Fair enough, Philip. (Who are these young, impressionable girls you say were so bowled over by this druggy persona?)

I'm curious about this concept of two different kinds of music being "mutually exclusive." Are there lots of things that automatically exclude other things, merely by virtue of being liked? And do you like many of them?

I also wonder if you read novels, or if you consider them "lies." And, if so, what is your definition of "the truth?"

I'm interested in the difference between knowing esoterica and being erudite. I suppose it must be something to do with depth of knowledge, or some element of judgement and discernment. Can you show me where you think Donaghy's discernment is lacking, so that the pretended erudition is revealed as mere esoterica?

Why don't you like esoterica?

Would you like to tell us what it is you do like, and why?

I will go out on a limb to say that we adults who do find value in Donaghy's work probably don't do so because we're crazy, or crippled by bad taste, or dazzled by some flim-flam persona, or hopelessly ensorcelled by the poet's personal charm. Ruling out those possibilities, just for the sake of argument, I wonder if there are any other ways to explain affection for this poet . . .

But in any event, Philip, your fighting words aside, I get that this poet isn't for you. Fair enough. And history may even prove you right about the superficiality of his charms and the profoundly minor quality of his work.

Then again, it might not. In any event, no one here is a neutral third-party arbitrator of what's Good and Right in poetry (because no such thing exists). So why don't we try to have a more interesting conversation than the one about who's bestest and who's worser?

These Donaghy threads frequently devolve into the poet's admirers rhapsodizing, until the poet's detractors just can't stand all the glowy encomia any longer and decide to take the man down a peg. Again - why don't we try a different conversation?

I'm squarely pro-Donaghy. I'll just say it: he's my "favorite poet" (odious phrase). But I don't hold any illusions about his being somehow "perfect" - as if there was any way to meaningfully measure perfection in art. I'm interested to hear where he falls short for readers, the ways that some readers (including several I know of and whom I deeply respect) find themselves resisting the work. It's a little bit like finding out that someone doesn't like your favorite flavor of ice cream, and, in the grand scheme of the universe, about as important. In any event, there's an interesting way to have that conversation.

I wonder if we'll have it.

John: snap! We've cross-posted.

Okay, so I've thought about this for a bit. It has admittedly felt odd, conducting a conversation like this, over several days, on this strange hybrid public/private, literary/personal basis.

There is a slightly irritating tendency in any discussion of Michael Donaghy, I have to admit - and it has got worse since he died - for conversation to become kind of hushed and pious, or for sentimentality to creep in. Even now it's very common, if his name comes up, for someone to say: "How long is it? four years. What - SIX years? Seems impossible!" And shake the head, and then everyone sits silent for a minute. It happened yesterday.

There's even a new genre of poems in new collections in the UK, even now, and almost obligatory: the Donaghy poem. They're still cropping up in books, and I've read very few that actually evoked Michael at all. (They were mainly by Ian Duhig.)

But in the face of this, and a slight mutual congratulation that may creep in, it's important to remember we're talking about someone who wrote poems. And taught. And had a wife and kid and house and car and laptop. Even Keats wasn't perfect; I'm sure lots of people found him annoying. Mr D could be very annoying, too. Sometimes he annoyed me almost as much as Keats. But Keats' reputation was made sickly after he died, just as Donaghy's is being solidified into just this annoying trickster character... There's an excellent book, in fact, called Posthumous Keats, that traces the development of this hagiography over a century - starting with the ruckus over his death in Rome and the ensuing ruckus over what to write on the tombstone - and it's fascinating. Actually, it's specifically fascinating in the light of having gone through this experience of Michael dying and watching how people then treat his legacy, memory, etc.

There was a similar vein last year in researches I was doing around Ernest Dowson, with Arthur Symons writing a memoir that did Dowson no favours and sealed in one particular perception...

