Just recently, I've been teaching Tony Kushner's Angels in America again, to a very bright group of 17-year-old A-Level English Literature students. I only really have the time to introduce this epic play to them, focusing on the scenes in which Roy Kohn is told by his doctor that he has AIDs and the subsequent scene in which Prior collapses after an episode of fever and incontinence and where his partner Louis has to take him to hospital. Every time, I'm awed by Kushner's fiery compassion, his genius for structure, his pace, his devastating characterization. Normally, in this sequence of texts by gay American writers, I would also teach extracts from another extraordinary play, Martin Sherman's Bent, contrasting this with 'Prose of Departure' a lesser-known classic of AIDS literature by another hero of mine, James Merrill (and I hope to talk more about these texts in subsequent blog posts). But this year, I want to make an addition to this mini-course. I want to talk about Mark Doty.
I came late to Doty. I've owned a copy of My Alexandria for years, and for some unknown reason never really read it when I bought it. But last July, I had the good fortune to be able to see Doty at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, in a reading and interview with Maitreyabandhu. The evening started with a wonderful Buddhist meditation, led by Maitreyabandhu, which somehow seemed to electrify the whole affair. And within minutes of the start of the conversation itself, I had an intense regret that I had never been taught by Doty as an undergraduate: immediately I sensed, as he talked about Wallace Stevens, what a teacher this man is.
Real teaching is not about fancy techniques or gimmicks, it's about transmission. What do I mean by this? The direct exchange of emotional, psychological, psychic (i.e. 'of-the-psyche'), energy. And with this energy can come an immersion in mythos. Mythos (as opposed to logos) is meaning, the combined, ancient or antique and modern slipstream of beliefs and stories and emotions. It's the power, the beating heart, inside the poetry. It's emotion as kinesis: it's the story as journey, what moves us in every sense, especially towards our ultimate shared destination. It is deep-drunk, psycho-active cultural and counter-cultural history. Mythos is transformative, and what we most need: 'total immersion.' Because in the depths and not on the surface is where we heal. And it's what Rilke meant we needed to plunge into when he told us to 'seek the transformation.'
As Doty talked about the ways that Stevens had transformed him, and as he read his own poetry, I had that sense, rare and ecstatic, that, as a consequence of being there, I would not be the same, that I was also being transformed. Very few writers have this effect on us. Most writers work on the level of logos, the word, the surface. Fair enough, you might think. Writers deal in words. Well, yes. But...but...that isn't enough.
You can be pretty competent and impressive on the level of the word. You might be able to say all the right things, be hip, impress, win awards, be fashionable, all on the level of logos. But mythos is another story. No, the story: the big dream-weave, and its qualities are reversal, astonishment, presence, agony, joy, emptiness, true cynicism (which means skepticism about everything, Diogenes style). Mythos is always far bigger than mere ego. So what I felt when I heard Doty read was Doty turned inside out, the way his experiences had written him. That sense that I had lived those moments with Wally, his dog, his other friends dying of AIDS, reading Stevens, etc. The generosity in this, that I was placed inside the pain and bliss of all these things, and the revelation created by the pain, the true seeing, the inscape that comes by living so very up-close to death and loss.
And this is why I add Doty to the list of extraordinary gay writers that I teach: so that my students, gay or straight, might experience that richness, that busy grief and agonic joy and far-seeing of Doty's existence. To do so is to gain an ever-expanding sense of the self, without walls or borders, and Doty's burning sense of it all (which you can really feel if you watch the video above): his rued and trued-because-queered vision and glory.
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