Did you know the American poet Mark Doty had a blog? It’s really good, too; I’m always on the lookout for interesting poetry blogs. I’ve been reading it for a few weeks, during which time he has won the American Book Award, and got a new job teaching at Rutgers, which means he’ll be leaving Texas right after their new law banning gay marriage. Like many people, he was quick to point out how that law discriminates against people materially; here in the UK we have civil partnerships, which at least protects people’s pension, health benefits and other rights of coupledom.
I suppose everyone else has known about this site for years. I finally heard Doty read last month at Poetry International, where he was very engaging and lovely, but unfortunately was put on last. It was a shame; it was a great evening, but he’d have been better suited to being first, to warm everyone up and get us all feeling good about the evening ahead. Instead, the first half was very intense and electrifying, and he came on with his quiet, charming poems right after another poet had effectively shut the audience down. Pity. But anyway, it was great to see him read at last, and he did redeem the thing at the end.
I forget how I found the blog, but this morning I read a recent post which has stayed with me in its moving technicolor throughout the day. In it, he realises he’s feeling sad to leave his home of the past ten years:
“Later, after the gym, I went to a Vietnamese restaurant I like, and a Ukrainian waitress took my order. While I was dipping half-circles of dry translucent rice paper into a bowl of hot water and then rolling up herbs and lettuce and cucumbers and the most delicious fried onions, some guys went through the dining room carrying a huge Christmas tree, so big you couldn’t see all of it at once as it passed horizontally through the doors. When I left, the staff were decorating the tree. A man and a woman in bad glam-rock costumes, with butterfly swirls painted on their faces, came in for dinner.In the parking lot, I stopped to listen to the loudspeaker from the gay bar across the street. “This is for you, James,” the DJ said, “for your birthday, bitch.” Then he proceeded to play a very funny, dirty parody of a popular ballad sung by an emotive black woman, so loud that it filled the whole parking lot, louder than the traffic going by…”
Doesn’t it just make you want to see the movie?
(Read the post to see what she was singing! You won’t regret it.)
