Book Talk: Firebird by Mark Doty
Posted by Anne Gudger: writer, mother, teacher & all around STH (super terrific human).
Poet, memoirist, deep thinker, amazing observer: Mark Doty is all this and more. Firebird—a gay coming-of-age story--is an incredible testament to his remarkable talent. Here we meet young Doty: a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his shocked mother who declares, "Son, you're a boy!"
Doty's memoir is lyrical and heartbreaking. Doty navigates his twisted family—where alcoholism, sorrow and repression rein and continues to seek beauty even as his life is swamped in ugly. In the first chapter Doty rifles through his sister's drawer of precious trinkets:
it's like a pirate chest opened in a movie, little glimmers brilliant on the faceted surfaces of the treasures, little musical chimes sounding as if these were audible jewels. . chiffon. . . tulle. . . Glittery ribbons, carnations made from Kleenex clipped with a bobby pin and fringed, just so, then unfolded into a burst of imitation blossom, one drop of cologne at the center. Scents, powders, delicious nail colors. . .
Doty uses these objects to dive into his story, into his memory. The objects are a way in, an opening for rumination. I love the richness of Doty's world. The scenes he creates from his childhood show the poet he is in their depth and breadth. Equally I love how he steps back and looks at memory: how it functions, how we use it as writers
Memoir is memory. It's a rendering of experiences, the feel of the experiences more than verifiable facts. In an interview in "The Atlantic Online" (November 10, 1999) Doty says: "I like the formal elasticity of memoirs very much. They alternately behave like novels, like essays, like travel writing, like poems—and that sort of synthesis lends itself to making discoveries. I'm especially drawn to those memoirs that place the act of remembering in the foreground—those that take memory itself as part of their subject and examine the action of making a story out of what is remembered."
Doty does this beautifully in Firebird. I return again and again to a passage that's near the end of the book when I need a reminder, inspiration to infuse my writing:
"What we remember," wrote the poet who was my first teacher of the art, "can be changed. What we forget we are always." Dick was right: We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us. What you don't allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever's held to the light "can be changed"—not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. Everyone will be filled by grief, distorted by sorrow; that's the nature of being a daughter or a son, as our parents are also. What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us.
Poet, memoirist, deep thinker, amazing observer: Mark Doty is all this and more. Firebird—a gay coming-of-age story--is an incredible testament to his remarkable talent. Here we meet young Doty: a ten-year-old in a top hat, cane, and red chiffon scarf, interrupted while belting out Judy Garland's "Get Happy" by his shocked mother who declares, "Son, you're a boy!"Doty's memoir is lyrical and heartbreaking. Doty navigates his twisted family—where alcoholism, sorrow and repression rein and continues to seek beauty even as his life is swamped in ugly. In the first chapter Doty rifles through his sister's drawer of precious trinkets:
it's like a pirate chest opened in a movie, little glimmers brilliant on the faceted surfaces of the treasures, little musical chimes sounding as if these were audible jewels. . chiffon. . . tulle. . . Glittery ribbons, carnations made from Kleenex clipped with a bobby pin and fringed, just so, then unfolded into a burst of imitation blossom, one drop of cologne at the center. Scents, powders, delicious nail colors. . .
Doty uses these objects to dive into his story, into his memory. The objects are a way in, an opening for rumination. I love the richness of Doty's world. The scenes he creates from his childhood show the poet he is in their depth and breadth. Equally I love how he steps back and looks at memory: how it functions, how we use it as writers
Memoir is memory. It's a rendering of experiences, the feel of the experiences more than verifiable facts. In an interview in "The Atlantic Online" (November 10, 1999) Doty says: "I like the formal elasticity of memoirs very much. They alternately behave like novels, like essays, like travel writing, like poems—and that sort of synthesis lends itself to making discoveries. I'm especially drawn to those memoirs that place the act of remembering in the foreground—those that take memory itself as part of their subject and examine the action of making a story out of what is remembered."Doty does this beautifully in Firebird. I return again and again to a passage that's near the end of the book when I need a reminder, inspiration to infuse my writing:
"What we remember," wrote the poet who was my first teacher of the art, "can be changed. What we forget we are always." Dick was right: We live the stories we tell; the stories we don't tell live us. What you don't allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever's held to the light "can be changed"—not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. Everyone will be filled by grief, distorted by sorrow; that's the nature of being a daughter or a son, as our parents are also. What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us.
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