A Gay Poet at Obama's Inauguration

Will there be a poet onstage at Obama's inauguration? Let's start a campaign to give the honor to the great gay poet Mark Doty, whose Fire to Fire just won the National Book award.

Clinton brought in Maya Angelou, and JFK had Robert Frost. Bush had...oh, nevermind. He didn't. (Republicans and poetry, not much of a match.) The AP is suggesting Phillip Levine, a rust-belt genius I greatly admire whose words would, I imagine, be a timely pick for our collapsoconomy.

But I'm pushing for Mark Doty.

Doty's poems are wise and heartfelt and occasionally angry -- best of all, they are accessible. Generally two-to-three pages long, written in clear, vibrant sentences, they feel like short-short stories, full of scenic description and real human beings, that burst into light at the end -- the kinds of epiphanies we want from art, and poems.

One of several of his poems called "Theory of a Marriage" starts out with Doty and his husband Paul (that would be novelist Paul Lisicky) going for therapeutic backrubs in Chinatown and ends up offering a vision of how love and commitment and sacrifice work in longterm relationships. Another illustrates love by depicting how their dogs react to affection. There's some humor at work here, too -- not a bad quality in a poem.

When Clinton picked Maya Angelou to read a poem at his first inaguration, he sent a kind of message about the necessity to hear the voice of a major black writer at a particular historical moment. As gay civil rights take center stage in our national dialogue, Obama could assert something similar about the ongoing struggle toward progress and equality.

Comments

[Ted]

I second your Doty nomination. I tried to link here in my pro-Doty comment on the HuffPost thread about the inaugural poet, but they rejected my advertisement of your blog. Sadness. Anyway, I think we should start a grassroots/netroots campaign to get Doty on that podium.