How language affects perception is an eternally urgent subject; while Wallace Stevens wrote that ‘poetry is the supreme fiction’ through which imagination transforms reality, at the other extreme is the hypnotising spectacle of ‘tatworld’ and today’s popular media. Rather than moving the mind towards more expansive awareness, its language seeks to reduce: utterance is turned into a manoeuvrable sound-bite, identities squeezed into cartoonish pigeonholes and the only reality worth experiencing seems to be that of our current celebrities. Much has been written about the slow fade of poetry behind this increasing media clamour, but Mark Doty’s new volume, Theories and Apparitions, makes an immediate and subtle case for poetry in today’s world. Its tightly-controlled poems explore the interplay between language and perception, and why poetry is still of paramount importance to human experience.

The deadened mind is present in ‘Apparition (Favourite Poem)’ which fears for the loss of literary history, simply because so few people engage with it anymore:

The old words are dying,
everyone forgets them,
pages falling into sleep and dust,

dust and sleep, burning so slowly
you wouldn’t even know there’s a fire.

The poet then witnesses a fourteen year-old boy reciting at a bookstore: he is a blank slate, ‘his loping East Texas vowels threaten / to escape the fence of pentameter’ but as his voice stays true to the verse, the boy becomes ‘a vessel / for its reluctance to disappear’. He gains

…the look of someone
repeating a crucial instruction
that must be delivered, word for word,
as he has learned it:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.

These final two lines make the poem – Shelley’s famous sonnet is a testament to art’s endurance and the futility of political power; but the meaning of these lines is less certain in Doty’s poem. Are Ozymandias’ forgotten ‘works’ meant to be those of an endangered literary history (which include Shelley’s sonnet)? Or is the poetic mind now being held up triumphantly against the ‘mighty’ ignorant of today? The poem’s ending expresses both fatalism and defiance, leaving a strangely powerful echo in its wake. There is hope as well: the recited lines indicate redemption through the language of poetry, if it is learned ‘without irony / but not self-important either’ (an obvious rarity).

Such a genuine education is essential, for in Doty’s world there is little difference between the inscribed word and corporeal reality. Our constant negotiations with language, and how they shape us, are presented in various ways: a woman on public transport is defined by her relation to the book she is reading; a street vendor can’t pronounce the name of the toy he is selling (with unsettling results); Doty’s friend has a mysterious ‘love’ symbol tattooed on his shoulder; a cab driver speaks of nothing but the eight novels he’s written, until Doty’s friend gets out of the cab and vomits (whether he is carsick or nauseous from the driver’s narratives remains comically unclear).  Why this focus on words themselves, and why is it worth such an extended sequence of self-conscious poems? Because Doty is acutely conscious of how the dynamics of language mirror the dynamics of reality – just as language consists of manifold combinations between letters and words, so reality is perceived on the same terms: ‘beauty resides not within / individual objects but in the nearly / unimaginable richness of their relation’. This intimacy is nowhere more apparent than in the short poem ‘Theory of Beauty (Pompeii)’, where Doty witnesses a little girl at a café ‘holding her book open, / pointing to the words and saying them half-aloud / while her mother attends to ordering breakfast’,

she’s reading POMPEII…Buried Alive! with evident delight.
Pleasure with a little shiver inside it.

And that evening, I thought I was no longer afraid
of the death’s head beneath the face of the man beneath me.

This strange intersection of imagery unites those most primal of concerns, sex and death, with the act of reading. The logic of this (ultimately reassuring) arrangement is clear but not studiously unpacked by Doty, and its power feels preserved as a result.

This is not always the case in Theories and Apparitions, where the act of writing is elevated to an almost divine level and sometimes dramatised in highly self-reflexive meta-poems. For example, the volume opens with Doty and his friend Charles trying to turn experience into verse:

His music, Charles writes,
Makes us avoidable.
I write: emissary of evening.

We’re writing poems about last night’s bat.
Charles has stripped the scene to lyric,
While I’m filling in the tale

(‘Pipistrelle’)

Such moments are spread throughout the volume, where the poet wrestles with word choices or walks the reader through his own writing process, and these are not always successful. In ‘Pipistrelle’, for example, the reader follows Doty on his search for words, ‘I could hear the tender cry of a bat – cry won’t do’ before he acknowledges a moment of near-solipsism: ‘Is it because I am an American I think the bat came / especially to address me, who have the particular gift / of hearing him?’ As he goes on to wonder ‘Is this material necessary or helpful to my poem’ the verse becomes deflated; it feels as if we are entering the self-enclosed world of a creative writing instructor, for whom writing about writing is more than just a professional necessity, but a hall of mirrors from which it can be difficult to escape. Doty finds a way out of this in ‘Citizens’, where he tells of almost getting hit by a car in New York City and his consequent anger at the driver, an anger still with the poet after he boards the subway:

…If he’s one of those people miserable for lack
of what is found in poetry, fine.

It’s not him I’m sorry for.
It’s every person on this train burrowing deeper uptown
as if it were screwing further down into the bedrock.

Heavy hands on the knees,
weary heads nodding toward the floor or settling
against the glass. When did I ever set anything down?

If the poem had ended after the first two lines of this passage, a self-indulgent tone may have prevailed, but Doty goes on to describe the subway passengers around him and, in six lines, captures a feeling of deadness and group futility that is familiar to any urban commuter. Doty’s implication is that these ‘weary’ urbanites lack what poetry can provide, but rather than an outward statement it is his actual poetic description of them that makes the moment convincing.

This is where the volume really succeeds: beyond exploring valuable ‘theories’ of poetry and poetic relation, Doty’s gift seems best employed when it engages and wrestles with the world itself and his own conflicts within it. One of the volume’s finest moments is in ‘To Joan Mitchell’:

In the flashpoint summer of 2002
it was possible to feel where we were headed,

sun screwing its titanium compress down
on human foreheads in the parking lots,

thin tamarisks on the margin shimmering a little
as if seen through fumes of gasoline,

and I was in the absolute darkness of Fresno,
past the middle of my life. As if I’ve been colonized

by the long swathes of car lots, flapping pennants
stunned under the mercury lamps,

will and inwardness thinned
like a chemical haze over the lettuce fields,

smokes risen from torn-up vineyards,
weary vines heaped for burning…

Doty’s voice – controlled, quietly eloquent, precise – is able to lift the banal into poetry. Rather than speaking directly of his literary relationship with Walt Whitman (as happens in ‘Pipistrelle’ and an ‘Apparition’ poem), the connection is here demonstrated through Doty’s poetic description of a very American landscape. Likewise, in other ‘Apparition’ poems Doty witnesses the ghosts of John Berryman and Alan Dugan, but these are engaging only insofar as the quality of the actual writing, rather than the slightly heavy references. Doty’s description of Alan Dugan’s spectre is brief and powerful: ‘Bitter wind off a metal harbor / and here’s Alan Dugan crossing 15th Street / as if he owns it, sharp new jacket / just the shade of that riffled steel’.

At such moments the poems stay on the right side of the volume’s self-conscious pursuit, and overall Doty succeeds in mixing the poetic with the meta-poetic. His attention to the electric, sometimes sublime, exchange between language and consciousness is careful, considered and ultimately engaging.

Mark Doty, Theories and Apparitions, Cape, 2008. £9.00 ISBN 978-022408528-1

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.