which only contains one poem entitled Atlantis. Though the collection is primarily acknowledged as a description of and response to the AIDS induced death of Doty’s lover, Wally Roberts, Doty writes in what has been hailed as the tone of a “privileged observer.” The book maintains a generally detached and ultimately neutral position, neither optimistic nor pessimistic, though heartbreaking at times, and always stunningly vivid.
The first collection begins with Description, a poem which at first describes a dazzling marsh and then essentially answers the question “why write poetry?” As Doty eloquently puts it, “if we say / the marsh, if we forge / terms for it, then isn’t it // contained in us, / a little, / the brightness?” (p.5). He argues that by describing and formulating language for beautiful things, we can possess their beauty and make it our own. The descriptions are also used as a coping mechanism in the face of Wally’s tragic death. The poems are potentially how Doty holds onto his lost love and deals with that loss. This achieves ideally what a first poem should achieve by setting the tone for the collection and stating why the book was written at all. In a reoccurring theme, striking natural beauty is used to answer life’s big questions and initial description leads into a deeper meaning.
The whole first section contains a collection of primarily descriptive poems which include vivid colors, musical language, luminous objects and surfaces, and suggestions of deeper meaning in the seemingly everyday occurrences. In Four Cut Sunflowers, One Upside Down, a standard poem from the first section, Doty’s use of “argent and gold” is typical of the colorful descriptive language he uses as well as his remark that “the world’s / an elaborate dialogue / between citron and Prussian blue,” which includes the subtle auditory images that murmur in the background of his poems (p.7). In a thought provoking end, Doty writes, “[sunflowers] burn / with the ferocity / of dying (which is to say, the luminosity / of what’s living hardest)” and “Evening is overtaking them. / In this light they are voracious,” foreshadowing Wally’s struggle and ultimate demise (p.7).
The section concludes with, Grosse Fuge, a poem which is out of place with the others. It is the longest non-segmented poem in the whole book and even in the table of contents it stands out as the only title in italics. The poem introduces the reader to the main conflict of the whole book in the form of “Bobby,” (presumably short for Roberts) who is dying of AIDS and staying with the narrator during the last months of his life (p.20). The narrator’s pain stems from a fact he acknowledges at the end of the poem, that he feels he “can’t live / in such radical proximity to [Bobby’s] dying” (p.26). In many of the poems, the disease is associated with black and dark colors while Bobby is a blaze of yellow and other warm hues. He wears a “scarlet / parka and a red Jamaican hat… his clothes / in three flowered yellow pillowcases” and his AIDS is directly called “the black angel” (p.21, 23). Throughout various pieces and sections Wally is represented as the life of sunflowers and his disease is the slow creep of dark decay which overtakes them. Like its namesake, Grosse Fuge is a musical masterpiece, full of musical references and a pervasive verbal melody and a rhythm of sounds and seasons. Doty notes the difficulty of comprehending Beethoven’s late quartets saying, “how hard / it is, to apprehend something so large / in scale and yet so minutely detailed” and he projects that feeling of confusion onto his main frustration, losing a loved one (p.22).
The second section revolves around a theme of green colors, coming storms, and destroyed boats that still manage to remain partially intact despite their disrepair. In At the Boatyard, a “drowned boat… / is every day more waterlogged, / less salvageable; it glows, / in the weak sun, apricot,” in the glow of apricot, the wreck echoes Bobby’s warm tones and the wonder that he still remains so long despite his disease and weakened state (p.30). In the Community Garden returns to the sunflowers of the first section only now, some “can barely / hold their heads up… // like lowered shields” (p.38). Doty asks, “how could they stand / apart from themselves / and regret their passing, // when they are a field / of lifting and bowing faces, / faces ringed in flames?” (p.39). Doty’s work was praised in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry as “attentive to the way an individual sense of identity is shaped by collision with the collective,” a theme which is especially strong in the second and final sections. He portrays the individual in context of a larger mobile mass that makes each single piece seem so much less than the whole and Doty reflects on this indirectly earlier when he realizes that “Beethoven / could see the forest and the trees” (p.24).
The central poem, Atlantis, is told in six parts, three dreams, one depiction of light, and two tales of an attachment to an animal. The first part, 1. FAITH, is the narrator’s dream of his and Wally’s dog being killed. “I don’t even want to describe it,” he writes, conveying the horror with such a simple expression (p.49). The dog is “tireless faith” and his envisioned death is symbolic of the ideal and “he is where [they’ll] be hit first” by the disease and the death to come (p.51). They cover denial and anger in part one. The second part, 2. REPRIEVE, is Wally’s dream in which he sees the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, and he describes seeing “a great being standing in the light. // His arms were full of people, men and women,” this comes closer to acceptance than the previous part, but the narrator is unwilling to let it be anything more than “only a dream” (p.53-54). The third part, 3. Michael’s Dream, is the dream of a friend who also lost a loved one. This section centers on the idea of others being “gone” while Wally is still “going,” yet where they go is unknown (p.56). 4. ATLANTIS muses again on the marsh from the first poem and glides over the surface of an answer to where the dead go when they die and proposes a whole continent “rising from the waters again: / … where it always was” (p.58). 5. COSTAL tells of a girl who tries to save a sick loon and whether it is “trust or illness” that prompts it to lay so calm in her arms (p.59). Similarly in 6. NEW DOG “Wally / wants to adopt, / wants something small” so he can build bonds before he dies and so the narrator humors his fancy and brings home a second dog, gold to go with the black one they already had (p.61). In the end the central section acts as a partial consolation to the inevitable death by bringing in something new in the form of the dog.
In the fourth section the poems are decidedly darker and the tone more disconsolate. The natural beauty of earlier sections is abandoned in favor of the menacing mass of urban settings. Two Cities describes a bleak adventure in Manhattan where “steeping ink has covered everything” and the narrator has “grown sick of human works, // sum and expression of failure” (p.67). And in the final section, the narrator returns to his old home among the marshes and oceanic coasts and the decaying boats which slowly disappear. Though in the very last poem, Aubade: Opal and Silver, we find that after the boats which were so much a memento of Wally, what does remain is “the new dog, // the one [his] lover asked for / in the last month of his life / racing unbridled now, abandoning himself / to the arc of his transit” (p.99). Doty also writes, “this fabric’s / spun of such insubstantial stuff // it doesn’t quite conceal the other world. / Can’t we see into it already, a little?” giving the reader possible closure for the questions of where the dead go when they die (p.101).


