On the NewsHour: Poet Mark Doty

On Wednesday’s NewsHour, Mark Doty read his poem, “Messiah (Christmas Portions).”

You can read “Messiah (Christmas Portions)” here.

Doty shared another of his poems with us, below, called “A Display of Mackerel.”

“A Display of Mackerel”

They lie in parallel rows,
on ice, head to tail,
each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,
which divide the scales’
radiant sections

like seams of lead
in a Tiffany window.
Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,
the wildly rainbowed
mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.
Splendor, and splendor,
and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other
–nothing about them
of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions
of the one soul,
each a perfect fulfillment

of heaven’s template,
mackerel essence. As if,
after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s
made uncountable examples,
each as intricate

in its oily fabulation
as the one before.
Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves
entirely in the universe
of shimmer–would you want

to be yourself only,
unduplicatable, doomed
to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,
multitudinous. Even now
they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.
They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:
all, all for all,

the rainbowed school
and its acres of brilliant classrooms,
in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,
even on ice, to be together, selfless,
which is the price of gleaming.

Mark Doty is the author of several collections of poetry: “Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems” (2008), which won the National Book Award; “School of the Arts” (2005); “Source” (2002); “Sweet Machine” (1998); “Atlantis” (1995); “My Alexandria” (1993), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain’s T. S. Eliot Prize, and was also a National Book Award finalist; “Bethlehem in Broad Daylight” (1991); and “Turtle, Swan” (1987).

He also written several books of nonfiction and serves as a Distinguished Writer at Rutgers University.