But really. Shall we just consider the work for a minute? Philip, I'd be glad if you could come back in and give a balanced, rational view of what you like and don't like about this poetry. There's plenty quoted above. You can get a lot more detailed information than what you relayed in your post by reading David Mason's essay - linked by Maryann on Page 4, I think - or Joshua Mehigan's, which I linked on Page 1. It would be interesting to discuss properly, rather than just bandy epithets.

I have been an ardent fan since I read "Machines",

Thanks, Katy, for hosting this thread.

Nearly any time a fan writes about Donaghy's work, some version of the phrase "what makes him different..." comes up. I'd have to look back, but I'm pretty sure I committed the cliche in both of my posts so far. But he's not the first poet to create personae, dramatic or otherwise (Pessoa, Pound, Eliot, Browning, Tennyson, Robinson, Masters, Spenser, Chaucer, Frost,....) While I don't think he would claim to be sui generis, sometimes it seems that, critically, he is treated as such. And that can be annoying.

Some of the same qualities I admire in his work are also what tire me of it after a while. In a less accommodating mood, his wisecracks don't do it for me ("I put the tenor in the vehicle...") I can tire of all those strange, often dusty and dingy artifacts of his, the claude glass being the first example that comes to mind. The sex, drugs, and bad soul get old. So, no, I don't think he's perfect, but he is a poet I keep returning to. And I'm always interested in the counter-argument to my tastes, if only to better understand why I have them. So I hope to hear more.

Hi Kevin, good point about the "sui generis" issue. Of course writing is a community, across time and space, so every writer is always in a dialogue with other writers as well as readers. TS Eliot of course outlined this for us in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." (And don't forget Borges!) And as well as that, writers are in a group of their living peers - by generation, geography, proclivity, etc. Small differences may be magnified, and large ones go unnoticed; I think Eliot touches on that too, in that same essay. We're just too close to say who Donaghy is like or not like, or how unusual he is in his own peer group - though he does feel unusual to me. For "his own peer group" by the way, the list starts with people like Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Sean O'Brien, Glyn Maxwell, Jo Shapcott...

So time will tell. Currently in Britain there's a counter-trend developing which values contemporary poetry over older "canonical" works, so Donaghy may become more and more unusual.

As for the irritants, well everyone's entitled to those! (But really? Are sex, drugs and bad soul really the Donaghy topnotes?) I guess as in relationships the things that attract you to someone eventually become the reasons you break up. And the poetry world, at least here in the UK, has changed so much even in the six years since he died that you can't help wondering what his reaction would be to certain developments. There's this whole new crop of poets springing up, younger and more hooked in to current American, for example, writing; strains of postmodernism and crossover practice - what do we call it, "post-division"? - that simply can't be ignored or written off... it's a great, a very vibrant and multiplicitous time to be writing.

So who else do you read? When you get sick of Donaghy? Who's your antidote?

Re: "irritants" & imperfections . . . I was thinking about this this morning. I always say, "of course he's not perfect!" but mostly because I know, intellectually, that he's not. My sentimentality (!) says otherwise.

But I took a second and really thought - what bugs me in a Donaghy poem? And I realized that there were a couple things, and that one of them was illustrated by one of his best-known, most beloved poems . . .

. . . which unfortunately I don't have to hand at the moment. But maybe someone has "Pentecost" laying around?

I love the poem, mostly. But the end! It just feels so abrupt. Like a bad mood swing. And the ending seems to be justified by, god help us, a pun:

And when you lick the sweat along my thigh,
Dearest, we renew the gift of tongues.

Argh. I get that it's a layered pun, a good pun. And I'm not anti-pun. (I couldn't very well like MD if I were.) But sometimes, I feel like this kind of move, the triple-entendre, the slick pun, is used as cover for a much bigger move (like ending the whole damn poem), but doesn't pull nearly enough weight.

So, there it is. A weakness for puns. Sometimes the puns are delightful. Sometimes . . . sometimes . . . I just wanted to stick to the story and have it resolve dramatically, rather than at a more superficial, that is, a purely linguistic/symbolic level. I guess that when someone hooks me into a narrative, I expect them to keep narrating all the way down the line. Pentecost is an example, I think, of where the narration rather abruptly stops, and the narrative voice instead turns to wordplay. Elegant, smart, imminently clever wordplay to be sure. But it just isn't what I was expecting to get. I always feel let down at the end of this, one of MD's best known poems. Bummer.

