Mark Doty: Phoenix Aflame

Articles About Hope

Mark Doty: Phoenix Aflame

18 March 2009

“What did you think, that joy / was some slight thing?”

-Mark Doty, “Visitation”

It is now a matter of public record that my company recently laid off 40% of staff. But numbers do not do justice to the sense of loss. Today I rifled through comments written in our software source code management system by ex-members of my programming team. Sprinkled among the technical remarks were little witticisms and the occasional wry geek joke, artifacts of camaraderie among the ash.

I have been cauterizing the wounds of loss with poems–more reading than writing lately, and catch-as-catch-can. I could not have willed my way toward a better book in this challenging time than Mark Doty’s Fire to Fire. Doty captures the fierce and sometimes terrible beauty of life with musical phrasing, stanzaic integrity, and the courage to look and look, deeper and deeper, into the human world. It is from loss that these poems are written, but their trajectory is towards awe–the hope that springs from amazement, the amazement that springs from deep observation, the deep observation that settles in the ashes of loss.

Doty’s carefully-measured stanzas seem to propel his poems like an engine–which is, after all, a series of well-timed explosions. Each little engine links together to drive us into the depths of the poem–be it the shell of a turtle, the smoky glitz of a cross-dressing bar, or the heart of a man care-taking his dying love. Doty is not afraid to hold with the poem until it opens up, frequently busting the page barrier in little epics that never feel watery, or strain to make a point. It is an inner fire he seeks in each poem, heating up line by line and phrase by phrase–his technique a poetic kiln. Thank you, Mark Doty, for firing your ovens, and plying your craft–producing stunning reminders of the beauty that can rise from flame.

By Robert Peake | Posted in Books, Poetry | Also tagged Mark Doty, The Economy, The Phoenix | Comments (8)

Submit! Submit!

30 November 2008

“Publication–is the Auction / Of the Mind of Man–”

-Emily Dickinson

I must admit I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with sending out poems to awards and periodicals. Actually, that’s not true. It’s more of a hate-hate relationship. The difficulty lies on two fronts: practical and psychological. So, this weekend, determined to let a few more poems from my manuscript finally have a chance at seeing the light of day, I enlisted my wife’s help. She, after all, sees nothing unusual about sending poems she likes to journals with a similar sensibility, and waiting patiently for the reply. After all, they are not her poems.

For me, it’s been a morass of spreadsheets and angst. Though otherwise detail-oriented, I found rounding up the information necessary to send off poems akin to a multivariable calculus exam. You see, the mind-games and doubt have somehow transformed a mildly laborious process into something Kafkaesque. So, making the process simple and methodical has been a key for me to stick with it. Poems, after all, don’t publish themselves.

My process involves maintaining spreadsheets: of poems I have already sent out, when, to whom; and of journals that might like my work. I have recently taken to rating them by the degree to which I think the sensibilities of the periodical might match my own, and by my perception of their reputability. So, then I sort the list (sensibility first, reputability second), and ratchet down one by one, checking submission periods, guidelines, and the number and format of poems to send.

For choosing the poems, I pick from a folder on my computer of poems I both think are done, and are worth publishing. I have a a single, huge document full of continuous writing, and a separate folder with individual files of single poems from that document with which I would like to tinker before declaring them done. Once done, if they’re good, they make it either to a place I call “fossils” (i.e. stuff I might mine later, but not worth publishing) or the to-publish folder I mentioned above. Once the to-publish folder starts looking really full, a combined sense of guilt and duty prompts me to submit a few poems.

This is my method. I have tried to make it as simple as possible so that, like the tasks assigned to astronauts waddling through the vacuum of space, the procedures are so methodical and well-rehearsed that I can execute them even when gazing into the yawning black void. I’d love to know what other people do, what works–both practically and psychologically–to keep putting work out there for consideration. Do you view it as a necessary evil? A pleasant delight? Do you have some other system that really works?

Like it or not, in the end, sending out poems is a part of the process. Making that process bonehead-simple, and doing it even (sometimes especially) when I would rather, instead, be writing a new poem or, better yet, wasting time on Facebook, is an exercise in detachment, perseverance, and yes, you guessed it, continuing to hope.

By Robert Peake | Posted in Insights, Poetry | Also tagged Facebook, Writing Techniques | Comments (12)

Poetry and the Economy

19 November 2008

The Economy I had the poignant duty of sending out the email newsletter announcement last night that the 2009 Ojai Poetry Festival has been cancelled. The current financial situation has affected our founders, our prospective donors, and our hopes for ticket sales considerably. So, the committee is conserving its resources in hopes of reviving the festival in 2011. Having already sent hundreds of emails and made numerous updates to the website in anticipation of such a great lineup, I am, needless to say, disappointed.

