Fire to Fire

In an interview on How to Write Poetry

Many people find it difficult to find their voice when they are writing poetry. What advice would you give them?

Most artists learn by imitation. This is certainly how I learned to write poetry, and this is how I encourage my students to learn. At some point as an apprentice, you realise that you might finally possess enough skills to fashion a reasonably passable imitation of the artist whose work has inspired you, but something other than ability prevents you from achieving the perfect fake. The thing that will keep getting in your way will be your own voice. Ironically, then, in trying to write like the poets whose work I loved, I learned to write like myself. There are so many kinds of poems. Perhaps at the start, a student cannot say why she loves the work of another poet, but contained in that attraction are the seeds of her own aesthetics. Eventually a poet can say, ‘Of all the kinds of poems that I might have chosen to write, I write this kind. And I write this kind because I value this kind.’ While all poets ought to have a wide palette and read other poets of all sorts, their own writing testifies to what they themselves think poems ought to do. We choose.

Let’s start with Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems by Mark Doty. 

For the first decade of my working life, I taught in schools. A friend asked me to chaperone a group of her students who were going to a poetry festival. I reluctantly agreed. At the festival, Mark Doty read two or three poems. When he was finished, I thought, ‘I want to learn to do that!’ Doty is an exquisite image-maker. His language is so precise and lush. He allows himself to linger over his descriptions, and his poems emerge out of that careful attention. I have never written a poem as beautiful as any one of his poems. But his work is not all shine (or sequins, as he says in one poem addressed to his critics). I love even more than the rendered image, the engaged, inquisitive mind that animates his vision. The poems are not just conscious but self-conscious; they are inhabited by a soul that is not simply talking to some specific other or many others but also talking to itself. The body of Doty’s work is profoundly moving – many of the early poems having been written in the midst of the Aids epidemic – but the poems are also funny and self-deprecating. There is nothing Mark Doty does not do well!