Critical Commentary On Mark Doty
& # 8217 ; s MY ALEXANDRIA Essay, Research Paper
Deborah Landau
The verse form of My Alexandria transform homophobic narrations
about the disease, offer comfort to those populating with HIV, and promote empathy from
those whose lives have non yet been affected by the virus & # 8230 ; . Although Doty & # 8217 ; s poems
are non polemical, they counter reductive representations of people with AIDS, are
accessible to a wider audience, and have the potency to better public response to the
epidemic & # 8230 ; . His verse form expose the codifications that map intending onto the HIV-positive organic structure,
destabilise the complex cultural webs that construct gay male individuality in the context
of the AIDS epidemic, and hammer a transformed and transforming linguistic communication in which to
articulate love and loss & # 8230 ; . For Doty, poesy is a medium for conceive ofing impermanent
freedom from history, from the physical and cultural restraints that circumscribe
esthesis and experience. By uncovering the myths and political relations that construct the AIDS
epidemic and by picturing single Acts of the Apostless that defy the force per unit area of those buildings, My
Alexandria transforms the footings that limit the lives and deceases of people with AIDS.
From Deborah Landau, “ & # 8216 ; How to Populate. What to Do. & # 8217 ; : The Poeticss and
Politicss of AIDS, ” American Literature vol. 68, no.1 ( 1996 ) , pp. 193-225.
Tony Whedon
With hello
s rhapsodic inclusiveness, Doty performs a sort of speculation through which the
lesions of memory are healed. In many of his verse form, the speculation blooms from the spirit
of his narrative, looking frequently in what seems like an drawn-out supplement & # 8212 ; or
cadenza & # 8212 ; to the verse form. The tone of these speculations is thoughtful, about essay-like,
enveloping the verse form in a membrane of sensuous expounding. In a lesser poet, this expounding
might irrupt on the verse form, might look like an apology for what the more dramatic parts of
the verse form fail to offer. But Doty employs these to distance the chief event of the
verse form, to put the event with a cryptic sensuousness afforded him through the play
of memory.
From Tony Whedon, “ Let Me Go, If I Have to, In Brilliance, ” Poetry East,
no.35 ( 1993 ) , pp. 160-61.
Diann Blakely Shoaf
Like Cavafy, whose native metropolis the rubric of this new aggregation alludes to, Mark Doty
is a poet of desire and loss, of the memorials and ruins belonging to ancient and modern,
“ high ” and “ popular ” civilizations likewise. The ancient universe as underlying
our ain, and the multilayered enigmas revealed through digging, imagined or existent,
are topics that have served Doty before.
From Diann Blakely Shoaf, reappraisal of My Alexandria, Harvard Review ( Spring
1993 ) .
