School of the Arts (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: School of the Arts Andrew Mulvania School of the Arts by Mark DotyHarper Collins, 2005, 128 pp., $22.95 There is a moment in the middle of Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" in which the poet declares, "I too had received identity of my body/That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I should be of my body." Mark Doty has long avowed his kinship with Whitman, but in his latest collection Doty seems more than ever to be writing under the sign of the great American bard. What both fascinates and frustrates Doty in School of the Arts is what compelled Whitman in his great poem: the body suspended in the medium of time—corporeality struggling against, as Whitman writes in Leaves of Grass, "the bitter hug of mortality." [End Page 191] For Whitman, this struggle is what accords us our common humanity and connects us with future generations. But while Doty shares Whitman's optimism, he confesses to a certain anger about the bargain one makes to be embodied in time. Writing of the ephemeral beauty of a pink poppy, Doty reminds himself, "Dangerous, to hate the thing that brings you all of this:/ that flower wouldn't blaze if time didn't burn." In his 1996 memoir My Alexandria, chronicling the death of his lover, Wally, from AIDS, Doty writes courageously of the beauty of Wally's body as the vital heat left it. Even in the face of tragedy, Doty found himself capable of praise. In School of the Arts, however, the poet's praise is more measured. In the collection's opening poem, "Heaven for Helen," Doty writes: "I have devoted myself to a? rmation,/when I should have kept my eyes on the ground." A number of poems in the collection attempt to imagine the afterlife of di?erent people and pets close to Doty, including one poem for the hundred-year-old poet Stanley Kunitz, in which Doty learns a lesson about time from the older man: "I thought poetry a brace against time,/the hours held up for study in a voice's cool saline,/but his allegiance is not to permanent forms./His garden's all furious change,/budding and rot and then the coming up again. . . ." One could see the influence of Keats as easily as that of Whitman in Doty's e?ort to understand the relationship between beauty and time. In his "Ode on Melancholy," Keats claims that melancholy"dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die"; and melancholy figures prominently in this book also. In a letter, Keats once wrote of the trials of earthly life, concluding finally, "Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?" The reader comes to realize that something very similar is intended by Doty's title, School of the Arts. Though in the title poem this phrase designates an art academy for summer painters in the poet's adoptive home of Provincetown, it's clear that School of the Arts refers to life itself, which teaches us to see time's ravages as beautiful. Because Doty writes so movingly of this paradox, he makes the world lovely in these poems. Copyright © 2005 The Curators of the University of Missouri