There is this vein of American poetry that produces what I’m going to call the Stadium Arena Voice. It’s loud and saturating! And when I’m reading it I feel like it’s vibrating me in my seat. It’s deep and probing and the wisdom is implicit to the tone, so that it feels like the language is this textured old growth forest, and you’re inside it, the shadows of the forest, the grain of the individual trees. Poems in this voice give me an overwhelming assurance. And honestly, I can never get enough of it. I wish there would be a Stadium-Arena-Voice Movement! There could be small shrines set up for Robert Pinsky’s An Explanation of America and Larry Levis’s The Widening Spell of the Leaves and Robert Hass’s Human Wishes and Carolyn Forche’s The Angel of History. I could name more. Very importantly, there would be a shrine for Mark Doty’s My Alexandria.
When Doty is inside this voice, I am given intimate access to the complications surrounding death and mortality. I have not lived through this experience, but I know the voice in these poems is interested in my understanding it; it is capable of holding the experience before me for consideration. Together we’ll be devastated and coping and unable to go on, though we have to. This isn’t to say that My Alexandria is an emotional pummeling. Maybe I could understand a book of poems like that. But Doty is sensitive to the scope of literature. In fact, I admire how often the book recognizes literature as an intellectual and emotional endeavor, not a reenactment. Can I truly understand what it is like to have a partner diagnosed with H.I.V.? Of course not. But then Doty points out neither can he. And he was the one who lived through it. I look at the transition from “Fog” to “The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum.” “Fog,” for me, represents utter tragedy. To follow that with a poem that puzzles over glass sculptures of rotting fruit, calling them “lovely because they seem / to decay,” sets art apart. It is merely mimesis. Art can only seem to express this tragedy. And yet, I felt a tragedy inside me when I read the poem. How can art only be something that seems when that feeling for me was very real?
I’m grateful to have the Stadium Arena Voice there as my guide, because the voice is capable of anything. Doty frames different views into his loss. The turtle that hides in its shell in “No.” The wave that breaks into the statement You’re dying in “Becoming a Meadow.” In any frame, that voice is assuring and earnest. I might understand how to live with mortality, if only I listen. This speaker might too—however difficult it may be, he is trying to understand more about his experience. I think that’s the touchstone of My Alexandria. This speaker who says, “Maybe, when we read through these poems together, I’ll understand what I’m feeling.” The poems mark the difference between knowing of devastation and living with it. It is the voice that negotiates between these two perspectives with such assurance. And it’s the complexity of the Stadium Arena Voice that allows comfort to reside amidst all the tragedy.
Recommended links:
My Alexandria
Mark Doty's home page
Mark Doty examines Walt Whitman
Still Life with Oyster and Lemon (like Doty's longer poems, except as prose!)
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