Work Cited
Doty, Mark. Atlantis: poems. new york: HarperPerennial, 1995. Print.
Jarman, Mark. "Mark Doty : The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.." The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Jan. 2011. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mark-doty>.
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry Second Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 2003. Print.

Attempting Ginsberg

Error Screen

I saw the best minds of my generation drowned in information overload, throwing themselves at the  walls of modern technology only to be caught round the necks, dogs on chains, tethered, jerked back, strangled in their desperation,
who can almost feel the degradation of words, language, syntax, as linking verbs over take other little bits, big bits that once kept everything in place have metamorphed into numbers, symbols, smiles, Wingdings,
who in vulnerable infancy saw planes and towers fall from the ash black asthmatic smokestack sky, fearfully high on marijuana and safer drugs,
who are done with the visions of LSD, finding a fix on CNN, NBC, even BBC (our across-the-pond British bastard brothers, screwing their university youth,
who burned parliament in the riots raging in the streets of London), but on the other side they’re borrowing, begging, pleading, pleasing the power of a higher educational high, stepping up from hash to harsh ruler-wielding clergeritas sporting bad habits, while drunk on holy water-into-wine from Constantinople’s cup of Istanbul’s stale absinthe,
who all became addicted to what was supposed to be and what it did for their pink mushy brains, like the LSD of their parents’ adolescent fix, wishing they witnessed Woodstock, but better visions are had on YouTube,
who think different is cool, but only when different comes in a conformist sort of way, preapproved by the rest of the square, box, lid, fit, stay, sit at your 3 dimensional friends, or was it fourth fifth or sixth dimensions? just the sixth sense that dead shells of people could walk around on the street not even noticing that they’re on TV,
who don't communicate face to face and then only have time to call or text or emote, but without the tell tale emotions, which get lost somewhere between them and the screen and the page and the web and the string pulling garments undone, tugging the wires till contact is intercepted (operator?),
who now don't know what to say to each other when seeing one another in the halls or in class because a screen between them is the only way to communicate these days (hello, operator?)
who saw the ordered artwork arranged on teacher’s wall, only to brush one out of place with a backpack bearing the branded label of materialism, awkward as waterfowl on land because they don’t know how to be in reality,
while the next classroom door along the randomly numbered hall hung open exposing a wall cluttered with clippings and quotes and photos and photographs and pics and pictures from the old man’s friends, and loved ones, and dead ones who wrote all they needed to say and saved it, not on web pages, not even death can erase those cookies or leave the faces forgotten,
who have mybook and facespace, writing on each other's wallpaper in words and whispers of what we really could have sighed loudly in person,
who really don't like the fact that if they don't write homework down it still matters (shouldn’t it just be forgotten if not recorded?), and have so much information at their fingertips that it's a wonder they haven't cured cancer, or ignorance, or infinity,
but maybe we're just going in circles around and around and around what one calls information but another calls storage,
who are the products of a more productive generation which produced so much more than their children have managed to program
who forgot that this country doesn’t make anymore, it’s all in factories overseas, so inevitably production stops for good
who look down on their failures, disappointed, disillusioned, rejected, deferred from making a decision and are thus indecisive decision makers, setting deadlines, trapping the desperate throng of echo (echo) baby boomers (echo) (echo)
