In Conversation: Poetry & Memoir: Walt Whitman in My Life & Rocket Fantastic

Mark Doty is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry including, most recently Deep Lane; A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Compendium of Creatures, and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which received the National Book Award. He has also published three memoirs: Heaven’s Coast, Firebird, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy, and Dog Years. He has also edited The Best American Poetry 2012. Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman’s bold, perennially new American voice and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self. In What Is the Grass (W. W. Norton & Company) Doty keeps company with Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, tracing the resonances between his own experience and the iconic poet’s life and work. He meditates on desire, love, and the mysterious wellsprings of the poet’s enduring work: a radical experience of transformation and enlightenment, queer sexuality, and an obsession with death, as well as unabashed love for a great city and for the fresh, rowdy character of American speech. – Jessica Ferri in the Los Angeles Times noted that “What Is the Grass may be the definitive book on Whitman’s life, afterlife and poetry. But it’s [in] the moments in Doty’s own life […] that the book truly glistens.”

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of Apocalyptic Swing, The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, and Rocket Fantastic. She is the senior poetry editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. In her collection Rocket Fantastic (Persea) Calvocoressi blurs the real and the imaginary as she reinvents the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems. Sorcerous, jazz-tinged, erotic, and wide-eyed, this is a pioneering work, a reinvention of self, family, and gender by a space-age balladeer. In its review, Library Journal observed that “queer lesbian poet Calvocoressi uses the Dal Segno, a musical symbol directing the player to return to an earlier spot in the score, as a pronoun embodying “a confluence of genders” when referencing the Bandleader. There’s a sense that the speaker wants to return to an earlier time, too, a throwback feel to the pastoral scenes she sets and a need to shuck convention. “