EDITING IN: On an entirely unrelated note, I hadn't seen anyone link to this recent review in Poetry of MD's Collecteds. Apologies if it's already been shared:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/jour...html?id=239466

Well - I admit that's not my absolute favourite moment in the oeuvre. But in my case, it's the slightly queasy word "Dearest" that I don't like.

I love puns too. I thrive on them. I mean, not only do I think they're the highest form of humour, I think they can even sometimes be deeply mysterious and not even funny. Paul Muldoon, of course, was the poet who - in the generation immediately preceding Donaghy's, that is, they're the same age-ish - Muldoon created a whole style and gave the rest of us permission to use words in certain ways. He brought assonance back in in a huge way - he turned it and pararhyme into full rhyme, in effect - and he brought puns blinking out into the sunlight. So you can't ignore him. Though I feel a Donaghy pun is more like a Donne pun, and I've always thought it was a wonderful serendipity that they're next to each other on the bookshelf.

In other news, speaking of the craze for the contemporary, I just this minute opened up my POETRY magazine email newsletter, and read this apposite beginning:

It relates more to what I said than what you've just said, John - and if anything it shows why we needed TS Eliot back in 1823!

And I've just remembered a book I saw today in the Oxfam Bookshop: The Shock of the Old. It turns out to have been a BBC series on British buildings.

By the way, it seems to me that - what with my remark about "Dearest" and others preceding - the thing people may be objecting to slightly is a certain archness. I'd hardly be in a position to object to such a trait, and I think I am aware that Donaghy possesses it. It's worth pointing out here his direct bloodline (as it were) from James Merrill - another poet who gets called arch, crazy, etc. He in fact introduced me to Merrill, and I remember the occasion as of the top of my head blowing in and the refreshing breeze blowing right down to my heart. Wowie.

The thing to realise about both of them is that they're both completely genuine in their archness. It isn't an affectation. I see it in their cases - certainly in Michael's - as more like something to do with an intellectual hyperactivity... and Merrill of course had his own little esoteric side, with the Ouija board. I love The Changing Light of Sandover, his twenty-year Ouija epic. Donaghy was very interesting on the subject of that, by the way. His feeling was that the spirits, who of course included Auden, Yeats & co, were metaphors for poetic creation.

There are passages in Sandover that are so suddenly, shockingly beautiful that I can barely even read them.

There's another line to be traced here. When Michael published his first book he asked an older poet to write a blurb for the cover: it was Alfred Corn. And Alfred Corn's first book had an encomium upon it from Merrill.

So, no: none of us is sui generis: everyone comes from somebody.

Speaking of narratives, what about The Incense Contest?

I have mixed feelings about MD. I bought the collected after liking some of his poems I saw around. A couple of thoughts for discussion

1. Do you think his poetry evolved at all? Apart from the intrusion of mortality into the topics. Maybe his career was too short. I had the impression that it emerged pretty much as it was to stay. Still 16 years isn't that long a publishing career

2. He has a habit, often in his best poems too, of having a concluding couplet wrap up. Maybe this stuck with me when I was reading as it occurs in the first two poems of the book Machines and Pentecost.

3. As important as the variety in the characters talking in the poem, maybe more so, is the variety in who is being addressed. The reader is put into the poem/drama by imagining what role they are playing.

