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Reflecting on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop advised herself as follows: “Portray not a thought, but a mind thinking … The ardor of [an idea’s] conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth, and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it has changed into some other idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any existence whatever except a verbal one.”

In Bishop’s work, the preserved occurrence of ardor often takes the form of something being described, and the description points obliquely to “a mind thinking.” Mary McCarthy said about her poetry, “I envy the mind hiding in her words, like an ‘I’ counting up to a hundred waiting to be found.” The semi-obscure artifice of “the mind hiding” seems a different thing than the affect of self-dismissal rampant in much contemporary poetry where apparently ardor “has ceased … to have any existence whatever except a verbal one.”

In one of two instances in The Art of Description where Mark Doty indicates the urgency behind this fine tutorial, he says, “Since the inadequacy of LANGUAGE is fast becoming a cliché of postmodern writing, we may have to think about how to negotiate the inescapable limitations of words without relying on a suddenly familiar hesitation, a doubt in language’s capabilities. Back in the mid-90s, my students at Iowa used to say, ‘I mistrust language.’ Now everybody in creation mistrusts language, and half the poems we read make a nod toward the unsayable.”

It isn’t the unsayable but the nature of the nod that agitates Doty into ardently pleading the case for the relevance of figurative language. He writes, “It’s the unsayability of what being is that drives the poet to speak and speak, to make versions of the world, understanding their inevitable incompletion, the impossibility of circumscribing the unreadable thing living is.” The relationship of the descriptive to the unsayable is the core substance of these lucid and persuasive essays.

Doty begins with a piece on Bishop’s “The Fish,” a poem illustrating how “poetry concretizes the singular, unrepeatable moment; it hammers out of speech a form for how it feels to be oneself.” At the same time, Doty discovers here “a free-floating sense of self detached from context, agency, and lines of action.” How have poets like Bishop and Cavafy managed to “name some elusive quality of their subject” while simultaneously resisting “too easy a knowing” and creating “a space of indeterminacy”? And how does figurative language work in the first place? Doty spells out six principles, the first of which insists on the primacy of the descriptive: “To say what we see is to speak figuratively.” But lest we regard description as mere mirroring or duplication, he says, “Poetic description wants to do anything but reinscribe the already known.”

In the second instance of explicit positioning, Doty declares himself “happily partial, partisan … on the side of allegiance to the sensible, things as they are, the given, the incompletely knowable, never to get done or get it right or render it whole: ours to say and say.” But figurative language is a resource used by every poet regardless of allegiance. One of the effects of The Art of Description is to gather us into a common and broad consideration of the figurative as shown in the work of Henry Vaughn, George Herbert, Blake, Shelley, Hopkins, Pound, Hart Crane, Mina Loy, Cummings, Ginsberg, Ammons, Levertov, Snyder, Hass, Swenson, Carruth, Susan Howe, Kinnell, Lynda Hull, O’Hara, Alan Shapiro, Malena Mörling, James Galvin, Dorianne Laux, and Wislawa Szymborska.

In his essay on Bishop, “Counting to a Hundred,” Seamus Heaney writes, “One has a sense of justice being done to the facts of a situation even as the situation is being re-imagined into poetry. She never allows the formal delights of her art to mollify the hard realities of her subjects.” But once we have the poetry, “the hard realities of her subjects” flee. Bishop could have taken her fish to the taxidermist or the photographer, hardening the reality – but the “facts” say she caught and released. Mark Doty’s essays are alive with wonder at the ability of poetry to figure the world – while remaining true to the ultimate escape of the actual.

[Published by Graywolf Press on August 1, 2010. 152 pages, $12.00 paperback. Also now available: The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction, essays by Dean Young. Both titles are part of “The Art Of” series, edited by Charles Baxter.]