♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Major support for "Poetry in America" provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of "Poetry" magazine, and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

♪ ♪ STEVEN PINKER: I do remember in a very sensuous way all of the pertinences of a barbershop.

The hot shaving cream coming out of the chrome dispenser, the straight razor, the leather strop, the bottles of Wildroot and Brylcreem and the various products, each in a different color.

MARK DOTY: When you come out of that barbershop, you've been splashed with a little... some kind of scent you would never wear otherwise.

You have that nice feeling of the buzz.

(clippers buzzing) SIMON DOONAN: There is the barber who has some magical ability to just put his hand on your neck and you do feel yourself calming down.

JONATHAN ADLER: Getting your hair cut, it's like, this dude who you don't know actually being quite tender.

BILL T. JONES: You can get away from your obligations as a father and a husband and all of those things and go there and be guys again.

♪ ♪ ELISA NEW: All of the men I gathered to discuss Mark Doty's meditation on aging-- "This Your Home Now"-- testified to the special place of the barber's chair in their own development as men.

JONES: I was a little boy, and you learn how to be a man in that environment.

And then as a teenager, I had hair down to my waist, believe it or not.

So, um, I didn't feel at home in the barbershop.

And it's surprising to, later in one's life, feel this sense of comfort and pleasure in that routine and repetition.

(clippers buzzing) NEW: A haircut?

Yes.

But as I learned from reading Doty's poem with legendary choreographer Bill T. Jones, psychologist Steve Pinker, design icons Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan, and with Doty himself, a half an hour in a barber's chair may convey a man into his past and into the tenderest parts of himself.

DOTY: "This Your Home Now."

For years I went to the Peruvian barbers on 18th Street, --comforting, welcome: the full coatrack, three chairs held by three barbers, eldest by the window, the middle one a slight fellow who spoke an oddly feminine Spanish, the youngest last, red-haired, self-consciously masculine, and in each of the mirrors their children's photos, mildly smutty cartoons, postcards from Machu Picchu.

I was happy in any chair, though I liked best the touch of the eldest, who'd rest his hand against my neck in a thoughtless, confident way.

Ten years maybe.

In that barbershop, there are three chairs.

- Right.

NEW: And you say you're happy in any of them... DOTY: I think one of the things the poem wants to celebrate is how great a thing it is to have a bit of routine and a bit of familiarity.

You have to be a habitué, you have to be comfortable there.

You have to belong there.

DOONAN: The poem to me describes an archetypal barbershop, which is very warm and you can almost feel it, smell it.

PINKER: Small shop, several chairs in a row.

It is the reassurance that it's like the last barbershop.

♪ ♪ DOTY: One of the characteristics of habit is that we very slowly let the details in.

You don't know that you're noticing the combs in their jar of liquid, or the particular red shade of this barber's hair until it's gone.

I was happy in any chair, though I liked best the touch of the eldest who'd rest his hand against my neck in a thoughtless, confident way.

Ten years maybe.

One day, the powdery blue steel shutters pulled down over the window and door, not to be raised again.

They'd lost their lease; I didn't know how at a loss I'd feel-- this haze around what I'd like to think, the sculptural presence of my skull requires neither art nor science, but two haircuts on Seventh, one in Dublin, nothing right.

And suddenly that feeling of there is a blue, impenetrable wall of corrugated metal and that part of my life is over.

Ten years marks off... a lot's happened in that time, it marks off a whole period.

I think every guy has had that experience where, you know, you get into a groove, you go to your barber and it lasts five or six years.

NEW: You can mark your life in how many barbershops you have.

- Yeah.

ADLER: Hair is a metaphor for aging.

♪ ♪ NEW: Not long into Doty's poem, we may realize that the loss of the barbershop has triggered something deeper in the speaker.

As we take a half-step down with "nothing right," we see for the first time how the poem's shape on the page recalls other famous poems of men in mid-life, poems that let their winding lines chart a speaker's restless internal journey.

Like Wordsworth, Frost, and others, Doty writes meandering lines that twist outer impressions into inner thoughts, braiding past and present in a loose downward spiral.

♪ ♪ PINKER: It's very subtle how the language itself, the sounds and the meter and the choice of words are deployed.

