Mark Doty's work has always straddled the line between a sense of belonging and alienation, so it's no surprise to find the crucial question, Where do I live? at the heart of his forthcoming book. In June Graywolf will publish Open House: Writers Redefine Home, Doty's first anthology project. In it, he invites nineteen accomplished writers, including Rafael Campo, Elizabeth McCracken, Honor Moore, and Terry Tempest Williams, to consider the idea of home. The resultant essays form a collective mediation on the many ways in which our surroundings create us, at least as much we create our surroundings.

Doty is the author of six books of poems: Source (HarperCollins, 2000), Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998), Atlantis (HarperCollins, 1995), My Alexandria (University of Illinois, 1993), Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (University of Illinois, 1991), and Turtle, Swan (University of Illinois, 1987). He has also published two memoirs, Firebird (HarperCollins, 1999) and Heaven's Coast (HarperCollins, 1996), and a book-length essay entitled Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy (Beacon Press, 2001).

Doty's irreverence, wit, and generous dedication to craft make him one of American poetry's most sought-after teachers (he holds tenure at the University of Houston). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill, Rockefeller, and Whiting Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Poets & Writers Magazine asked Doty what marks his work as American, and what it means to be an "American" poet.

Mark Doty: This isn't in any way an easy thing to see about oneself. Our "Americanness" is transparent to us until it's called into question, or spotlit by being placed in some less familiar circumstance. I have just been to a couple of poetry festivals in the UK, for instance. I read in London along with an international line-up of poets, and then in Aldeburgh, mostly with poets from Britain and Scotland. That makes me feel American indeed, in a number of ways. Less articulate, first of all; our European colleagues are so much better talkers than we are! Secondly, less interested in particular details of class and origin. There's a lot of poetry being written in the UK that attempts to conserve something of regional speech, that wants to capture, say, the talk of fishermen from Northumberland. There isn't a parallel in contemporary American poetry, really.

Beyond that lies a realm of large generalization. One can try to make broad claims about the character of American poetry, but such attempts are always complicated by the wonderful contradictions of history and of individual character. If one thinks broadly of Whitman and Dickinson as the parents of American poetry-or perhaps, more accurately, its queer uncle and aunt?-then certain American characteristics come to the fore, predicting a poetry that could be expansive, exuberant, inclusive, skeptical, concerned with the possibility of personal revelation, and faithful that there is meaning to be found in experience. Both are interested in the forging of a voice, the creation and expression of a coherent character on the page, one who acts in the work, who does the work of inquiring into experience.

P&W: Sounds both like the internal mandate from which many of us work, and also like the definition of that dread term "confessional poetry," which we're always being warned against. What do you see as the difference? Is there one?

MD: I fear that term—"confessional"—has cursed us all, and I am amazed by its persistence. It was invented, of course, by M.L. Rosenthal, in a review of Life Studies [by Robert Lowell], and I've never felt it was apt, since Lowell's poems feel less like monologues delivered to a priest, in search of absolution, than they feel like monologues spoken to a psychiatrist, in search of insight. There is a huge difference between the search for insight and the desire to be forgiven. Now, admittedly, there's something deeply paradoxical about writing in public as though one were speaking with the privacy of an analyst, and that deep tug between private and public life is an energizing polarity for Lowell and for the poets he influenced. The term quickly became a handy categorizer for experience that was outside the mainstream; Sexton's illness or Plath's rage were "confessional," whereas reports on more conventionally validated realms of experience were not.

There has been a huge cultural shift since Lowell published Life Studies; the startling stuff of private revelation is now the ho-hum fodder of the daytime talk show, and even they're tired of it. The result is to make us wary of autobiography; we fear that to name the stuff of a life is to make use of the same tired terms. I've had eighteen-year-old students say to me, "I don't want to write confessional poems." And when I said, "What DO you want to do?" the same young poet said, "Well, I want to write about my life."

Obviously I am very influenced by those poets of the Fifties who made the investigation of self a central strand in their work. We are meant, in Berryman, Bishop, Roethke, and Lowell, to name a few, to meet a character who is a version of the poet, a character who's more or less the same person from poem to poem, and to follow that character's path through the difficult realms of experience. I guess I am that sort of poet, but in truth the term "confessional" is hollow and meaningless for me.

P&W: You've never shied away from locating your self—or a self—in your poems. This has made your poems in some way unavoidably political, since yours is the voice of a gay man writing from the midst of plague, and then more specifically as a gay man losing his partner to AIDS, and healing from that loss. More recently, in Source, you're tackling complex ideas about the nature of democracy, expanding on your ongoing theme of the relationship of the individual and the collective "whole."

And yet, since Source was written and published, so much has changed for America and Americans. Of course I'm referring to the 2000 Presidential Elections, 9/11, and our entrance into an undefined, constantly escalating war abroad and against some of our own citizens. How have these events changed your work, the way you think about it, and/or your beliefs about the role of the poet in our culture now, as opposed to two years ago? Have you seen changes in your American colleagues or students as well?