who know there’s nothing worse than a state school child coming out of an Ivy league family, the first generation to go to that kind of college, until they’re crossing the Virginia Tech campus sympathizing with a killer because we’ve made ourselves into an age of understanding, where we sympathize with Anything from the murdered to the murderers, because they were pushed that far and their rotting minds were untreated thus they are excused, right?
who search our personal minds and the collective knowledge (in a bucket with a few holes that need fixing) of the rest of the world (a.k.a. google), reading Wiki pages, watching videos, hearing the screams, gunshots, fear, and crying at their computer screens imagining what it must've been like for those kids at Columbine, feeling like being halfway there but halfway is terrifying enough
who cower at the oceanic edge while crashing economic tidal waves are dragging companies out to sea, caught in the riptide of rates and inflation and blue-green brine, witnessing the uninsured lifeguards afraid to get their feet wet when the time comes to save the drowning masses
who had religion, but still aren’t sure it’s a good thing, bad thing, new thing, why can’t just pretend we invented it since we’re a nation of Faith, with more in Texas alone than in all of Europe, that’s a fact,
who may or may not listen to tall hatted chessman in the Vatican, holy city, Hollywood, DC, home of greedy bitter independent public servant-slaves to The Times from a Newer northern City,
where the prison warden (operator?), watching the conversations of convicts and loved ones looking through the glass while talking through dirty telephone; can't you read their lips Mr. Zuckerberg?
who undress with their eyes in the dark, and bear all for some unknown viewer, or for the show, the poster, advertisement on craigslist
who can’t be bank robbers like in the old days and movies, because the banks are empty: no more money in the basement or even on Wall Street, no longer under the mattress since it's all in the laptop and on the BlackBerry from the crack house, known as the “service provider”
who maybe even set password as their password to every single online account, but don't go writing that down because they haven't changed any of them since 1999 or 98, can’t recall,
time is no longer an issue because clearly the clocks can’t tick or think out loud anymore, the LCD screens have no sound, and our auditory processing skills are going down the drain with a woooooosh,
who forget to talk about music and TV and how much of it kids actually watch (which is an astoundingly large portion), but we still get all three original channels in TV land because I love Lucy, while everybody loves Raymond,
who make up an answer to post on Wikipedia and see if someone corrects it in time for the mid-term and who knows what's what in this world anymore (besides Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, who looks so sad in those photographs now that business is failing)
who find something so extremely alpha that it instantly becomes Zeta because we’re too dumb to know Omega, and say “that photo of your cat with that caption is so cute I just can't stand it so as a coping mechanisms I will send you an acronym of laughter, LOL,” and, maybe just for kicks, they’ll send some more cats back to show appreciation,
who post all those cool cats refusing to be square having morphed into something more of a third dimension, but still refusing to be put inside a whole box; choosing rather, to think outside of it in the air and the open and the polluted nature of New Jersey, and industrial remnants dissipating in a cacophony of horns and cicadas
which doesn’t bother those who want to stay awake longer, party later into the night, live more hours of life, but it's really just desire driving them to have more hours to be in the virtual world and be wrong and be wild and befriend the midnight creeping strangers, and make midnight friends, exposed on the Internet, their 15 minutes of half a million hits in half an hour, in a world that’s half made up of what and half made up of how,
who act as if there'll be a second coming and one day in some person’s sad little span of a lifetime something is going to come down from the blue bowl sky and answer all the questions on the internet and the old questions written in the fossils of prehistoric prokaryotic cells, emerging from the primordial soup, splattered on cave walls.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Later by Philip Gross

