PrintMark Doty is an American poet now teaching at Rutgers University. In 1995 he made history as the first American to win the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Doty has written 12 books of poetry, the latest of which, Fire to Fire, won him the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry. He has also written three memoirs, including Dog Years: A Memoir, for which he was awarded a 2008 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award for Non-Fiction. Zach Dyer interviewed Doty about New York’s function as a muse and learning to go beyond initial inspiration.
As one of the most successful poets in America, do you find that you worked very hard to get there, or that as a poet, success comes mostly by chance?
Poets have to work like crazy. There is no other way to develop your work than by practicing, trying things out, experimenting, revising, throwing things away, and trying again. It’s true, I think, that poetry begins in inspiration, that sense of something welling up within, but inspiration’s never enough. You have to take what you’re given and then see what you can make out of it. I don’t think that how much you work has a whole lot to do with success, though. There are wonderful poets who work very hard, write terrific poems, and not so many people notice. “Success” as a poet seems to arise from some strange combination of good fortune, making yourself visible in the literary community, and whatever the cultural currents of your time might be.
Do you feel or have you ever felt that being a writer is actually your job, or does it still feel like just something that you do? Do you always feel like you have to be doing something else?
I never imagined writing as my job, or as a career. It was always something I liked to do, then it deepened into a fascination, until I knew that I’d continue to write no matter what else I did—because if I wasn’t writing I wouldn’t know myself, I wouldn’t know who I was. And the reality for American writers, with a very few exceptions, is that you have to do other things to make a living. For many of us, that means teaching, though of course that’s just one possible path.
As a former writing student and a current teacher, what do you think is most important for writing students to keep in mind while they develop their voice?
I think you have to hone your craft while somehow holding on to why you wanted to make poems or stories or novels or memoirs in the first place. When you’re immersed in learning and thinking about craft and technique, sometimes you can feel like a professional specialist—but we want also to keep in touch with that original, playful, pleasurable impulse to make things.
If I’m not mistaken, you now reside at least parttime in New York. Do you think the city has in some way changed your work?
I live in Chelsea, and though I’ve left for periods of time to teach elsewhere, New York’s become my home. I do think it’s changed my work: the cast of characters in my poems has become larger, I think the pacing is swifter—less extended concentration on one image or element and more rapid motion. Seems inevitable, doesn’t it? And New York always reminds you that your grand, personal vision, your inner life, no matter how profound or absorbing, well, it’s just one tiny bit of the whole. This is something I used to like about teaching at Columbia, in the graduate writing program. No matter how intense or focused our poetry workshop might be, you walk outside that gate on Broadway and, boom! Broadway seizes you. Broadway’s bigger than you.
Why do you think the city speaks so much to other poets? Do they tend to flock here? If so, why? Or is there something about the city that happens to awaken something in people that leads them in the poetic direction?
That’s an interesting question. Walt Whitman would probably have said yes, that being in the stream of humanity loosens our individual sense of being attached to a particular body, a particular moment in time—so that “I” isn’t necessarily the little limited self any more, but a flash of consciousness, a spark in the larger fire. But you could also say that New York is so big and anonymous that somehow you need to talk back to it, need to stake your claim and say who you are, and poetry’s a way to do that.
You have had great success in both the worlds of poetry and prose. Is it easy for you to switch back and forth or does each feel like its own beast?
Even though I believe in working at writing poetry, I also know that I have to wait for the spirit to move. I can’t force it to happen. And poets are always starting over from a blank page or screen, always unsure where the next poem will come from. Th�e prose writer, however, gets to return to a work in progress, pick up the thread, and continue. You can start to work on a piece of prose when you’re not in the mood and find yourself entering into its world again, and that’s a very welcome thing. I think poets should always have something else to do, a different kind of practice they can enjoy when poetry, for whatever reason, isn’t available to them.
Where are you now with your writing? Are you moving in any sort of direction or are you letting ideas come to you as they do? If you’re in the middle of some projects, is there anything you’d like to share?
I’m working on a few different things. One is a prose book about Walt Whitman, and the way that his life and work have become more and more magnetic to me over the years, the way I’ve come to feel deeply connected to his language and imagination. It’s a sort of experimental book—part memoir, part literary criticism. I don’t know how it’s going to work, quite how I’m going to shape it, but I mostly like the uncertainty and challenge of it. And I’m always writing poems. Lately they seem to be getting shorter, in some ways less personal, more philosophical. I’ve only recently come to writing short poems, so that’s a new adventure, too. I think it’s crucial, as artists, that we keep ourselves awake, and always try to do what you don’t quite know how to do yet.