Hi Cally. Well, the Collecteds seem to be out of print but you can still get the individual books: Shibboleth, Errata, Conjure and Safest. Start with any of them. From the US your best bet might be ABEbooks, but have a look round...

I looked at your links Maryann, and I've seen that interview before - nice to see it still on there! I clicked at random and heard Michael talking about the way poery and dance are two [rehistoric art forms, and both created to enable memory - that is, to enable information to be stored within them, to be transmitted, as he says, from person to person - or even generation to generation. This is a central tenet of his work and gets to the heart of itvery quickly - the fact that what we're doing when we write a poem - or read a poem - is taking part in something hardwired into being human. And the connection between poetry and dance: there's a poem, and a Selected volume, called "Remembering the Steps to Dances Learned Last Night." In his monograph Wallflowers, which is absolutely fascinating from start to finish and once again contains most of his essential ideas about what poetry is - he describes the pattern he imagines might be left on the floor, tracing the movements of dancers' feet, as the equivalent of a written record of the dance - the way written poetry is the record of the poetry in real time. We were doing both long before we could write.

He was fascinated by mnemonics, the tools that were developed to aid memory. The Renaissance Memory Palaces were enormous constructs where each "room" in the palace would be accessed - along with its information - according to where it was situated, both on its own and in relation to other "rooms."

This reminds me of a book I wanted to read, maybe it's out now and I should look. A few years ago the Royal Shakespeare Company performed the entirety of Shakespeare's history plays, using one company over two or three years. A staggering feat for them - memorising all these plays. I read it in the Sunday papers, I think, an interview with the director about how they went about memorising, & I'm sure there was going to be a book... Of course, actors learn lines, but they don't JUST learn lines. I was talking to one of them about this, because I knew a couple of people in the cast. He said it was very holistic. They learned the lines, sure, but the tools they used were blocking, cues, the words and sounds that go with a certain movement - they learn the dance of it, in other words, and they learn it physically as much as intellectually. Michael would have loved that.

It's important to remember - and I very much think this, and I think it's partly how you develop your ear, and Michael used to talk about it - that words are physical. Your speech affects your breathing, which affects your oxygen levels, slows or speeds up your body - words produce sound waves that go through your head, waves are physical. He pointed out - maybe in Wallflowers - that even if you just you move your lips silently to yourself as you read, tests have shown that your brain registers it as real speech. I'll look for the quote.

Katy - I have nothing to say, except please - keep talking! Silence does not mean not listening, not breathing hard at all you are telling.

Just, rave on, ok? What you're saying is great!

All ears, all eyes,

Cally

p.s. I saw a documentary about that! On the teacher who worked with them, learning the plays by moving. I remember them giving speeches while having to do certain movements, or the rest of the cast pulling at them - all sorts of physical ways of getting to the words. It was GREAT!!

Am I allowed to post this? Take it down, if not - I'm ignorant of such things. But ohh ...

The River in Spate

sweeps us both down its cold grey current.
Grey now as your father was when I met you,
I wake even now on that shore where once,
sweat slick and still, we breathed together--
in--soft rain gentling the level of the lake,
out--bright mist rising from the lake at dawn.
How long before we gave each other to sleep,
to air--drawing the mist up, exhaling the rain?
Though we fight now for breath and weaken
in the torrent's surge to the dark of its mouth,
you are still asleep in my arms by its source,
small waves lapping the gravel shore,
and I am still awake and watching you,
in wonder, without sadness, like a child.

Wonderful poem, Cally! I like Donaghy's poetry so much, and though I've seen a number of his pieces, I'm abashed I don't know it better. I look forward to giving some time to it this week. Thank you for starting this thread, Katy.

Here's one that I have in an old Hudson Review, Winter 2000 issue. I have no idea what collection it would be in.


Refusals

Shooting their horses and setting their houses alight,
The faithful struck out for a hillside in Sussex
To wait for the prophesied rapture to take them
At midnight, New Year's Eve, 1894.

But they knelt in the slow drifting snow singing hymns,
Hushing their children and watching the stars,
Until the sky brightened and the cold sun rose white
Over the plain where their houses still smouldered.

Some froze there all day, some straggled back sobbing
To salvage what little remained of their lives,
Others went mad and refused, 'til the end of their days
To believe that the world was still there.

Here, ten seconds to midnight, they join in the count
Over tin horns squealing in the bright drunk rooms.

Although Michael and I wrote from different worlds, mine entirely rural and his urban, we saw eye to eye on memory. The only other poets I know who really recite an entire program are Dana Gioia and Kay Ryan, and they keep a book in front of them and "pretend" to look at it. I just carry a notecard with the list of poems, and Mikey didn't even do that.

One of the few times I read with another poet, very well known, a little girl asked her mother in my hearing "Mommy, why was that lady reading from a book?" From the mouths of babes... I think one reason Mikey wanted me to recite to his students in London was so they would know he wasn't a freak of nature. As I wrote in the adjacent thread:

"She watched you springing for the microphone
to read without a text,
master of pacing, phrasing, pitch and tone.
Pity the poor bastard who went next,
yet even he is grieving
your prematurely leaving
a stage so few could ever wholly own."

Reading Shibboleth.
 

Poems like this one make me think I should learn dance and meter. From Shibboleth OUP 1988.

Khalypso.

Cast off old love like substance from a flame;
Cast off that ballast from your memory.
But leave me and you leave behind your name.

When snows have made ideas of the rain,
When canvas bloats and ships grow on the sea,
Cast off old love like substance from a flame.