MD: First, thank you for your reading of my intentions in Source. It's a book that grows out of some years of travel, of living in a number of places, and thus feeling less like a resident of any one spot than a citizen of the nation-and an uncomfortable one. One cannot write, really, as a "representative"—to try to do so would be to overdetermine the poem, potentially, and cut off the possibilities for discovery. And yet there's a paradox here; I know that when I wrote poems about my partner's death, and the community in which we lived, I was in some way a carrier of that community's stories. I needed to write about the particular circumstances of my life, but as is the case with everyone, really, my life was a part of a larger fabric and I was responsible to that greater narrative, like it or not. Usually good art isn't made out of the desire to be a spokesperson, but the artist IS a spokesperson, and we may as well try and make use of that paradox.

But how to apply that thinking to our current situation? I guess I think it's too soon, mostly. I was living in New York City in September of 2001. I was startled, a few weeks after the 11th, when I first went to L.A. and my friends there were talking politics, talking about the situation on a national and global level. I felt my thoughts were stuck at a material level; what was real to me was the white dust on everyone's shoes, the terrible burning—computer-and-concrete smell in the wind from downtown. I still felt that way when the first requests for contributions to "writers respond to 9/11" anthologies showed up. I just couldn't deal with it; there was something reductive about the prospect of going to work and making a poem to talk back to that great gesture of fury and the resultant despair.

That feeling began to shift after the first anniversary. I've written a rough version of a poem that has to do with those days. It seemed to take me that year in order to begin to have access to metaphor. I do feel it's true that there's been a watershed moment in American life. We have been [forced] into something like citizenship in the world; we can do that, or we can be bullies who insist on our own power and our own point of view, and damn the costs. As of today, it seems clear where we're headed, at least in Iraq. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a perspective shift about our relationship to the rest of the world that has been set in motion. There is hope for seeing differently, but who knows how long it might take for such a shift to be expressed in our leadership. I'm saddened and terrified by this administration, like most everyone I know.

P&W: Do you see yourself, as a poet, as having a role in making that shift to world citizenship come about? If so, how does that work?

MD: I wish I could say that poetry in America has that kind of power! We are in no such position. But I have to believe that the practice of poetry, and the professing of it (in the sense of both teaching and speaking as a poet in the world) is an act of paying attention to experience, of responsive awareness. And in that sense it does make the world a bit more human. I have seen firsthand poetry's power to awaken, deepen, provoke compassion. It is a long ways from that to world citizenship, but it is nonetheless a work in that direction.

At the Dodge Festival last year, the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammed Ali read an unforgettable poem about a Palestinian vendor, who'd responded to an American invasion force by making them sandwiches. It was a poem about how the particular focus of people's lives transcends broad political forces-or maybe flies beneath the radar of nationalism. You know, America was brandishing its grand power and the guy was gesturing back with sandwiches. People loved the poem; you could feel in the audience that sort of moment of recognition, as the Palestinian character (and the poet standing in front of us) suddenly became completely recognizable. His humanity was of a piece with that of his audience. That's an illustration of the power of poetry to evoke empathy.

P&W: I love this also as a metaphor-the poet as someone who makes sandwiches in the face of the world's brutality...

MD: Well, he was doing the practical, ordinary, necessary, nourishing thing. I'd like to think that's what poetry is too. Though I suppose we might have to discuss the "practical" part.

These days, these matters, will take years to find literary expression. It was years into the AIDS epidemic before there was writing that seemed larger than simply a cry of horror. The initial writing about Vietnam mostly hasn't held up very well (with the exception, I think, of W. S. Merwin's haunting poems from those days), but what came along later-Yusef Komunyakaa's poems, for instance-is extraordinary.

Of course this doesn't mean we shouldn't try! It's just that, for a while, it is much harder to get the self out of the way, to stand in relation to the gravity of circumstances. You ask about changes in my students. I was teaching at Columbia that semester, and half my workshop said they couldn't see why on earth they should get a graduate degree in poetry, after what happened. And half said they felt they could do nothing BUT write. That was a telling response.

P&W: What it seems to come down to is that people's gut reactions to being a poet during this time of grief and crisis is deeply linked to their reasons for writing, their "internal mandate." Do you feel you have an internal mandate for writing, and if so, what is it? When did you discover it, and how has your relationship to it changed and served you as a writer through your career?

MD: Something in me resists giving too clear a name to that internal mandate, or too easily defining its purpose. The urge to write for me is in part the desire to make a form to resist the passage of time, and in part a desire to make a shape that will stand against the disorder of experience. And then there's that desire to approach the unsayable that you describe, and there is also that desire to be heard... And there's probably more in there, too! There have been times when I have had more of an internal imperative to be a witness, or to give testimony, and times when I feel my work is more exploratory, less driven by the particular character of circumstance. I know the world's always on fire, but like everybody I'm sometimes closer to the flames, sometimes not.