NEW: Children's photos, Machu Picchu, chair, touch; repetitions of sound exert a growing pressure as if leading us into deeper registers of feeling.

JONES: "They'd lost their lease; I didn't know how at a loss, I'd feel."

PINKER: "They'd lost their lease.

I didn't know how at a loss I'd feel."

NEW: The language is so colloquial.

"I didn't know how at a loss," it's almost... awkward.

But you will notice that that language changes as the poem moves on, goes to some quite different places.

If a poem has varying levels of diction and varying kinds of tone, it gets maybe a little closer to lived experience.

The way we look at something utterly beautiful.

And then you look at a pothole in the street.

We go from heightened experience thinking it's something crucial to us to, you know, a phone call from a bank, right?

All the time, the world is like that.

♪ ♪ ADLER: "Then (I hear my friend Marie "laughing over my shoulder, saying 'In your poems, "there's always a then,' and I think, is it a poem without a then?)"

NEW: There are different ways we might read the "then."

One is there's always a past.

There's always the "then" from which you come, the "then" of memory.

What are the possibilities of what "then" can mean?

- That was the past, it was then or... anticipation, "Then what happened?"

So there is going to be answering the questions.

So some set up, and then the poem is going to take us a bit further.

Which is the "then" of shift.

That something happens.

We look at an experience and if we look hard enough, sometimes we can turn how we see it just a little bit.

And in this case, it's looking at the loss of the barbershop, the loss, of course, of memory, the loss of many people who are referenced in the poem.

♪ ♪ Dull early winter, back on 18th, upspiraling red in a cylinder of glass, and just below the line of sidewalk, a new sign, Willie's Barbershop.

Dark hallway, glass door, and there's (presumably) Willie.

When I tell him I used to go down the street he says in an inscrutable accent, This your home now, puts me in a chair, asks me what I want and soon he's clipping and singing with the radio's Latin dance tune.

(Latin dance music playing) (clippers buzzing) ♪ ♪ I think that phrase was probably the first trigger for this poem.

Here is somebody I've never seen before, looks at me, so exuberant, says, "This your home now!"

- (laughs) DOTY: Okay.

You want to return such an embrace.

And also, it starts to raise this question of home, right?

Is home what I've just lost?

Is the barbershop one of my homes?

Could this be another place of comfort and familiarity?

I don't know.

I think that home perhaps also suggests where the poem is going in terms of relaxing into another level of contemplation.

PINKER: There are sounds.

There's the "skull-buzz drone."

Both the sound and the tactile feel of an electric razor reverberating against the skull.

(clippers buzz) The language recedes and you're projected into a world of vision and of sound and of touch.

ADLER: And then I got kind of sucked into this guy's journey, his sort of ruminations.

I was like in there with him in his head, in the chair drifting off.

There's somebody working on the outside of your head and then there's what's going on inside your head.

ADLER: It's like this dreamy period.

DOONAN: Isn't the dreamy period, though, when you look at the pictures of family, babies, lounge singers.

You sort of start in that ruminative period.

You get very involved in those pictures that he talks about.

♪ ♪ DOONAN: "That's when I notice Willie's walls, though he's been here all of a week, spangled with images hung in barbershops since the beginning of time: lounge singers, near celebrities, random boxers, Italian boys, Puerto Rican, caught in the hour of their beauty, though they'd scowl at the word.

Cheering victors over a trophy won for what?

Frames already dusty, at slight angles, here, it is clear, forever."

♪ ♪ For me, there are the images of the ancient world.

Since I've been in a barbershop, you know, for the last 60 years, there's been a boxer on the wall and some starlet who you don't know who she is, and some, you know, guys shaking hands to congratulate each other.

It's part of a sort of masculine vocabulary, something that is ephemeral.

Obviously when you look at those pictures that happened a long time ago.

They are an example of magic in everyday life.

Because how is it possible that this is the new barbershop?

It's just opened and the pictures are dusty and they have cobwebs on them, and they're... What is going on here?

♪ ♪ (birds chirping) PINKER: Are barbershops like aspens, each sprung from a common root, ten thousand years old, sons of one father, holding up fighters and starlets to shield the tenderness at their hearts?

DOTY: Aspens are just enormous, underground things.

