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    A Study Guide for Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel"
    A Study Guide for Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel"
    A Study Guide for Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel"
    Ebook44 pages31 minutes

    A Study Guide for Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535816632
    A Study Guide for Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Mark Doty's "A Display of Mackerel" - Gale

      12

      A Display of Mackerel

      Mark Doty

      1995

      Introduction

      A Display of Mackerel was originally published in Mark Doty's 1995 collection Atlantis. A Display of Mackerel is a poem, composed of seventeen three-line stanzas, that describes a display of identical fish, laid out on ice in a fish counter, and uses that as a metaphoric jumping-off place for a meditation on beauty, individuality, and grief. The poem is also characteristic of Doty's work in the manner in which it engages in an ecstatic relationship with color, surface, shimmer, and texture, using these qualities to reflect Doty's conviction that the world is, despite our sorrow, a place of beauty and wonder.

      Like all of the poems in Atlantis, A Display of Mackerel is informed by and written in response to the death of Doty's partner, Wally Roberts, and is part of the book-length meditation on the lost world that was their life together. Grief is an experience that is both excruciatingly particular—one grieves for the particularity of the person one has lost—and at the same time excruciatingly universal. Since death is inevitable, we are all going to lose our loved ones, and the poetic canon is rife with elegies to the beloved dead. In A Display of Mackerel, Doty takes on the problem of the individual and the universal through the image of the identical, beautiful fish.

      Author Biography

      Doty was born on August 10, 1953, in Marysville, Tennessee, to Lawrence and Ruth Stephens Doty. His father worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, so the family moved often. In an interview with Atlantic magazine, Doty noted:

      I grew up in a very disconnected suburban landscape, in town after town, and it seems to me that there was very little that existed in order to enchant, to instruct us in our larger possibilities, to engage the spirit.

      He married at age eighteen, in large part to hide from his homosexuality, and enrolled at Drake University. After graduation, he and his wife divorced, and he moved to New York City. He earned his master of fine arts degree and got his first teaching job at Goddard College in Vermont. It was during this time that Doty fell in love with Wally Roberts. They bought and renovated a century-old house in which they lived until moving to Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1989, shortly after Wally was diagnosed with AIDS.

      Doty's first collection of poetry is Turtle, Swan, published by Godine in 1987. His second collection, Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, came out in 1991. It was his third collection, My Alexandria, which was selected by Phillip Levine for the National Poetry series, that made Doty's mark on the

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