Last Friday night, the KGB Bar, a cramped but cozy little space on East 4th Street, was jammed about as close as I’d ever like to be to capacity. Every seat was taken (sometimes more than once if we’re to count laps) and cemented into place by the less fortunate who squeezed between them, with quite a few more hovering in the doorway and on the small landing outside, just to be near Mark Doty.
Hearing Mark Doty read his poems was a magical experience in itself, but hearing Mark Doty talk about his poems was to come face to face with the raw intensity of what poetry can be. Doty described and introduced each of his poems casually and intimately. I reveled in the ease with which he seems not only to write and to so intensely capture what would otherwise be a fleeting notion, but I was struck even more so by the way in which he seems able to see meaning before it exists cognitively, to see potential before he illuminates it with a poem.
He introduced each poem by talking first of noticing-- noticing the scribblings in the margins of a used copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the cover photograph of a National Geographic-- and in doing so made it possible to glimpse so vividly, if only for the duration of a few short poems, the way in which he sees. I could notice what he noticed, begin where he began, and see the dynamism of the unfolding of observation into meaning. To experience Doty’s poetry as such a real reckoning was not only to experience the connection between author and audience which exists in art, but was to have affirmed what to me lies at the very heart of the desire to read and to write.
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