Each trunk looks like an individual tree, it's actually a clone of that one creature or a part of that one being.

NEW: And the root system of the aspen is underground.

DOTY: Yeah.

NEW: As if male tenderness had to be... DOTY: Hidden away.

For me, it felt like that was the crack in daily life, in ordinary reality, which began to open the poem because to go into Willie's barbershop is to travel in time.

And so it begins to be as W.H.

Auden once said, "A lane in the land of the dead."

Even though the poem has a fairly jaunty surface when it starts out, and it is casual, there are little nudges in there that I hope make what comes... not startling or not shocking.

One of the things I find so interesting in this poem is your skull.

There is some sort of augury in that first image of men shrunk to skin and bones.

DOTY: Sort of being aware in that situation of oneself as body, oneself as bones.

Think about the pharaohs' tombs and how much was prepared in the past to care for the bodies of the dead.

And there's something about the barbershop, that caring for the body in this very, very old way.

It feels very elemental, there's something very ceremonial about it.

NEW: Barbering itself has a long history to which the poem alludes.

Barbers of the Middle Ages in Europe were barber-surgeons.

They not only cut hair or shaved whiskers, barbers were blood-letters who applied leeches, pulled teeth and performed operations.

White bandages, red blood, the blue of veins, these are all remembered in the barber pole, and Doty's poem gives us to understand that the modern institution of the barbershop as a place of comfort looks over its shoulder at a long medical history.

ADLER: My mind went immediately to blood in a vial because I felt like HIV and AIDS was, like, so present in this poem.

I kept thinking of that time in the '80s when the idea of infection was such an important thing.

And I remember I was a regular at an archetypal New York working-class barbershop.

The instruments weren't cleaned that well, and there were always wanting to shave your neck with a cutthroat razor.

ADLER: It was such an intense moment, you'd be like this gay dude in a barbershop in the Village with a straight guy cutting your hair, wanting to, like, shave the back of your head with a razor.

DOTY: Our guardian Willy defies time, his chair our ferry boat, and we go down in the trance of touch and the skull-buzz drone singing cranial nerves in the direction of peace, and so I understand that in the back of this nothing building on 18th Street, I've found that door ajar before, in daylight, when it shouldn't be, some forgotten bulb left burning in a fathomless shaft of my uncharted nights-- the men I have outlived await their turns, the fevered and wasted, whose mothers and lovers scatter their ashes and gave away their clothes.

Twenty years and their names tumble into a numb well though in truth I have not forgotten one of you, may I never forget one of you-- these layers of men arrayed in there no-longer breathing ranks.

PINKER: Obviously written alluding to the horrible era of the AIDS epidemic because the men that he's remembering were buried by their mothers.

NEW: Yes.

PINKER: And that is a reminder these were, these were young men.

DOTY: Poem is written in tercets, so they're three line stanzas, and, and in a way that's a little bit of a nod to the great poem in tercets in the Western world, which is, of course, "The Divine Comedy," in which Dante is descending into hell.

It's not as though we hurtle into the underworld.

We are ferried gently.

DOTY: Our considerate ferryman.

NEW: A man descends in a barber chair... JONES: To the River Styx.

- Yes, he descends to the River Styx, to the underworld from the most unlikely of places... - The barber chair.

- (chuckles) NEW: Where there are particular dead, for whom you mourn, the dead of 20 years before.

♪ ♪ Mark Doty and I are on the far shores of surviving gay men of HIV.

That's what connects us.

It's hidden down in the poem.

I think it's two-thirds of the way through the poem before we realize what he's missing.

Just when I think I'm free of it, then I encounter... something, Mark's poetry, Mark, and I realize that we will never be free of that particular type of loss.

There are not so many gay men of my generation walking around.

Hundreds of thousands perished.

I lived in a community that was very hard hit by the epidemic in Provincetown, Massachusetts, town of 3,000 people, year rounders, we averaged a funeral a week during the early 90s.

How old was I-- I was 40, when my partner died in 1994.

For a gay man such as the writer or myself who dealt with the AIDS epidemic, went through that as a young man, you know, you don't really get over it.

You're completely haunted by it.

I had many friends die, and many died without funerals, without anything, because their families had disowned them.

