What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life

Mark Doty

W. W. Norton & Company, 2020

Review by Matty Layne Glasgow

A couple of nights prior to a reading in New York City, I dined with some friends in their Gramercy apartment. Jazz rose through the summer evening from the park below and swayed our shoulders around the table, plates piled high with fresh bruschetta, our wine glasses in regular need of refreshment. As though the moment could be complimented by a singular voice, our host read her favorite Mark Doty poem, “Pescadero.” The little goat’s kisses that were not kisses, her splayed hoof beside the speaker’s hand, the poem aroused an intimacy in the room, between us and the poet, and yes, between all of us and that little goat who acknowledged the speaker, and thus, us as well. When I think of New York, I often return to this moment with Andy and Julia, with Mark and the goat, how we find tenderness in other living things even if they don’t know us, even if acknowledgment and pleasure are all that come from the interaction.

I begin here with New York because the experience of a poem is not wholly informed by the environments the poet explores within the poem itself. The place where we receive the poem’s words might also take on new meaning, transformed, along with us, by transcendent moments of love, clarity, or curiosity. For Mark Doty, New York is one of the five sources or streams that flow through Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Doty writes, “Great cities require their poets, and New York seemed to summon Whitman into being, charging his voice with its own brash, self-inventing confidence.” Doty traces Whitman’s steps through Brooklyn Heights and across the Brooklyn Ferry, and we follow Doty from Arizona to Manhattan to Provincetown as he renders his own formative moments of queerness and intimacy.

Mark Doty’s most recent book, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life, is a stunning mélange of close critical reading of Whitman, biography of the poet and his uniquely American poetics, and Doty’s own memoir of desire and selfhood. Doty’s passion for Whitman—his research and historical savvy, his familiarity with every iteration of Leaves of Grass, his own personal revelations—inspires in the reader that same passion, that same curiosity and pleasure in the impossibility of language and how the unwritable can yet, somehow, be written.

Doty approaches What Is the Grass critically, organizing his blended prose vignettes around what he terms the five main sources of Whitman’s greatest work: a set of transformative experiences, a poetics of queer sexuality, New York City, a renewed language, and a profound reckoning with death. These currents do not flow independent of one another, but rather provide Leaves of Grass, which Doty believes to be Whitman’s best work, its perennial freshness. If anyone knows how to keep it fresh, it’s Doty. While Whitman is considered by many the father of American poetry, Mark Doty certainly takes the mantle of tender daddy of contemporary queer poetics. His careful balance of exquisite precision and endearing aside hits full stride in the second section of the book, where he explores the queer desire and sensuality of Whitman’s work.

In “The Unwritable,” Doty describes a gentleman at an invite-only mask party in Manhattan as “a six-foot chiseled tower in red briefs who mans—there could be no other verb!—the door.” An acknowledgment of his own punning perfection pairs with an efficiently arousing portrayal of the man who mans the door. The verb here wears no mask. Doty’s lack of restraint and humor in this moment afford me various pleasures: the view of a chiseled tower of a man, a sensual indulgence in language, and a candid connection with the writer, to name a few. Double the pleasure, double the fun. Later in the same chapter, Doty explains, “All my life I have looked and looked at the mystery of desire, and I feel no closer to understanding it.” Of fulfillment, he believes we move toward it but never entirely reach it. Still, we must proceed in satisfaction’s direction—towards the man in the red briefs and the unmasked verb. Doty creates in this layered pleasure a tension between desire and language. What do we desire and is there a language for it? Doty argues Whitman communicated to queer readers an unsayable thing—“the love that dare not speak its name”— crafting a sensual and environmental language of queer sexuality.

Later in the same section, Doty poses a question, one of my most beloved lines of the book. “Is desire itself a lust toward the unsayable?” Like Whitman, Doty frequently puts words to the unsayable. Here, desire as lust? Sounds plausible. But toward the unsayable? A lust for silence, a lust for the absence of language, a lust for transcendence. The question itself reads as more of a statement, one that I agree with and remain haunted by. Most importantly, the question-statement maintains this tension between desire and language—its imprecision, its impossibility—as Doty himself sustains dissonance through his own immaculate precision. “We refuse what is originary in ourselves to our peril; what wells up is to be attended to,” he writes. Sensual desire wells up. Inadequate language wells up. Our silence, our absence wells up within us, but he will not leave us there.

Doty closes “The Unwritable” by addressing his readers, “Oh my dears,” asking us what we would think if we came upon him at Gregori’s, where he takes pleasure in the fostering of desire. As endearing as ever—both that we are, in fact, dear to him, that we’re welcome, that we might receive one of the exclusive invitations to the party. How joyous it would be to witness such pleasure from the nurturing of others’ desires. Might we call that an intimacy akin to the little goat resting her hoof beside the poet’s hand? Even if they do not touch—the men at Gregori’s, the goat and the poet—such an acknowledgment fills with tenderness the space between two lives, especially for those of us who have worn a mask at one time or another. But one need not be queer to appreciate Doty’s exquisitely rendered vignettes or the candor with which he approaches desire, mortality, or insatiability; one need only have an interest in the truth. Daddy wouldn’t lie to you.

Diane Seuss