At the Gym

Mark Doty’s “At the Gym” treats the gym as a place of worship, ritual, and communion. In this way, Doty’s gym serves many of the same functions as a conventional Christian church. Doty makes this connection between gym and church explicit through mirroring religious imagery—most significantly the Shroud of Turin—and functions inside the gym. While typical churches see people celebrate and congregate in the service of divine powers, Doty’s gym celebrates the secular power of the human body. Doty’s speaker also depicts the gym as a homosocial space, which means that it is a space dominated by men. Doty’s men, however, are never individuated, and the speaker describes neither their bodies nor their personalities. Though the men congregate at the gym in shared worship of the body, it is this congregation—the community itself—that trumps each individual’s physical achievement.

Doty’s depiction of the gym as a homosocial place of congregation and shared accomplishment begins and ends with the “salt-stain spot” (Line 1) that occasions the poem. This sweat stain is the poem’s occasion and its object of contemplation. In this way, “At the Gym” shares many similarities with ekphrastic poetry, or poetry that seeks to describe or interpret a work of visual art.