And yet, I am heartened by the absolute flurry of poetry events passing through in recent weeks. A small but formidable group of women poets are hosting a reading in a beautiful backyard just around the corner from me. The names of two fellow students from long ago found their way to me in announcements of their separate readings. Others seem to be driving up and down the California coast reading poems associated with their recent prize, or book, or just because there seems to be a hungry market for poetry right now.

In some cases, the marketplace of poetry does intersect with the financial marketplace. Those poets who have managed to in some way cobble together a lifestyle of writing and teaching poetry are likely influenced by the recent economic downturn. Yet there exists a separate marketplace for poetry wherein supply can be measured in willing voices, and demand in eager ears. This marketplace seems to work almost inversely to the financial marketplace, in that difficult times bring us back to the necessity of art.

Writing poems is, in many senses of the word, “free.” And during times when it can be difficult to be generous materially, opportunities to be generous with one’s time and creativity seem to represent an outlet for hope. Attending readings, buying and borrowing books of poems, is generally inexpensive. Yet the payoff is significant. From a small investment of time, an enrichment of perception. Therefore, as the stock markets, and other markets, continue to rattle and roll, I say let us all invest our human currency–in reading, writing, and listening to great poems.

By Robert Peake | Posted in Insights, Poetry | Also tagged Ojai Poetry Festival, The Economy | Comments (2)

The Shed

10 August 2008

Today, we tackled the shed, a routine suburban act of tidiness for most couples. But the reason we hadn’t used most of the stuff in our shed since we moved in over a year ago is piled up against the back wall: the stroller, the diaper genie, the car seat, and the chest of drawers we refinished by hand, every drawer filled with baby clothes. We have been unable to have another child in the two-and-a-half years since the birth and death of our son, and today, we decided, in order to stop avoiding more than momentary forays into the shed for a critical item, that it was time to move the baby stuff into storage.

The chest, with all that it symbolized as an act of preparing for parenthood, we decided to set aside until we could find it a new home. That meant going through each drawer, re-packing the small hats and shirts and vests and the impossibly small socks. What got me was the smell. I realize that brand new baby clothes don’t actually smell like babies–it is, in fact, the other way around–but the two have become closely associated for me, and somehow my nose has secret wiring straight to my heart. I again recalled Keith’s post last year about the cap his son wore to keep warm, and how he and his wife tried in vain to hang on to what he left behind in that cap–his smell.

Moving the baby stuff offsite was also a way of accepting that we may not be able to have another child. Facing this has meant riding out a second wave of grief, with many of the same effects as when we first lost our son. In the past two-and-a-half years, many new people have come in to our lives–new friends, neighbors, and colleagues at work–who know nothing about our James. And so, I find myself, at times, living in two worlds at once. Occasionally, the disparity between what others can see, and what I carry inside, is brought into startling contrast by, for example, a giddy new mother, unaware of our past, eagerly accosting us about our plans for “starting a family.” I respond with a sheepish grin, and change the subject. They probably think this means I don’t like kids.

Life was never what we thought it was supposed to be about. A shed piled up with junk is about more than clutter. The name “shed” somehow seems fitting–as though I have cast off a heavy coat or, like a snake, shed a skin. Or reached, perhaps, a watershed in recovering from grief, choosing once again to direct myself, despite so much uncertainty and disappointment, toward renewal–and with it, a strange kind of hope.

By Robert Peake | Posted in Fatherhood, Grief Recovery, Life | Also tagged Keith Woodruff | Comments (12)

The Likelihood of Hope

11 July 2007

Keith Woodruff has a poignant article on his site about his new relationship to statistics since the passing of his son. I, too, have experienced a profound thinning of the security blanket of probability since our own loss. Every time I got on a plane to and from Oregon, I was keenly aware of how I now neither can nor want to go back to the kind of drowsy false security of my privileged first-world life; nor can I bear to live under constant threat in my mind.

Our nation likewise had the psychic fabric of its imperviousness rent by the attack on the Twin Towers by airplanes. It was an immeasurable tragedy. Yet other countries suffer such losses in greater numbers and more frequently; other families lose more children than those who see adulthood. How can we live, awake to such fragility, without, in the process, being crushed?

Poetry is a kind of faith. The audacity of poem-making, in a world saturated with throw-away words, a preference for television and music, and suspicious indifference to all but the ironic–is itself a profession of belief. To commit one’s life to this art in such times is as irrational as any religion. Truly, we write against the odds.

Tonight I have been reading the poems of Ilya Kaminsky–a Russian poet from Odessa, deaf since early childhood, who, a year after arriving in America with little English, lost his father suddenly. He writes about Mandelstam, Akhmatova and others who survived the un-survivable, writing poems for which they could be killed or worse. Here is a fierceness of faith in humanity. What we pass on to each other in such thin books of poems is some likelihood of greater self-understanding–and a precious likelihood of hope.