Mark Doty has been a powerful voice in American Poetry since his 1993 collection My Alexandria, which won him a number of awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award. My Alexandria is Doty’s third collection, and contains poems that relate his lover’s struggle with HIV. This focus is typical of much of Doty’s earlier work which focuses on the gay experience and pays particular attention to the HIV / AIDS epidemic. His later work moves a bit away from this, and “At the Gym,” which appears in his 2001 collection Source, depicts a particular cross-section of contemporary American life that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Doty’s free-verse style is often compared to poets like Walt Whitman and James Merrill, though Doty’s ability to merge low culture with traditional poetics makes him a strong example of contemporary postmodernism. Doty’s original perspective on objects such as the sweat stain in “At the Gym” is demonstrative of Doty’s ability to elevate common subjects to the level of high art. Doty’s depiction of the gym environment paints it as a place of quasi-religious ritual and communal bonding.

Poet Biography

Mark Doty was born August 10, 1953 in Maryville, Tennessee. In 1971, Doty enrolled at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. During his time at Drake, Doty dedicated himself to his poetry. He married Ruth Dawson, another poet, around the time at which he enrolled at Drake; together, they co-authored three poetry chapbooks which Doty no longer recognizes as his own work. From 1978 to 1980, Doty attended Goddard College and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing.

Doty realized that he was gay during his time at Goddard College, and Doty and Dawson divorced in 1980. For the next year, Doty lived between Manhattan, where he worked as a secretary, and Montpelier, Vermont, where he taught at Goddard College. On a trip to Montpelier from Manhattan, Doty met Wally Roberts, who would become Doty’s first male partner.

Doty published his first poetry collection, Turtle, Swan, in 1987. In 1989, Roberts received a diagnosis of HIV. Doty did not become infected with the virus. The couple moved to a beach house in Provincetown to focus on Roberts’s health. Doty wrote and published during this time in Provincetown, and he wrote his third poetry collection, My Alexandria, as Roberts’s condition worsened, publishing the collection in 1993. Doty’s frank and emotional portrayal of the HIV / AIDS epidemic brought him international recognition and awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, which Doty was the first American to win. Roberts died in 1994, and Doty published his fourth collection, Atlantis, a year later.

Doty turned to memoir after Roberts’s death. In 1996, he published Heaven’s Coast, which chronicles the couple’s last years together. Doty went on to publish thirteen collections of poetry, four memoirs, and a number of essays. “At the Gym” comes from his 2001 collection, Source, which is Doty’s seventh overall. Unlike Doty’s earlier work in My Alexandra and Atlantis, his later poetry concerns descriptions and investigations of American life. In 2008, Doty married Paul Lisicky, novelist and memoirist, whom he later divorced. Doty married Alexander Hadel in 2015 and currently teaches at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

Poem Text

Doty, Mark. “At the Gym.” 2002. Poets.org.

Summary

As the poem’s title suggests, “At the Gym” takes place in an American gym. The poem’s speaker is one of a group of weightlifters at this gym. The speaker notices a sweat stain, or a “salt-stain spot” (Line 1), on one of the gym’s exercise stations, and this sight occasions the poem. The rest of the work is an extended meditation on that sweat stain. The first stanza introduces the sweat stain as a marker of “where men / lay down their heads” (Lines 2-3) to exercise, and the next stanza clarifies that the particular bench the poet-speaker describes is a weight bench, where men “hoist nothing / that need to be lifted / but some burden they’ve chosen” (Line 5-7).

The end of the second stanza and the first line of the third relate the progression of adding “more reps / more weight” to the weightlifters’ exercise (Lines 8-9). Then the speaker returns to the sweat stain and sees it as a “sign of where we’ve been” (Lines 11) on the bench. The speaker, at the end of the fourth stanza, states the reason for the exercise, to gain “some power / at least over flesh” (Line 17) and its weaknesses, both physical and moral. The speaker dismisses the question of who “added his heat” (Line 21) to the space and the gym-goer’s collective intent to actualize themselves.

The end of the sixth stanza bleeds into the seventh stanza, and together, the two stanzas communicate weightlifting's repetitive difficulty, whether that weight be “lifted, pressed, or curled” (Line 25). The speaker then chants the mantra “Power over beauty, / power over power!” (Lines 26-27) while lifting those weights. The last line of the seventh stanza marks a turn inward. The speaker states that the weightlifters have “something more / tender, beneath our vanity” (Lines 28-29): their “will to become objects / of desire” (Lines 30-31).

From this inward turn, the speaker returns to the sweat stain and calls it “the mark / of our presence” (Lines 31-32). As a product produced by multiple people over a long period of time, all exerting themselves on the same bench, the stain, by the end of the poem, turns into “some halo / the living made together” (Lines 33-34).