Turtle, Swan (1987) is the title of the first collection of poems published by Mark Doty, an American poet who in recent years has garnered international fame for his free verse poetry and memoirs. Doty’s poetry includes a variety of lyrical and narrative verse, but whatever style he employs, he expresses his own thoughts in the context of broader American life in a way that readers have enjoyed and related to. Throughout his career as a writer, Doty experienced intense loss and sadness, and his work reflects these hard times. Turtle, Swan was written relatively early in Doty’s life; therefore it is more focused on his early youth and his life as a gay man. Later works were to become darker as they expressed his personal suffering, but Turtle, Swan paints an image of Mark Doty, a true artist, coming of age in America.
Doty was born on August 10, 1953 in Maryville, Tennessee. As his father was an army engineer, Doty’s childhood was marked by frequent moves between Tennessee, Arizona, California, and Florida. He spent his early years devouring the many books around his home, and he possessed “a great deep longing for something unsayable, and questions that couldn't be answered” (Contemporary Authors).
Doty describes a tumultuous childhood, a lack of permanence, and family members struggling with their own problems in his poem “Horses,” which was published in his first collection of poetry, Turtle, Swan. The poem opens with the image of nights “blue and star-regular as church.” The narrator remembers as a boy sitting on a rope swing outside of a house his family is living in for a brief time, watching a group of ponies next door and feeling that his existence is not so different from their “rambling lives.” The poet describes a string of houses occupied for short periods of time, a mother who drinks and who’s anguish shows through her paintings, and a father who says to him “You be her husband.” As an adult, the poet sees pictures of himself as a child and is pained by how old the face staring back at him appears. The eyes have a look of guilt. The poet is sad for the little boy who was forced to grow up too quickly in a home that did little to nurture him.
This poem is most likely taken directly from Doty’s childhood and his reflections on his past. He remembers moving between thirteen different homes by the time he reached high school. His mother was an alcoholic, and his father was “too deeply involved in dealing with my mother's illness to pay too much attention” [to Doty] (Contemporary Authors).
Largely attributable to his fears of being a gay man in the 1970s, and because home had become physically and emotionally dangerous, Doty was married at 18 to Ruth Doty, a poet twenty years his senior (Contemporary Authors). The union lasted nine years. The two divorced after Doty graduated from Drake University in 1978 (Olson).
Doty received his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Goddard College in Vermont in 1980 (Goddard). During this time he fell in love with Wally Roberts and the two lived together for twelve years. It was during this time that Doty wrote the poems in Turtle, Swan. The title poem of this collection exemplifies how the poet seamlessly weaves together anecdotes, his feelings and fears, and current issues in American life.
The beginning of the poem recounts two occasions on which weather conditions or chance caused first a swan, and then a turtle to cross the path of the poet and his partner on their way home from work. Doty makes beautiful use of metaphors and similes throughout his poem, and particularly in reference to the turtle and the swan. The swan, for example, was “white architecture/ rippling like a pond’s rain-pocked skin” while the turtle lumbered “head up like a missionary moving certainly/ into the country of his hopes.” These metaphors, providing specific images that magnify the small but beautiful qualities of the creatures, become more layered as the poet relates his deep adoration for his lover by comparing his beauty and strength to that of the turtle and the swan.
The first line of “Turtle, Swan” reads, “Because the road to our house/ is a back road.” For the next several stanzas, the poet uses language of “I” and “we” in telling of how he and his lover encounter obstacles in their lives such as the turtle and the swan that hinder their journey home. When the aggressive snapping turtle takes a chunk out of his lover’s shoe but leaves him otherwise unharmed, the poet is as relieved as if it is he who has escaped a trip to the emergency room. At the end of the day, the two of them head for the same home, talking together about what they experienced.
The poem is divided into a few anecdotes. The first section describes the walks that the poet and his partner take. The second half of the poem shifts to another narrative, a situation in which the poet is apart from his partner at a movie theater, unable to find him. He mistakes his partner’s coat for a person, reading his fears of losing his partner into the scene. In this section, the poet fears he is no longer part of a unit, and this causes him to feel vulnerable and afraid that some day he will be alone.