People stopped visiting them because the people who were visiting them, they got sick.

All these people are dying and they will be forgotten, and many are forgotten.

My companion died, I think at that time I was 36.

He was 39.

And he would never be older than 39.

But then, lo and behold, I found that I was now 49, and then I was 59 and now I'm looking at 70.

♪ ♪ DOTY: Willie, I have not lived well in my grief for them; I have lugged this weight from place to place as though it were mine to account for, and today I sit in your good chair in the sixth decade of my life, and if your back door is a threshold of the kingdom of the lost, yours is a steady hand on my shoulder.

Go down into the still waters of this chair and come up refreshed, ready to face the avenue.

Maybe I do believe we will not be left comfortless.

After everything comes tumbling down or you tear it down and stumble in the shadow-valley trenches of the moon, there's still a decent chance at a barbershop, salsa on the radio, the instruments of renewal wielded effortlessly, and, who'd have thought, for you.

(clippers buzzing) ♪ ♪ NEW: One hears the language of church.

PINKER: "Still waters in the shadow valley," allusions to the 23rd Psalm.

Very, very subtle.

DOTY: That's the language of the sacred with which I grew up.

I came from East Tennessee, Protestant family, we used to sing hymns on the front porch and summer nights, and that was my first poetry, and... you know, you could do something by saying "Stumble in the shadow-valley trenches of the moon" that you can't do by saying, "I was depressed."

I don't believe in that theology anymore, but I'm so grateful to have that language.

This poem in particular has a geography.

We feel we move from one emotional register to another and to feel in some ways the reassurance of that everyday language return.

It becomes that much more possible for having journeyed into the valley of the shadow.

So if I can sing some of the time and make this wrought language, create an aria or some... filigree of prayer, I'll do that.

But I don't want to stop there.

I also want the plain person.

In this case... the artist who, in the face of difficult experience, lays down some of his tools and says, "Now what, what do I do?"

So I think in order to feel whole, the poem needs both those poles.

Well, I think the two things coexist nicely in the poem, the horror that's never going to go away with the day-to-day rituals that are comforting, because that's what people's lives are like.

I think he is talking about, like, how do I live well?

And it's like how do I... how come I get to go on?

I still have 15 or 20 years.

I think, you know, when those kinds of times happened to us, it seems like, how can the world move on?

These things will never go back to normal or people will never be able to be innocent in that same way again.

Of course they are.

But for those who live through that time, it feels sometimes like you just kind of set it aside and it doesn't go away.

You haven't forgotten it.

It's that daily life, ongoingness, requires.

The poem has ripped open something for me.

Can you allow yourself to become a middle-aged man?

Now, even more, can you allow yourself to become an old man?

Ah, or can you allow yourself to fall in love again?

Oh, I'm going to be allowed to get older.

If I'm careful, 15 or 20 years, I can do something just for the experience of it.

NEW: Enjoy getting my haircut.

- Yes.

Or I can write a poem for the pleasure of it.

Could I be a little satisfied?

There's a man who loves me.

Our dogs.

Fifteen, twenty more good years, if I'm a bit careful.

There's what I haven't written.

It's sunny out, though cold.

After I tip Willie I'm going down to Jane Street to a coffee shop I like, and then I'm going to write this poem.

Then.

♪ ♪ The then of the next moment is... that's hope, isn't it?

That's ongoingness.

What do we do in the present that allows us to hold the past, remember it, but move forward at the same time?

I don't know that every poem has to have the word "then," or even necessarily turn something into another layer.

You might sing one thing so fully and so completely that the poem feels satisfying.

But how about the poem of later life when one continues and what, you know, you move from heightened feeling to getting through the day and onto the next.

So to make the poem that contains or remembers this experience is a way of mapping what just happened and to arrive at the "then."

It may be possible to walk to the next territory.

It's certainly possible to walk to the coffee shop.

And then from the poem written there, it may be possible to move further emotionally.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: Major support for "Poetry in America" provided by the Dalio Foundation.

Additional support provided by the Poetry Foundation, publisher of "Poetry" magazine, and an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture.

And by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

And from Deborah Hayes Stone and Max Stone.

For additional information and streaming content, please visit us at poetryinamerica.org