P&W: Do you think this answer has changed over time? If I'd asked you the same question, say in 1982, or 1992, would you have described your experience of your "imperative" differently?

MD: Yes, absolutely. In 1982 I was very concerned about how to name my experience, how to find a way of speaking in poems that would admit more of my life, allow the inscription of my late twentieth-century gay man's life on the page. Not in terms of writing about sex. I mean the way my experience as a gay person informed all the aspects of life-the social climate I moved in, how I dressed and spoke, my economic life. And I wanted to understand the drama of my family, find a form in which to explore those forces that had shaped my adult self.

By 1992, my interest in memory and in personal history had fallen aside, at least for the time being; it was the height of the AIDS crisis and I felt that the act of writing was tremendously pressurized. Those questions about identity and desire were of course still very much on the stage, but they were lent a different urgency, placed in another context.

Now I would say that all these things are still with me, but I am more concerned with the self in community than I used to be. That old question of the relationship between the one and the many seems to loom larger for me as time passes.

P&W: How does the type or quality of the imperative you feel when writing a particular poem influence what kind of a poem you write, in terms of style, tone and structure? I'm thinking of some of your more "elaborate" poems ("Letter to Walt Whitman" comes to mind, of course, as does "Mercy on Broadway," in a different way) as compared to some of your poems which have a more intense focus (like "Fish R Us" or "Golden Retrievals"). Can you pick one from Column A and one from Column B (or your own two examples) and talk a bit about how different kinds of poems come to be for you?

MD: I love the inclusiveness and scale of the long poem; I've always been drawn to those grand poems that seem to become a kind of model of an individual consciousness, showing us so much of a particular speaker's process of attention, and containing, as a long poem must, a complex organization of time. I'm thinking of James Schuyler's "The Morning of the Poem," Herbert Morris's "Boardwalk," James McMichael's "Four Good Things," and of course Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover. They arise out of a fundamentally different impulse than the lyric poem's desire to illuminate a single, resonant moment. Oddly, they may arrive at something like the same place; there is no necessary relation, in poetry, between length and depth, or between length and complexity! But the poems travel along quite different paths to get to a sense of wholeness, a satisfying dimensionality.

As for examples from my own practice-well, "Letter to Walt Whitman" is a poem that wants to think about Whitman's vision of egalitarianism and camaraderie in the light of American life now. It is, I'd say, an investigative poem; the speaker is feeling around in the materials available to him (the evidence of Whitman's life, the abiding resonance of Whitman's name, the debasement of a sense of human fellowship in America now) to try to understand something of the impasse we've come to. It couldn't really be more compressed because it doesn't center on a single, telling moment or image; instead, it's a motion through various scenes. Whitman's house in Camden, a beachside changing room, a hotel in Columbus, a rest stop in New Jersey, a discount store in Salt Lake City.

That's basically the opposite of a poem like "Fish R Us," which wants to use a single moment's perception-the sight of a big bag of goldfish in a pet store-as a springboard for ideas about community, crowdedness, and our common fate. So now that I spell that out, I see that these are the same subjects as in "Letter to Walt Whitman"-it's just that the poems partake of radically different approaches to time.

P&W: How does one (in this case, how do you), as a poet, negotiate the shaky ground around representing other people's lives and experiences in your work? The most obvious example of this for you would, of course, be your writing about your relationship with Wally, his illness, and his death. Did you feel a responsibility to him to represent him in a way he would (or did) approve? Do you ever feel conflict between wanting to say something that is important and/or true for a poem you're working on, but might upset the person it's related to or about? If so, how do your resolve that tension?

MD: I don't think you do resolve the tension, I think you just learn to live in it in ways that protect your work and your life with others. This is even more of a problem for me as a memoirist than as a poet-since there is often a tacit understanding that a poem is something made to give shape to individual perception. We don't (for better or worse) assign poems the burden of historical truth-whereas the memoirist makes a kind of pact with the reader that his or her writing operates 'under the sign of the real.' But memoirist and poet are in fact balancing three different kinds of allegiance-to one's own sense of reality, to the esthetic needs of what one's writing, and finally to one's ethical sense, the need to treat others responsibly. It's almost as if these three considerations occur in that order, actually. I usually begin with a desire to describe some aspect of experience, and then I find the poem itself taking over; the shaping of language becomes more important, and the poem begins to take on a direction of its own. And somewhere along the way, the ethical implications of what I've made also present themselves. Ultimately, in completing a poem, you have to negotiate with all three of those contexts at once-but I also think that in the initial writing process, of course, you just have to make what you want to make.