I would argue, Peter, that Michael's closings are not a too-neat wrapping up but a lovely spin on what has come before, including that last couplet in "Machines." This to me is "closure" done well--the click of the hasp on a well made box, but the sense of something still breathing, still open. By the same token, I would say that his openings are remarkable and can teach us much about how to get into a poem. Did he develop? Well, it's an odd thing. There are poems in his first book--like "Remembering Steps to Dances Learned Last Night" and "The Tuning" that are among his very best. But a few other poems in that book did seem merely clever, and that growing sense of mortality is a development every bit as much as it is in Yeats, who had a much longer career and of course more opportunity to grow. So yes, it's tragic that Michael's development was cut short, let alone his life, but I continue to think there's more vitality and verbal elan in his work than in the work of almost anyone else of my generation.
Dave

Dave - yes! I would argue that Donaghy aimed for that very effect. In fact, I think he wrote about it. I suppose it's probably crass to link to myself, but, damn it, it came up naturally. A while back I wrote an essay on this very topic that Kate was kind enough to place in Umbrella. If anybody's interested, it's here. It's a close read (of the already-referenced-here "Upon a Claude Glass") and hence the bit on closure comes in the last three paragraphs.

(I apologize in advance for some of the more breathless passages, from which Kate gamely tried to save my obstinate ass.)

* * *

Editing in: Peter, I love your third point, about the varying identity of the implied listener. I haven't read that anywhere, and I think it's a spot-on observation. Many thanks!

That's a great piece about the Claude Glass. I don't think it's over the top at all! And why shouldn't it be, anyway - it isn't a review, it's a close reading of something that grips you, whcih should include WHY it grips you...

I spent some time looking for over-neat clinching couplets, and while I did find some closing couplets, the most noticeable effect I noticed was that after a while every poem I saw seemed to have this thing going on, and then I thought: well, that's just what poems DO at the end, surely? And it worked for Shakeapeare. I'd even argue that he did it MORE than Donaghy.

I was also thinking about the progression idea. Dave's got it, I think - the movement from cleverness and maybe a slight brittleness to a deeper, more fluid, more - is aged the wrong word, as in oak-? - outlook. And elan, isn't that a great word.

One other "clever" poem I love is "Shibboleth." He said he wrote that out of the experience of being American and moving to London, which I find howlingly funny. Yes! Fortunately I'm long past that anxiety now but it is a very, chillingly, funny poem.

The things that I listed that bug me about Donaghy are also what endear him to me. If I were to list other poets I read and love, I might say the same of them. And, no, I don't think "drugs, sex, and bad soul" are his top notes... I'm more attracted to his storytelling, and his engagement with the reader. But I think that for those readers like Philip the more wilder elements are a barrier. I read Donaghy for a few years before I knew of his drug habits, which I only learned from Tim Murphy's remembrances. When I encountered those references, I never assumed he had firsthand knowledge, but I thought it likely. In any event, that's totally beside the point.

About the closing couplets... I agree that Donaghy makes that work. It's also one of the most daring techniques he employs (that, and the unabashed conceits worthy of Donne). I agree with David... it is like the box is being snapped shut, but paradoxically it still breathes. What first jumps to mind here is the closing of "Reprimands" when Thomas chooses to "...wet with blood his faithless hand." There is a contemporary aversion to the kind of closure that Donaghy tends to employ in these poems and I think it comes from a postmodern unease with the whole idea. And I don't think one can encounter it without thinking of Shakespeare, which is either to the poem's benefit or detriment.

It's interesting that so chilling a poem as "Shibboleth" was inspired by his move to London. It seems he never took the most obvious route from inspiration to poem. It would have been too easy to write a poem about the American new to London trying to get the lingo down. What if Donaghy had written a poem with a confessional "I" that directly addressed his anxieties?

Yeah, Kevin, I'm inclined to think that confessional "I" poem might have sort of sucked. Which is to say, I can't even imagine such a straightforward treatment from this sleight-of-hand artist.

We've come back around to Donaghy the storyteller, Donaghy the dramatist (even if only in monologue, not for stage). Katy, you mentioned The Incense Contest. Such a fantastic poem. More appealing to me, in many ways, than Black Ice & Rain. But so many of Donaghy's poems are terrific dramatic monologues. The Commission is a favorite of mine. I guffaw every time I read it, painfully. And the Chamber of Errors creeps me out every time I read it, entirely.