Doty’s greatest fear at the time that he wrote “Turtle, Swan” was that his lover, Wally Roberts, would die from AIDS. The poem was written during the late 80s, when the AIDS epidemic was becoming a painful reality for more and more gay men in the United States. In 1989, two years following the publication of Turtle, Swan, Wally Roberts was tested positive for HIV. Doty’s fears were realized. Following this discovery, the tone of Doty’s work became darker. His next books of poems, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991) and My Alexandria (1993) both reflected his suffering, and were widely acclaimed. After the release of My Alexandria, Doty became the first American to win the T.S. Eliot Prize for best book of poetry published in the United Kingdom. In an interview, Doty described My Alexandria as “a real change… I was casting about for what would come next. And what came next for me was looking around at the present and adult life” (Poetry Foundation).
Roberts died from AIDS in 1994. The loss was so difficult for Doty to deal with that he found himself unable to write for a period of time (Contemporary Poets). It is significant that he used the image of being lost in a dark movie theater, unable to find his companion, to describe his premonition of losing his partner. He was terrified of being alone, and suggested through his poem that it would be like being in a dark place, unable to find the right way to proceed.
“Turtle, Swan” was not the only poem in Doty’s first collection that breached the subject of death. “Sideshow” focuses on the poet’s memory of a trip to the circus. Inside a tent he finds a miscellany of animals with extra or irregular limbs. Standing in the corner, the poet catches the gaze of a dead stuffed horse, near a sign that reads “WORLD’S SMALLEST HORSE, B. 1976, D 1980.” A crude painting shows the horse galloping over an impossibly green meadow, but the poet realizes that it most likely never galloped anywhere on its pathetically small legs.
The narrator relates to the horse: dead, deformed, and filled with taxidermy chemicals and cotton. The line “his mouth sewn up into that crooked/ but somehow forgiving smile” is reminiscent of what someone may see looking down at the painted, rearranged face of a loved one in a coffin. The poet further suggests a funeral as he points out the way in which the carnival glorified this sad, probably isolated creature by putting him on display and painting words on a sign. Often at funerals, praises for the recently deceased are thrown around liberally. Sometimes these praises are well deserved, sometimes they are long overdue, but sometimes the desire for comfort distorts the memory of those left on Earth. Fiction takes the place of true memories, and ordinary, flawed individuals become legends as the “world’s smallest horse” becomes a legend in this poem.
Similar to “Turtle, Swan,” Doty begins his poem with a description of an animal. In fact, he makes no mention of a “me” until the final line of his poem. The reader of the poem is drawn into the horse’s life, commiserating with it, but at the end, the reader is invited to consider that the horse has something to teach the reader. The lesson is to accept life as it is, rather than cling to the dream of what it might have been. As in “Turtle, Swan” the poet draws from a brief personal experience and continues to describe his own contemplations of death.
Doty’s poems in Turtle, Swan make few to no assertions about the answers to life. He dwells in doubts and questions. A phrase that is repeated over in his poem “Turtle, Swan” is, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know what happened to the swan;/ I don’t know if the stain on the street/ was our turtle.” Doty’s questions and doubts are extremely powerful because they do not offer any kind of comfort to the reader. Instead of offering answers, he presents his darkest, most intimate worries, and in doing so he names the doubts his readers may also struggle with. Doty’s poetry is oriented towards creating a sympathetic resonance with the reader.
Mark Doty currently has eleven volumes of published poetry, the most recent of which is Theories and Apparitions (2008). He has received numerous prestigious awards including The Whiting Writer’s Award, The National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and The National Poetry Series publication. His passion for writing on themes of gay relationships and humanity has continued to develop as his work has increased in popularity. Doty’s ability write about homosexual love in universal terms has made it possible for readers from various orientations to broaden their understanding of love, and this has made him a thoughtful but powerful voice in literature.
Works Cited
Hawkins, Brenda. "Goddard Alum Mark Doty Wins 2008 National Book Award." Goddard College. Goddard College. Web. 05 Feb. 2011.
“Mark (A.) Doty.” Contemporary Poets. Gale, 2001. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 7 Feb. 2011.
"Mark A. Doty." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2011. Gale Biography In Context. Web. 7 Mar. 2011.
"Mark Doty." The Poetry Foundation : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry. Poetry Foundation, 2010. Web. 31 Jan. 2011.
Olson, Tory. “Drake alumnus Mark Doty honored with National Book Award for poetry.” Drake University. Feb. 2011. Web. Nov. 2008.
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