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Mark Doty
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To mark World AIDS Day and Day With(out) Art, the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery will host a reading by the critically acclaimed and award-winning poet Mark Doty. The event will take place on Saturday, December 1, at 4:00 p.m. at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery, Schermerhorn Hall, 8th floor. The reading is free and open to the public.
Tim Dean, writing in "Modern American Poetry," comments that "Doty's originality lies in his making AIDS part of his poetic perspective, rather than treating it simply as an object of contemplation or analysis." Reflecting upon his increased absorption in the epidemic, Doty explains that "AIDS is no longer something I write about, but part of the way I see or speak."
The speaker in the title poem of "Atlantis" (1995), Mark Doty's fourth collection of poetry, suggests that AIDS can be both a destructive and reconstituting force.
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not even a real word
but an acronym, a vacant
four-letter cipher
that draws meaning into itself,
reconstitutes the world.
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Amid the decay caused by the disease, comes a renewal in the writing of the poem.
The transformative power of poetry that finds beauty amid ruin is essential to Doty's poetic vision. And through this vision, unlikely objects and characters become subjects of beauty such as the drag queen in "Esta Noche" from the poet's third volume of poems, "My Alexandria" (1993):
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…She's a man
you wouldn't look twice at in street clothes,
two hundred pounds of hard living, the gap in her smile
sadly narrative—but she's a monument,
in the mysterious permission of the dress.
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Doty received critical acclaim for "My Alexandria." On this collection, Deborah Landau writes in her review for "Modern American Poetry, "For Doty, poetry is a medium for imagining temporary exemption from history, from the physical and cultural constraints that circumscribe sensation and experience. By revealing the myths and politics that construct the AIDS epidemic and by depicting individuals that defy the pressure of those constrictions, "My Alexandria" transforms the terms that limit the lives and deaths of people with AIDS."
Begun in 1989 as a World AIDS Day initiative, Day With(out) Art has evolved since its inception to become a day with art—a collaborative project of more than 6,000 participants around the world, demonstrating the power of art to raise awareness of the ongoing AIDS pandemic. Each year on December 1 arts communities are encouraged to bring together diverse audiences in shared commemoration of those who have died from AIDS and to promote a broader awareness of the crisis.
Mark Doty is the author of five poetry collections including "Sweet Machine" (1998); "Atlantis," which received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize and a Lamba Literary Award, and "My Alexandria," chosen by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series and a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize. Doty is also a recipient of the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction for "Heavens Coast: A Memoir" (1996). He teaches at the University of Houston and lives in Houston and Provincetown, Mass.
Copies of Doty's latest books, "Source" (HarperCollins, forthcoming) and "Still Life with Oysters and Lemon" (Beacon Press, 2001) will be available for purchase at the reading.
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