And of course he's got plenty of shorter poems that assume a specific, recognizable persona (as compared to an indeterminate or tricksy one) yet don't quite announce themselves as dramatic monologues. His poem Ovation, from Errata, comes to mind (somebody mentioned Dante's influence on the dramatic monologues earlier . . . well, there it is, along with a sinner from an entirely different era). Sometimes, as in Ovation, these poems feel like riddles. The fun, and chill, of Ovation is figuring out who's speaking. When you do - wow. Wow and ugh.

Aside from Donaghy the dramatist, we've also been talking about Donaghy the formalist, while noting that his view of form was expansive. Katy has suggested (and here I'm going to run a little ways with what she's actually said) that the kernel of Donaghy's "formalism" wasn't really formalism at all; it was instead his belief, roughly, that writers spur themselves on by mediating resistance. I say this isn't really formalism because form is external & verifiable; the process Donaghy describes is fundamentally internal, and known only by its fruits. It's a view of form that lets one freely use the traditional forms - and Donaghy could use them all - but doesn't need them. To the extent that New Formalism suggested that traditional form was a necessary part of writing good poems (and I realize that extent was limited), Donaghy had pretty much nothing to do with New Formalism - despite doing traditional form as well as those who bear its standard.

With a view of formalism like his, one preoccupied with mediating internal resistance and less focused on satisfying the external demands of traditional structures, it's no wonder that Donaghy the formalist could produce striking free verse and prose poetry.

Here's an example from the former. (And by the way . . . before we all get too carried away about the "I" missing from Donaghy's poems, isn't this it? And isn't this the same guy who appears in Local 32B? And in the poem about the driving lesson? MD didn't seem so much to shy away from identity as to use it, yes, manipulate it - which may be why this aspect of his art is so off-putting to some. Anyway, here's that free verse poem.)

Quorum

In today's Guardian, the word quorum
is spelled the same as oqurum,
the only surviving word of Khazar,
according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Oqurum, meaning "I have read."

The original pronunciation is lost for ever,
but I weigh three syllables in my palm,
against "paprika" and "samovar,"
"cedarwood" and, for some reason,
"mistletoe." I have read . . .

an entire literature,
and enacted all that it describes.
On a winter morning, in an ochre room
that we can never enter, the resonance
of those imaginary consonants

the elders whisper over ancient documents
flickers the blood bright shadow
from a glass of tea.

* * *

Formal? No. Formed? Yes. One of the things I like about it is that he actually doesn't mind, in a free verse poem, violating what I take to be a more-or-less unspoken rule in free verse, and resorts to end rhyme! A triplet, no less. I know it's not an unheard-of move, but it underscores, I think, the commitment to an internal sense of form.

And then there are the prose poems. Here's one from Shibboleth:

The Toast

You may have glimpsed a version of the Toast - our most curious tradition - played by our children on the streets of your cities at twilight, or seen, at our weddings, the young men dressed in red shot silk, wineglasses balanced brim-full on the backs of their hands, shuffling the intricate steps whilst reciting the tongue-twisting parable of the tailor's thimble.

The age and meaning of the Toast are much disputed. Heraklius contends that the ritual is merely a corruption of a trick schoolboys once used to remember the names and dates of our country's defeats. It will be noted that Heraklius is a northerner. A more promising avenue of investigation lies in the fact that, "the thimble," familiar to us from the nursery as part of the dandling-song of the infant prince exposed on the hillside and raised by fieldmice, is in fact a rebus for remembering the constellations, and the accurate dancing of the toast was a skill much prized among our seafaring ancestors who chanted the story to navigate, stomping the deckboards and raising ladles of fresh water to the Pole Star.

And it was said to be once a trial for witches or spies from the north who, unable to mimic the nimble steps and rhymes would trip up, drop the chalice, and seal their fates. And some scholars say that the story is only a code for the steps of another dance, long since forgotten, but often depicted in the goblet-bearing youth motif of our pottery.