Your eyes are green with oceans and you strain
To crown and claim your sovereignty,
You leave me and you leave behind your name

And all the mysteries these isles retain.
But if the god of sailors hacks you free,
Cast off old love like substance from a flame

Until you’re in a woman’s bed again
And make her moan as you make me,
‘Leave me and you leave behind your name.’

The brails go taut. The halyard jerks, the pain
Of breeching to the squall and all to be
Cast off, old love, like substance from a flame.
Now leave me. I will live behind your name.

I just bought used copies of Conjure and Safest from Abebooks U.K. for just over $20 for the two of them. The Collected Poems was out of my price range--about 60 bucks. There's a volume that puts together his first two collections, and it doesn't cost that much, but I don't know what the earlier collections might be like compared to the later ones. I already know I really really like at least some of the poems in Conjure

Katy or Tim or someone: how does the early Donaghy compare to the later work? Did it change a lot, get better, get worse, or . . .

Any time I encounter remembrances of Michael Donaghy I am grateful, so I want to thank Katy for leading this discussion, Maryann for sharing some wonderful links, and Tim for posting his remembrance which was good to revisit. I couldn’t help but stitch together some thoughts on Donaghy, a poet whose work has affected me deeply, and offer them humbly. I feel chastised for not committing my favorite poems of his to memory, for I don’t have his books with me in Brazil, and his online presence is scattered.

Like anyone who knew him, read him, heard him perform, when I heard that Donaghy had passed away I felt robbed. I had attended a performance of his—I won’t say reading for the obvious reason that no one was reading in the auditorium while he was on stage—at West Chester the year before, and was looking forward to signing up for his class at a future conference. In the meantime I had his books, which perform the valuable service of showing us new and exciting possibilities for the contemporary poem. His “Black Ice and Rain” has been criticized for being too Browningian, and to an extent I agree, but it was valuable to me when I first read it because it showed me very clearly how naturally one could capture the living, breathing present in the old, cobwebbed forms. I don’t have that poem by heart, but its moldy encyclopedias, its religious kitsch, cultural detritus, receding suburbs, all clutter a favorite room of my subconscious.

My first encounter with that poem was as an audience member at the performance mentioned above. All day those in the know had been telling me what a treat I was in for, and if I complained of fatigue and mentioned ducking the readings I was sharply reprimanded. Now the thought of missing any reading at a conference is distasteful to me, but I was twenty and callow. Thankfully I made it. One doesn’t expect a poet to look his audience in the face, except perhaps as he licks his finger to turn the page, or gives a wry wink after a clever passage to indicate we should all be—well, not laughing, or chuckling, but perhaps nodding with a knowing smile. My God, though, Donaghy was talking directly to each and every one of us. And when he cracked a joke, it shook you.

In “Reprimands,” he spoke of wanting to touch a “holy water font in Rome… half afraid I’d find its surface hard as stone and, this you’ll never understand, half afraid to leave the thing alone.” (Pardon if I misquote as I’m going by flawed memory.) That interruption of his sentence, that accusation that “you’ll never understand,” says much about the speaker and his relationship to his addressee in a poem that leaves out everything regarding their identities. It’s a fine touch. But I think it’s also meant to taunt the reader. “I’ll never understand? We’ll just see about that.” For me, at least, the desire to “reach out and touch faith,” as Depeche Mode would have it, is indeed a hesitant trembling of the hand before the water. An “apostolic voice” tells the poem’s speaker, “Oh ye of little faith, and shallow doubt, choose here to wet that hand, or step aside.” When Donaghy intoned that command to his rapt audience, I felt the urgency of the troubled soul at a Baptist revival, afraid to stay in the pew, and afraid to approach the altar. I understood.

Much is made of his live performance, but I want to stress that for all his acting talent it would not stick in our hearts and minds so if the poems were not as strong as they are, strong in the sense of craft, of course, but also strong of heart. For all its jest and protean flux, the Donaghy poem possesses an emotional core motivated by, well, “the heart’s old triads.” The same thing that, given a glimpse of the other side, we bash our skulls to escape.

Reading his poems, it’s hard not to feel like a drunk peeing on a wall, while inside Donaghy is slaughtering the suitors. Which is why the fact that his Collected and essays are out of print a year after their release is a crime against poetry. I hope new editions are forthcoming.

Okay, well I emailed Picador last night and this is the reply: "These absolutely shouldn’t be out of print; indeed, I asked for them to be reprinted in August! I’ll get on this asap."

So that's good news.

Kevin, what a great account. And you seem to have enough to go on, by heart, for the moment. One poem I really like is "A Darkroom." I hope this link works: it's Michael reading it on a site called the Poetry Jukebox, run by 57 Productions.

There's a lot to say, Andrew, about the earlier poems as compared to the later ones; some of my very favourite poems are in Safest, for example. I think "A Darkroom" is in there, and the one I quoted at the beginning of this thread. There are two poems based on Troy. And of course Conjure has "Black Ice and Rain", though I agree it isn't my absolute favourite, even of the monologues... though it does have that outrageous semi-gothic (more like as in "Southern Gothic" I suppose) atmosphere. (Michael was an admirer of Diane Arbus; you can see that, can't you?)

More later.

Thanks to everyone for these continuing comments. I see today a Baroque in Hackney blog post inviting participants, so I'll just add one technical note: If you're joining Eratosphere to participate on this thread, do please add Katy's name in the "referrer" section. That will speed up my process. Thanks!