ABSTRACT
The poise of Doty's narrative is all the more poignant as it moves steadily forward in what is a two-page long sentence. The couplets are a steady pulse of form which in Doty's hands structures his salute to an often wayward, self-destructive life. The lines of a poem and the spaces between lines constitute a poem's architecture. The architecture of the poem that is line fitted beneath margin and returning line enforces and exemplifies what the poem is about. In its way the architecture makes us experience what the narrator goes through. As in architecture where there are walls and spaces, the spaces in the poem are as integral as the masses of the stanzas. The architecture of stanzas tends to be strictly vertical as the page shows block being laid upon block as if a chimney were being built. Such a chimney is a poetry structure, however, in that the top block begins rather than finishes the structure.