* * *

So, here again is "an entire literature" from a civilization we'll never see, this one shot through with so many of the Donaghy preoccupations: the idea of the shibboleth (see also: "Analysand," "Shibboleth," "Majority" ["the name of our tribe means human being"]); the folk-art theme (see, well, all of Wallflowers); the terror of political paranoia (see the many Donaghy poems where he somehow managed to address the Nazi phenomenon from fresh angles).

This is why the criticism of Donaghy as lacking a "voice" doesn't resonate with me. Whether or not one recognizes a "voice," I think that's just the wrong metaphor. What comes through in the poems is a single mind, an unusually capacious one to be sure, and one that likes to play dress-up, but recognizable, and deeply integrated. Music, sex, and drinking, yes - but also Catholicism, memory, tribe, magicians, the Irish, parents, children, country, postmodernism, scoundrels . . . it's a complex and distinct palate, and it runs across whatever form Donaghy happened to select, or mask he decided to wear. It's not a confessional I, but it's an I.

A lot of words have been thrown about MD, the one for me is showmanship, he likes to put on a show.

BTW my points weren't meant to run him down but to try to focus in a bit more in detail on things I noticed about his work.

Ah, Kevin - but what would be gained by the mere anecdotal? For one thing alone, it would underline one's "otherness" in the very place one is trying to fit into! Why not take the path of more wit, and make something universal - which also, for private amusement, reverses the direction of the impetus?

But more to the point, why should Donaghy write in a confessional "I"? I mean, it wasn't his thing. Our particular era is obsessed with this confessional "I", but before 1950 it wasn't in any way de rigeur. I for one feel really excited when I discover a new poet who isn't just talking about himself the whole time. It all begins to feel a little like lifestyle articles, after a while.

Also - one of the chief benefits of not taking the "most obvious route" to a poem is that it will have gained a life beyond its original impetus. It will be - in fact - less obvious. Supposing the story about the man from Porlock were true, would we rather have "Kubla Khan," or a poem about a man trying to take a nap and being woken up by the front door?

And trust me, if you've never spent years surrounded by people all reminiscing about things you've never heard of, you don't know how important it is to be able to at least fake it!

I'm not sure I follow this "drugs" thing. For one thing, is this reminiscence of Tim's (I was there the night he met Michael's class, by the way) really material to an understanding of the poetry?

My understanding of how this stuff works is that the writer pays attention to, absorbs, and utilises the various spores that float in the cultural ether. Or, as Henry James put it: "Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost." Michael's poem "The Drop" is modelled on Eliot's "Journey of the Magi." The story is made up to be a modern version of a life-changing journey. "From The Safe House" is also imaginative, rather than autobiographical. "Black Ice and Rain" ditto.

I don't really know what to say about your statement that the "wilder elements are a barrier" to some kinds of readers. I'm sensing disapproval. There's not really much that can be done about that. I hear John Berryman was alcoholic. It's literature, not a schools outreach programme.

As to the Donne-ish conceits and other grand gestures, I think it's important to note that they employ a sensibility that is contained within postmodernism. And indeed modernism: he had a long apprenticeship to Pound before he moved on, and it's everywhere in his work. His "Seven Poems from the Welsh" is postmodern, though admittedly it belongs to the early, "clever" period. "Interviews" employs a modernist collage technique, and more than nods to surrealism. Even the title of "True" reflects the poet's fascination with out culture's deeply embedded unease with the whole notion of legitimacy, identity, truth. The spurious footnotes, invented histories, the mixing up of genres and tropes, gratuitous plundering of the "posh shop" of Western Civilisation - he is a child of his age. And his own railing on against postmodernism only tells half that story.

I see what you're saying about "closure;" it's not fashionable. But I'm not sure you get that much of it in Donaghy.

I'm really glad you do like the poetry, though! The poetry is the point here, not the cult of personality.

Well, I feel like a company rep. I've gone on enough for now...

No observation from me is needed. When Mikey writes about alcohol or drugs, whatever his speaker's persona, he writes with an authority that can only be grounded in experience. Alas.

Wow, I cross-posted with not only one but a couple of people! Excellent posts all. Mr H is holding us aloft here, I feel.

