What follows is an essay I wrote a couple of years ago on Mark Doty’s The Art of Description: World into Word, from Graywolf Press’ indispensible Art of series. I was thinking of it this week as I was running through revision of a poem. A friend of mine, after reading it, reminded me to watch the use of adjectives — and I immediately thought of Doty’s book and the challenge that it implies, which is to cut out the adjectives and to find better nouns and verbs, ones that can do the work on their own without the crutch offered by adverbs and adjectives.
Mark Doty in The Art of Description argues that description in poetry does more than just present sensory information or paint a picture. Description, he says, is about the relationship of speaker to the world that the speaker experiences. Good descriptive poems – like “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop or “The Starlight Night” by Gerard Manley Hopkins – in many ways are depictions of the thought process:
What descriptions – or good ones, anyway – actually describe then is consciousness, the mind playing over the world of matter, finding there a glass various and lustrous enough to reflect back the complexities of the self that’s doing the looking. (Doty, p33)
To that end, Doty presents an argument that description encompasses more than just the presentation of images or sensory information. He makes it clear that the poet’s descriptive toolbox contains more than just words. For the poet to accurately and evocatively recreate his or her world, the poet also must rely on rhythmic and syntactical variations, line length, syllable pitch and length to supplement word choice.
Consider Doty’s reading of Bishop. “The Fish,” he says, “interprets a wordless, creaturely presence,” which “carries … the possibility of endurance.” (Doty, p.16) And yet, Doty says, this is just part of the poem’s project. The speaker in the poem “is concerned with the experience of observing” and “track(ing) the pathways of scrutiny.” (Doty, p. 17) “The Fish,” he says, is “a carefully rendered model of an engaged mind at work.” His reading is about the process contained within the poem:
First, she notes sound and weight, fusing impressions synesthetically in a startling phrase, a “grunting weight.” Peeling scales provoke simile: the fish’s surface is reminiscent of the condition and patter of ruined wallpaper. There’s pleasure taken in working out this comparison, and these lines signal just how leisurely and careful an examination this will be. The poet seems to proceed from a faith that the refinement of observation is an inherently satisfying activity. To see is joy and scruple, privilege and duty. (Doty, p. 17)
This is a visual poem, he admits – “painterly” in some respects – but it is not just the recounting of details that create the impact; it’s the presentation, the arrangement, the choices made by the poet. For Doty, an 11-line section that focuses on “those haunting, yellowed eyes, with their scratchy eyes” is “the most extended and intricate of the poem’s descriptive acts.” The lines “focus our sights on the primacy of vision here, dilate our attention, and slow our movement forward.” (Doty, pp. 18-19) The passage ends with a note of hesitation, he says, (“— It was more like the tipping / of an object toward the light.”), a “gathering of breath” that indicates a mind at work.
This hesitation reveals that what’s been stated so far isn’t necessarily authoritative; each descriptive act is one attempt to render the world, subject to revision. Perception is provisional; it gropes, considers, hypothesizes. Saying is now a problematic act, not a give; one might name what one sees this way, but there’s also that one, and that one. And if we’re not certain what we should say, can we be certain what we’ve seen. A degree of self-consciousness, of uncertainty has entered the project of description. (Doty, pp. 19-20)
And so has music. Echoing sounds ring throughout what follows.
Sometimes it’s simply the chiming of a repeated vowel (far and larger, scratched and glass); sometimes it’s a complete rhyme (shallow and yellow, backed and packed). Then there are echoed initial consonants (tarnished and tinfoil), and subtle groups of near-rhymes (seen and lenses and isinglass). Such music-making lends the surface of language the complexity and interest of the surface that’s being observed. (Doty, p. 25)
This complexity is evident in the temporal shifts the poem undertakes, as well, Doty says. The rhymes and half-rhymes and echoes have the effect of slowing the poem down, their “thickness” making the reader “labor to enunciate” even as other lines in the poem roll quickly off the tongue.
It’s a slightly longer activity, sounding a line like “the irises backed and packed,” than it is to speak a plainer line like “I looked into his eyes.” On a subtle level, this variation speeds the poem up and slows it down again, allowing our movement through the lines to mimic the character of experienced time. (Doty, p. 26)
The poem’s temporality also is a product of its unfolding in the past tense, Doty says. Past tense makes this a re-examination rather than just a “straightforward record of perception.” It happens “in the composition of the poem, in a second layer of time.”
This “second layer” is the contemplative dimension of recollection—meditative but dynamic, penetrating deeply into the fish’s body, rigorously attending to the peculiar character of its gaze. Perhaps the experience of joy the poem chronicles, in the final lines, was the character of the original event (“that’s exactly how it happened”). But surely the understanding of that joy, the interpretive work that holds the sources of such feeling to the light, is the work that has gone on at the desk, where the dimensions of being open themselves to investigation. The poem’s work of inquiry – or at least a compelling replica of such a process, designed to enlist the reader’s participation in a version of the work of consciousness. (Doty, p. 27)
He makes the same point regarding Hopkins’ poem in the book’s third chapter, detailing the poet’s use of a variety of rhetorical flourishes (repeating the word “look,” for instance, four times in the poem’s first two lines and three more times in the second and third lines of the second stanza, creating a mad, ecstatic rush forward) and eccentric imagery (“curiously pagan images,” Doty calls them, and “precise observations of the natural world”). (Doty, p41) Hopkins, Doty says, “seems madly in love with the surface of the world” (Doty, p. 42) and, while spiritual, the poem refuses to be pigeonholed as simply religious.
I think this is a key point. If we define the goal of poetic description as presenting an accurate portrayal of world as seen and experience by the poet, then the descriptive toolbox must include these other poetic effects. “Description,” Doty correctly asserts, “is a mode of thinking” (Doty, p. 33) presented in language – words, syntax, line endings, etc. – that ultimately create a singular presence.
The more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking, a sensibility at work. It’s as if the harder the eyes and the verbal faculties work to render the look of things, the more we see that gaze itself, the more we hear that distinctive voice. (Doty, p. 45)
Later on, he discusses the use of the sunflower in four separate poems – by William Blake, Alan Shapiro, Allen Ginsberg and Tracy Jo Barnwell – reminding us that it is the poems’ rhetorical and technical flourishes that create both meaning and voice. The sunflowers depicted in the four poems
gain power from resisting the flower’s conventional associations: Blake’s flower pines, its phototropism a sign of insatiable longing. Shapiro’s flames and talks tough. Ginsberg’s hides illumination beneath its grimy skin, while Barnwell’s lives on neon alone. They’re self-portraits, at least in the sense of portraying some aspect of the speaker’s psyche, and they manage to be true to sunflowers, too, in the slyest of ways: they foreground the character of the flower by insisting that we see it in some unfamiliar light, finding qualities nearly opposite to those we might expect. (Doty, pp. 62-63)
The sunflowers themselves do not do the resisting; it is the language of the poems – the word choices and settings selected by the poets, the associations these choices raise, the other poetic tools in play – that create the unconventional connections that are the reflections of the speakers’ consciousness.
The act of describing something, whether it is a fish pulled from the water, the night sky or a sunflower by the side of railroad tracks, is far more complicated than just creating a “word picture,” to use a cliché foisted upon students in writing classes. Good description, as Doty makes clear, goes much deeper than that. In poetry, description is a collaborative effort bringing together all of the poet’s tools to present the poet’s experience in words and the poet’s arguments about the world around us.
“The best description,” Doty says, “is never merely decorative, but makes meaning in itself, building an argument about the nature of the real.” (Doty, p. 93)