Later

after the work stopped
          water filled the quarry pit
(just a kerb of raw pink limestone showing
by the cherry-ripe DANGER DEEP WATER sign)
                     then it was available for light

and for transients, drawn
          by its glint from the sky.
The landscaped car park bays are emptying
in the all-at-once late afternoon, a safely-gathered-in
                     of scattered child cries for the night.

A small flock (black
          snags I can't name
in a reflected satin blue) is intent on itself,
its scoots, squabbles and lulls, as busy as a shopfloor
                     at being the species they are

dip-and-shrugging and
          frisking themselves. One
stands up, almost, on the water, up-and-un-
ruffling wings of spray like (from here, with low sun
                     behind) those of a larger

brighter bird than itself
          which is also itself
extended into space around it, the sensible
world. Itself... Yes, maybe that's what self is, not
                     a tight-inside-us nub

but what we are, thrown
          out and off, un-self-seen,
once-for-all, betraying even as it leaves us
our position, giving itself (don't you long
                     to say 'gladly'?) away


PHILIP GROSS
Poetry London
Autumn 2010

http://poems.com/poem.php?date=14978



Later, by Philip Gross, is a work of art. To me this poem seems to be a wild far off memory recalled in vivid detail. From the quarry to the birds to the way in which each line flashes after the last in stanzas of a unique form, it calls to mind two specific experiences from my past. When I was younger I went to a summer camp which took us in school buses every day to an old quarry which had filled with water when the diggers hit an underground spring. That is what I think of when I read the first stanza, as for the rest of the piece I picture the shore town I used to vacation in as a child. There are so many shorebirds there that you can't go 5 feet without almost stepping on one or startling one out of the grass growing on some dune. I loved to watch them when I was little and learned their different names. There is something majestic about birds and I have never quite been able to put it into words. Gross says what I've never quite been able to but always wanted to say.
The poem is informally organized with sparingly placed capitols, off-and-on punctuation, and subtly vivid imagery which give it a simplistic sound building up to a powerful close. I call the imagery subtly vivid because the comparisons used are only partially contrasting and primarily mundane. The descriptions make comparisons to familiar images but the connections made between images are unique. One wouldn’t necessarily say a flock of birds is “as busy as a shopfloor,” but the images are firmly linked by the disjointed motions of unconnected shoppers and the activity of the flock. Both situations have some semblance of a shared purpose yet little to no organization. Gross mentions a “cherry-ripe DANGER DEEP WATER sign,” which is creatively capturing bright red in the readers mind. Another of the colorful comparisons is that of “a kerb of raw pink limestone,” which is not only bringing to mind the color of the stone, but also echoing the freshness of the quary and likening it to a gash in the earth or some other wound which, in flesh, would be more appropriately called “raw.”
In the poem a thing is not just its apparent self, but something larger, stretching beyond what can be seen. This is the subject of the piece and is best illustrated by the bird, singled out from the flock, as the description goes on. I know how easy it is to be struck by the beauty of cormorants (which I'm nearly sure these birds are because of the distinctive way cormorants cluster in small flocks and occasionally rise up out of the water to spread their wings and dry off in the sun) as "One/ stands up, almost, on the water, up-and-un-/ruffling wings of spray like (from here, with low sun / behind).” The bird is more than itself and Gloss attributes its sunlit spread out wingspan to that “of a larger // brighter bird than itself.” This is not just comparison though for the larger bird “is also [the former]/ extended into space around it, the sensible/ world." And if you should ask yourself, so what?, Gross writes, “maybe that's what self is, not / a tight-inside-us nub // but what we are, thrown / out and off,” suggesting that not just the bird, but all of us are larger and brighter than we seem. This is quite a description of something so simple and gives the birds action and manner more meaning than the concrete idea at hand. It focuses the poem on that idea of being more than the apparent self. Gross also begins the poem with a lowercase letter and ends without a punctuation mark, contributing to the idea of greatness and the theme of a larger than life quality in all things. I love this poem because it captures the essence of little things which have a simple beauty and transforms them into something greater.