Thursday right after school I drove just under two hours to Ashland to see Mark Doty. Culture shock just to drive from my little left-out town over the mountains to the mini-urbanity in muted toned nubbly fabrics of Ashland. Let alone going to see a major poet. How frightening would that be, to be written about as a major poet? Last year I went to Ashland to see Li-Young Lee. It's hard to think though since I'm sitting in the town library where a skeleton hand with a little speaker in its wrist and a motion detector somewhere laughs in a scary Halloween voice every couple of minutes. The motion detector is broken, it isn't that there are dozens of passersby at the desk. The librarian's smile has gone a bit grimace but she's game enough to keep the thing on, which draws the kids wandering around every so often so she can tell them about the free movie (Monsters vs. Aliens) at 2pm in the big room here at the community center.

Which reminds me of how Mark Doty's reading began, after the interminable fawning introduction that drew attention to the fact that the speaker whoever she so prettily was had heard him first at the Geraldine R. Dodge poetry festival. Finally, he walked on stage, they sorta hugged, sorta shook hands, he said a bit of a syllable (sorry, I don't remember which,) and then a prerecorded woman's voice boomed from the speaker above his head, telling us to keep our feet off the seats in front of us, this being the high school's very beautiful theater, and then the regular stuff all theaters remind us about. It'd have been nice to have done that bit before or perhaps during the stint of the introducer.

Doty opened by celebrating the broadside the one letter press printer in Ashland made for his reading, which I had bought before going in in the lobby for $10 (a bargain.) Before reading his poem he read the poem that he said it sprang from - "In the Same Space" by the Greek poet (I always think ancient Greek when someone says Greek poet, but I caught up) C. P. Cavafy. Here's that poem:

IN THE SAME SPACE

The setting of houses, cafes, the neighborhood
that I've seen and walked through years on end:

I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.

And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.

-C.P. Cavafy


Doty said the last line over again, and we knew this line was what carried him into his poem of the same title.

He read in that markedly slowed down manner that puts me off for about a poem and a half and then draws me into the words. Jane Hirshfield does a similar thing - when I heard her last year my first thought was "how affected," but then I was transported. Ditto Doty.

The couple to my right just moved to Ashland from Zila, near Yakima. He was a journalist, she a children's librarian sucked up into management. They were so pleased with their relocation. Ashland has a cultural life, from the Shakespeare Festival to the Varsity Movie Theater to the Bloomsbury Bookstore, and the Chautauqua Series that brings poets like Mark Doty, who not only read at the evening event but work with the kids in the high school. No wonder they're pleased. It's also physically beautiful, and whatever my meaner thoughts about the slight affectation of the gentlefolk farmers in the vicinity, there's lots of wonderful local food, including artisan cheeses.

And now the librarian is talking with another local who brought in an unwatchable DVD he'd checked out, returning it now unwatched, complaining "you know how people are around here." Sigh.

Doty read a handful of new poems, one of which, about being greeted by the emissary goat from a herd, I really liked. He told an anecdote about Stanley Kunitz at his 98th birthday, then talked about his puzzling over Kunitz hitting his poetic stride in his 70's and 80's. "I think it's because of his garden," Doty said. Kunitz loved all phases of the garden - all year, from upsurge to rot. Like most of the rest of us, Doty said he struggles with any kind of acceptance of mortality. He read his poem "Heaven for Paul" wonderfully - it's set in an airplane about to crash, and features his partner Paul going glowily beatific facing death while he panicked. I liked his talk about Kunitz better than "Heaven for Stanley," but that's just me.

During the q & a, which I'm always grumpy about, the questions usually being more along the lines of "LOOK AT ME!" than sincere questions, someone asked about how Doty got started writing prose. He said after his lover died in 1994 he couldn't write poems - what he was going through wouldn't let him make poems. He started writing in sentences, then paragraphs, in prose. He began looking at them, thinking, "now, that sentence there could be better..." He said that opened an aesthetic distance, paused, then said, "Aesthetic Distance can Save Your Life." (caps mine.)

Afterwards, I wandered the lobby watching folks lined up to have their books signed. My broadside had come presigned so I didn't have to stand in the line. I hate standing in the line, forcing the exhausted poet to engage with WHO? little me there with my book out wanting his actual hand on my paper. Pah! And the fear I'll say something. If I could just thrust the book forward, stay mute, I'd avoid the possibility of blather. Kiss the anti-blarney stone before standing in a signing line.