Apologies for what looks like tetchiness in my previous reply - it's actually me trying to phrase things properly. Before dinner.

Peter you don't need to give a caveat. I wish Philip had come back. I think the point is that were talking about someone who was an integrated mind. Once somebody is that, they can only be themselves. (This is why only real originals can be parodied.) And to this extent it's not their job to be perfect, it's only their job to be themselves.

I've written before about the classes he taught - to a very much greater extent than other poetry tutors, he didn't give rules, he gave pointers. The idea was that you were there to write as much like yourself as you could - not to mimic his taste or style. The range among the group was very broad, and as time has passed and people have been published, this has been noted. So this is the above principle put into action.

Here's a funny think. He admits somewhere that he had a big Ashbery period in his youth, but got over it, and never published any of it. Here, vis a vis that idea of negotiating with the form, is an amusing passage from his review of Rebel Angels, the anthology that "launched" New Formalism... actually, in the collected prose, this essay and the letter to Ian Duhig that follow it are intensely interesting. He writes to Ian explaining the book form an American vantage point, he having taken the opposite view of it from Ian's (who didn't get the politics). But it's important to note that he did not consider himself a New Formalist: "No. No room for membership cards in my wallet."

So here's the passage at hand:

I hope it's clear that I think a confessional "I" version of "Shibboleth" (or, really, any of his clearly persona poems) would be dreadful. Katy, I think your "lifestyle article" comparison is apt. Of course when it's done well it works just like any other approach. I keep remembering Philip's "lies" remark, and I wonder why anyone would object to Donaghy's myriad masks when there are countless others out there documenting their lives (some good, some dreadful).

I wasn't being disapproving when I made that "barriers" remark, but merely trying to indicate where some people might find fault. Also, my point about the closing couplets was that many people automatically dismiss them because they are not exactly fashionable. In short, I think we're in total agreement about these things, Katy! I've had to write these posts quickly, so maybe I haven't come across as I'd like.

Eh, Kevin, haven't we all! I guess I just go into auto-refute - the company rep, as I said. But yes, I mean if you just take "readers at large," there are several reasons why people might be put off reading this poetry - just as they might be put off any book, poetry or other. It's not about a girl; it expects you to pay attention and be interested in unpredictable things; it addresses all kinds of subject matter, which no one person is likely to recognise all of; there isn't a "main character" - which is what it suddenly looks like what we're saying about the "central voice." In addition, though there is love poetry, and there is deep emotional content - and there are reflections on personal sotuations (eg "Caliban's Books") - it's not exactly a wallow, is it. You're not going to read it and be going, "Wow, I can really relate to this." In other words, he's showing you other worlds, not (however you may intersect) your own.

This seems an important point to me. Right now at least in the UK there's a comedy revival on (again). The comics who are really popular seem to deal in a kind of "Oh GOD, yes," kind of comedy - in other words, the comedy of recognition: "You know when..." Then we've got reality TV - often scripted or at least heavily produced and directed, but predicated on our seemingly endless desire to recognise "ourselves" on TV. Drama is more or less out, with the exception of a big few. (Mad Men is a case in point, and I have theories about that, too. It's also very much about recognition.) You can evewn extrapolate to politics! Though on this board that may be dangerous. but one thing all sides seem to agree on is that, to get elected or to hold public trust in America these days (& I mean America: Britain's gone back over to the toffs, in a big way) you have to appeal to people as a reflection of themselves. Political credibility is based on recognition.

Now apply this concept to poetry, and what do you get? Anecdotal poems. Sensitive explorations of young parenthood, told in the first person. Life-cycle crises we all share (and recognise): age, illness, dying parents, parenthood. It's easy, because you're already in it. It says it's about them, but it's about you.

Same with fiction, of course. Novels about "issues."

Now, of course I firmly believe all good literature is "about" "us." But you have to go inside it and look around. You have to go halfway, or more than halfway, to meet it. You have to trust the author to know more than you and to be able to teach you. But we, the collective contemporary "public" "market-value" we, want to recognise ourselves, to say "Hey, that could be me." (And it could. I also believe that. But not in a Simon Cowell way.)

