62. Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word (2010) (12/8/21)
It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see. But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your eyes, and it immediately becomes clear that all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive. As Susan Mitchell says, "The world is wily, and doesn't want to be caught."
It's a short book, comprising four essays and an abecedarian, an A-to-Z lexicon of sorts of the tools of the word artist—concepts like color, economy, hunger, morality, qualifiers, and uncertainty. My favorite piece was "The Tremendous Fish," an analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish," as well as a celebration of everything language can do when it gets it just right: a sense of time and space, of reverence and sorrow, of grace. In "Remembered Stars" (in which he examines poems by George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Hart Crane) and in "Instruction and Resistance" (Ezra Pound's "In the Station of the Metro") he looks at poetry as a means of self-examination, or as an active process of thinking, of being "in the position of interpreter of something that is perpetually open." And in "Four Sunflowers" he looks at four examples of, yes, sunflower poems—four very different poems in mood and style—by William Blake, Alan Shapiro, Alan Ginsburg, and Tracy Jo Barnwell that, yes, evoke sunflowers but also manage to express some aspect of the speaker's psyche: flower and observer become one.
Here's a long section from the first essay, "World into Word," that I enjoyed in part because I have been in a similar situation as to what Doty describes vis-à-vis a fireworks display, and I thoroughly appreciate how he keeps going deeper and deeper into the effort to capture it:
On a warm August evening on a pier in Cherry Grove, New York, I watched a display of fireworks. The wooden dock was crowded, everyone excited for the show to start. Police boats and fire boats whizzed around on the water. When the first flare went up, it became clear that the barge from which the rockets flared was anchored a mere hundred yards off the end of the pier. We could see, in a way I never really did before, the rough industrial-looking process of firework-shooting. When a group of streaks all went up at once, the metal barge itself was lit, and you could smell the gunpowder, and see the fire fountains sputtering into action.
Proximity to the source meant that the shells were exploding right over our heads. A few children had to be comforted, a few shocked pets hurried away, but everyone else loved it, craning their heads back and taking in the gold and green and fuchsia sparks exploding over us in the form of starbursts or fantastic down-raining flowers.
Here I sigh. That last sentence just doesn't come anywhere close to evoking the actual visual or auditory experience. Not to mention the smell of burnt powder and drifting smoke picking up a little salt and seaweed tang, mingling with the annoying cigarette of the man next to me. Or my awareness that the colors overhead were complicated by a peripheral sense that the intense light of the launching rockets had lit up the water a peculiar army-surplus green, while a cheerful little blue and yellow inflatable skiff to our right rocked on the wavelets beneath all that celestial action.
But what struck me most was this: as the bits of fire came arcing down, they streaked across the night at the same time that I became aware of the spider-smoke behind them, strange contrails and patterns left where the flares had been; these were already shifted and lengthened by the wind—so that, beneath the descending display of lights, a kind of ghost display moved at a right angle to the first, strangely, like a visible history of fire written on the night.
That is a lot to try to fit into words, and it has taken me a paragraph to note, somewhat awkwardly, what the eye took in in a fraction of a second. I tried to put it into a single sentence in order to suggest, as Proust did, the simultaneity of perception. He wanted to dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blur of space and time that the unit of syntax held all at once, as it were—like seeing a whole landscape reflected back to you in a single drop of water. Because I'm not him, the attempt to render visual intricacy makes words feel unwieldy, like sacks of meaning that must be lugged into place, dragged here and there, then still don't feel quite accurate.
Which raises the question, why bother? Is it necessary to render this bit of perception into words? Why do I feel compelled to get this right?
His answer, in a nutshell: because it's what he does. Though it's not that simple, of course. In Doty's case, his excursions through language and meaning and interpretation and representation seem closely linked with desire—desire and yearning (to understand this life, to taste it fully, for deep connection, to experience a sense of the sublime). Perhaps that's true of all of us, but Doty seems to wear that desire on his sleeve. It's something I admire and appreciate about him, very much.
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