Out in the Mountains

Page 16

Life on the Coastline:
The 01 T M Interview With Poet Mark Doty

by Hugh Coyle

' On April 13, the renowned poet Mark Doty will
return to his former home state to deliver the keynote

"address at the Vermont CARES annual dinner in

Burlington. Doty’s most recent book, the prose
memoir Heaven is‘ Caast, chronicles his relationship
will] Wally Roberts and offers beautifully moving
meditations on the grief and despair which followed
‘Wally’s death from AIDS. Doty has also published
a number of poetry books, including Atlantis;
Bethlehem in Broad Daylig/it; Turtle, Swan; and
My Alexandria, which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award.

This past summer, Doty was a faculty member at
the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Ripton,
Vermont. During the session, I had achance to talk
with him about his life and his work. What follows
are brief excerpts from that interview.

Hugh Coyle: Can you talk a bit about your time in
Vermont and your reasons for moving to
Provincetown‘? »

Mark Doty: About a year after Wally’s HIV
diagnosis, we left Vermont. He was healthy, but like
anyone in that situation, we didn’t know how long
he would remain healthy.

At that time, there were about twenty identified
cases of AIDS in the state. Vermont CARES was a
‘new organizat-ion". There was very'little’in the way
of support and services. Living in 'Montpelier, we

had the sense that the central fact of our lives —_

which was the reality, the pressure, and the fear that
his HIV status raised for us — was not reflected in
that community. It was like our reality was one thing,
and Montpelier’s reality was another thing, and it
felt very isolating. It’s not that people weren’t
concerned or anything; ljust think that we wouldn’t
have had a'c'o'n‘1muni'ty'of people" with common
experiences, whereas’ Provincetown offered us
greater support for us as a couple, and an excellent
range of services.

We went at just the right time (1990), because by
late I99] or so, Wally’s health was beginning to be
compromised. So we got to really enjoy it, and we
got to get a community around us and have a sense
of home’before' things grew really difficult.

HC: What motivated you to write a memoir rather
than poetry? *
MD: I had been writing poetry during Wally’s
illness, bits and pieces, and obviously I didn’t have
a lot of time to spend on it because the demands of
taking care of him would prohibit long periods of
working. I’ve always felt that writing is what I did
to know what I felt. I couldn’t really stop; it kept
being my way of getting through the experience.
After he died, I felt completely incapable of
writing a poem. I felt that if I was going to write a
poem, it would have to express everything, and there
was no way that a poem could do that. But I needed
to write, and I was lucky because I got an invitation
a little while before Wally died from Brian Bouldry
to contribute an essay to a book called Wrestling the
Angel: Gay Men Write About Faith and Religion.
, About six weeks after Wally died, I was washing
the dishes one night and I thought that ifl felt like

. writing, I’d try writing that essay. I could write a

sentence, and then that sentence would lead to
another, and it started to feel like a kind of lifeline
that I could follow this thread of thinking and give
voice to what I felt.

So I wrote the essay, and when I was finished I
wrote another one, and I decided that what I was
writing were not separate essays, but a chronicle of
grief. As I wrote about that grief, I also wrote about
the history of the relationship, going back to tell
who he had been and who we had been together.

 

Mark Doty at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he was a faculty
member in August of I996.

It saved my life, to be honest. And eventually,
during that year, I found myself writing poems again.

HC: You read a new long poem the other night, and
a number of us were moved to tears and moved to
laughter at the same time. Can you talk a bit about
that poem, the one about the turtles for sale in New
York?

MD: Turtles are sort of a totem for me, and there
are several poems in which they appear. They’re
figures of vulnerability and they’re also self-
protective in interesting ways. I don’t know that I
could explain why that seems so appropriate to me
or why that compels me. But in that poem... I saw
this bowl full of turtles for sale on Broadway, and
was so struck by these little vulnerable things in that
grand city and their will to live.’ They seemed so
much a figure of the epidemic for me: here are these
individual lives trying to ‘make it, trying to thrive
with so much against them, which is true not just
about AIDS but about gay people’s lives in general
— there are so many forces to say that you’re not going
to live, you’re not going to love, you’re not going to
do well. And there are those little creatures trying
to be themselves. So it was an image that really spoke
to me.

One of the lessons that came to me from liv-
ing with Wally’s illness was that in that awful time,
I was never so close to anyone in my life. There was
so much intimacy in it; there was really so much

beauty in it, and while he was leaving the world
(and nothing worse ever happened to me), it was
also the most intimate thing I’ve ever done with
another human being. He took so much pleasure
in life, even when it was not reasonable to do so.

HC: We keep looking for a central metaphor that
works well for the AIDS epidemic or for a gay man
trying to some to terms with himselfin the modern
world. I can see how the turtle image works really
well, that you have an animal that can actually
“come out” of itself —
it’s probably one of the
only animals that can.
MD: You know I never
really thought about
turtles in just that way,
but I think it’s a really
smart connection. The
epidemic is such a big
thing. It’s like we live
inside it, so profoundly,
that it’s very hard to see.
We sometimes fool
ourselves and think that
either we understand it or
that its story has been
told.

One of the questions
that I got fromjournalists
sometimes about the
memoir was, “Well, aren’t
people tired of this story
of AIDS?” As ifit wasjust
one story! And I think we’rejust beginning to hear
it and see it in its many dimensions.

Photo hy H ugh

HC: In your poem “The Tiara,” you wrote, “I think
heaven is perfect stasis/poisedover the realms of
desire.” How do you feel about those lines now after
having written Heaven’s Coast?

MD: I think there was a point where I did think of
heaven or of perfection as being something
complete and static. I think I probably wouldn’t
write that poem the same way now because of the
experience of living close to death, where change
is vitality, change is what makes things alive. There
is no growth, no affection, no coming into being
without things passing.

The title of Heavens Coast has to do in part
with where I live, which is such a beautiful
heavenly landscape, an-d in part with the coast
between living and dying, between being and not
being. What I love about a coastline is that it is a
border that is in between, and it’s always shifting,
and you can’t have that kind of perfect stasis that
I was reaching for in “The Tiara.” What you have
instead is a place where life and death are pushing
against each other, always back and forth, and
nothing stays the same for long.

I’m glad I don’t have to live there all the time.

I I don’t think any of us can. But when somebody

you know dies, it seems like that’s where you go.
It takes you right up to what it means to live.V

K

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