As is so often the case with anthologies like Best American Poetry, I’m finding a significant number of poems that diminish each time I re-read them. Fortunately, other poems grow on me. I’m on track, as I expected before ever opened it, to settle on about a dozen “keepers” from this year’s volume.
I’m a fickle poetry reader. I’m very easily swayed by my own mood, the context in which I discover the poem, and received opinion from a small—but important—circle of friends. I’d like to think this fickleness is really the result of those external factor prompting me to greater attentiveness, but much of the time it’s simply a characteristic of my (necessarily) subjective aesthetics.
Mark Doty is a good example of this dynamic of persuasion. At some point in the past I formed a negative opinion of his work despite having read very little of it… most likely the result of a comment made by a friend at just the right time. When I see his name on a poem I tend toward instinctive dismissal. But “Apparition (Favorite Poem)” hooked me for superficial reasons that ended up being strong enough to compel me to re-read it a few times. Here’s the poem:
"Apparition (Favorite Poem)"
The old words are dying,
everyone forgets them,
pages falling into sleep and dust,
dust and sleep, burning so slowly
you wouldn’t even know there’s a fire.
Or that’s what I think half the time
Then, at the bookstore, a young man reciting,
slight for fourteen, blond, without irony
but not self-important either;
his loping East Texas vowels threaten
to escape the fence of pentameter,
his voice seems to have just arrived here,
but the old cadence inhabits anyway.
He makes the poem his own
even as he becomes a vessel
for its reluctance to disappear.
All right, maybe they perish,
but the boy has the look of someone
repeating a crucial instruction
that must be delivered, word for word,
as he has learned it:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.
I gave Doty’s poem more attention than I might have for one simple reason: it invokes Shelley’s "Ozymandias," one of my favorite poems of all time. "Ozymandias" was one of the first "adult" poems I memorized and I’ve never forgotten it. More than 25 years later I still occasionally discover something new in this well-anthologized poem. Some of what I have to say about "Apparition" relies on my particular reading of Shelley’s poem.
"Apparition" isn’t a poem loaded with beautiful imagery. The idea (and the situation) is the thing… but I did enjoy the image of the "old words … burning so slowly / you wouldn’t even know there’s a fire." Doesn’t anyone who loves classic poetry– or perhaps any poetry other than the avant garde– feel this dejection sometimes? I’m feeling a touch of it right now, considering that even coming from a poem as well known as Shelley’s, there will be readers who don’t realize the final lines of Doty’s poem are the famous conclusion to one of the most famous English poems. Further, "Apparition" reflects my own inconsistency in this area: I too feel despair over the state of poetry (literature?)– or at least the kind and configuration of words I like to read– at least "half the time."
But the meat of this poem is the interplay between the young teen’s reading of Shelley’s poem and the sentiment Shelley’s poem, in part, espouses. But this interplay echoes back and forth in the short space of Doty’s poem in subtle ways beyond this obvious, explicit comparison.
It helps to remember that– popularization notwithstanding– Shelley’s poem presents irony within irony. In "Ozymandias" we see the remains of a great monument reduced to just "trunkless legs," and can laugh uneasily at the hubris it embodies when we consider the vast, lost empire it was meant to represent. But at the same time, there are Ozymandias’s words before us, still having a powerful effect on us– and the speaker/poet– thousands of years after the fact. Ozymandias’s works were mighty, if not quite in the way he expected. And all of that is wrapped up within the artifact of Shelley’s poem itself, widely recognized as an essential work, an artifact of great power, but one that is still part of the complex constellation of Doty’s old dying words. Shelley’s poem is itself an act of hubris, striking out to make an eternal point in the guise of critiquing the absurdity of staking a claim for eternity.
These contradictions and connections intertwine throughout Doty’s poem. The young boy "makes the poem his own / even as he becomes a vessel," reciting the poem in a manner as if "delivering a crucial instruction … word for word." His voice "seems to have just arrived" while being inhabited by "the old cadence." The boy’s recitation of the poem– somewhere in an unknown bookstore– is an Ozymandian act, documented in Doty’s own Ozymandian poem, though the boy is very much the opposite of Ozymandias in concrete terms, being in the throes of his youth, "slight" but "not self-important," a far cry from the "curled lip" and "sneer of cold command" that characterizes Ozymandias a living human being (rather than just an archetype).
The description of the boy’s voice is wonderful. The "loping East Texas vowels" that "threaten to escape the fence of pentameter" are echoed in my own reading of the penultimate line of Shelley’s poem, which I’ve long maintained purposefully broke from the pentameter to make a point about the grandiosity of Ozymandias ambition and self-regard: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings."
Finally, we have the shifting sand the narrator of Doty’s poem stands on, the fate of the old words, represented by the exquisitely real, human equivocation: "All right, maybe they perish…" leading to the close of his poem and Shelley’s, each of which make the best argument that, in fact, the words don’t die.
I liked this poem, too, and probably for similar reasons as those you list. I also like the concatenation of hope (in seeing a young reader of poetry) and dismay (for the old words are dying, as you point out, despite the boy they “perish”–perhaps on the vine, or merely in the utterance).
The original Ozymandias poem talked of the crumbling relics of kings from the distant past: though their power has long since waned, their beauty still manages to endure and captivate. In parallel, Doty’s poem seems to point to Shelly, a daunting poet in his day, whose power has waned and whose old words are turning to dust, but whose beautiful poetry still captures the hearts and imaginations of many – even fourteen year old East Texan boys.