Still Life With Oysters and Lemon
Mark Doty
What are the ingredients of Art?
To Jan Davidsz de Heem, the 17th Century Dutch painter whose Still Life With Oysters and Lemon lends both title and inspiration to Mark Doty's slim yet infinitely rereadable new volume of prose poetry, one recipe begins with citrus, crustaceans, clustered grapes, a glass urn.
To these, de Heem adds oils, pigments, canvas, bristles pulled from a pig's proboscis. And through the alchemical cookery of light and vision and emotional resonance, he transforms them into something altogether different than themselves.
Start from an egg, arrive at a meringue.
Or, start from a painting, arrive at a poem.
De Heem's painted lemon peel uncurls in Mark Doty's mind. The whole painting becomes but one compound ingredient, to which Doty adds words, rhythms, his memories, others' paintings, and Gaston Bachelard's philosophies. Then comes Doty's own cooking style (In the 21st century, a self-conscious convection alchemy versus de Heem's old-fashioned woodburning alchemy). The results is a daring, delicious dish. A metameringue.
So what's a book critic to do? You can't just pull an Emeril and these crank these recipes up another notch. This Art thing can be pushed too far. It can explode into silly pretension: Metameta-boom! (And a rama-lama-ding-dong).
Mark Doty has a brilliant sense of metrics. In Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, he's measured everything so carefully and set it right on the brink of overripeness. The brink, so it's still delicious. Art criticism-cum-memoir-cum-essay-cum-elegy.
"Come!"
"Not yet, this feels so good!"
All is held at the luscious brink of things, like the deliquescent half-shelled oyster, shining on the edge of the table. It could go bad, could spoil at any moment, but, no. De Heems and Doty have locked it in place at precisely the right moment.
Sometimes we have to set aside the clever criticism. That means you too, reader. Step back one layer of meta. See the painting. Read the book.
What are the ingredients of Art?
You'll know it when you taste it.
Post-prandial petit-four: Mark Doty has yet another brand new book, an extravagantly attractive limited edition with full-cloth binding, called Murano. Published by Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum in conjunction with an exhibition of Venetian glass (Murano is the outlying island of Venice famed for its glassworks). Doty's elegant single poem on memory and the glassblower's art is accompanied by extremely close-in photography of objects from the Getty collection, revealing the flow and the flaws of both glass and time.