Switching tack, I've just been revisiting on Facebook a survey the BBC did a while ago of "the nation's favourite books," & where some are seeing a reassuring fondness for the classics, I'm seeing a slightly depressing lack of initiative on the part of the reading public. I have a theory, by the way, which is that if the bookshop chains and publishers wanted poetry to sell, it would. Because they'd sell it. They'd put posters in the underground and sell interviews with its authors into the nationals; they'd get PR on the basis of poets' private lives, they'd get dumpbins and make in-store displays... of course the book covers would have to be more commercial. Even within fiction there's a truism that books with big publicity will sell. And books with no publicity won't. But right now what we've got is a situation where the big conglomerates will barely even publish poetry any more, let alone promote it. So it's driven out of the main stream, and you get a situation that's almost like Samizdat. It's another discussion for another day, perhaps, but there is a point.

It's that, in this utopian world, poetry would have its genres and types and sections just as fiction does now. I mean, it DOES. Admitting this and allowing each poet to thrive on his or her own strengths, and be found by his or her own suitable audience, would help a lot. Donaghy will always appeal to those with a relatively mandarin taste, though his real shtick is what I think someone's called a mandarin demotic. But he might go with novelists like Umberto Eco or Italo Calvino, or the aforementioned Pessoa, or Lawrence Sterne. Or you could put him with Byron, or Merrill, or right there with Donne, or in certain moods Queneau... not that poems like "The Present" and "Haunts" aren't pretty straightforward in their own ways.

I think, going backto the "sui generis" remark earlier, that where he is unusual is in his breadth or reading and breadth of influence - that is, breadth of writers from whom he's helped himself to what will help him do his own thing. This is the unique selling point: that he brings together that which was separate, into a new thing.

One last thing, unless anyone has something else to say. by a complete serendipitous fluke, today's Guardian newspaper has a piece by another ex-student of Donaghy's - from five or seven years before me - who writes about his teaching, for a series called "My Hero." It's a great depiction of him in class - completely takes me back, and I'd forgotten the burglar joke, though I remember two longer ones about pigs (but those were from the pub).

The real joy of the thing for me, though, is the photograph that accompanies it. You can see it online, but unless you have the paper you can't see it BIG. Bless him.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/...onaghy-005.jpg

Thanks to all, but special thanks to Katy Evans-Bush, Kevin Cutrer and John Hutchcraft for so many thoughtful contributions to this tribute.

Wonderful, just wonderful. Thanks so much, everyone--to Katy for agreeing to serve, and to Tim and John for superb contributions, and to Kevin and all others for carrying things along. I've learned much and am very grateful. Thanks on my own behalf, and the Sphere's official thanks too.

Yes, thanks to Katy and everyone for a really interesting thread. It was a chance to eavesdrop on Donaghy conoscenti, a good introduction to his work for those who, like me, hardly know it but want to.

This has been a treat for me. Thanks to Katy, John, Tim, and everyone else for the insightful contributions. My appreciation of this great poet's work has deepened this past week. I know I will return to this thread whenever I muse on Donaghy. Thank you to everyone at Eratosphere for making this possible.

Many, many thanks to Katy for ably leading the charge, and to Tim, Kevin, and all the other commenters for thoughtful and heartfelt contributions, and to Maryann and Alex for letting us use their gym for the sock hop.

Same time next year?

This has been one of the best discussions of a poet I’ve ever seen on the Sphere. I’m sorry not to have gotten back into it before it wound down (a crazy week at work and home intervening), but I’m grateful to Katy and everyone who shared their insights. You’ve deepened my appreciation of a poet I knew was extraordinary since coming across “Cruising Byzantium” in a little magazine over a decade ago. I’ve saved this thread to reread every time I go back to Michael’s poems. Thank you all.

Thanks Katy, thanks all who participated in the thread. I will have this in the back of my mind as I read his book of essays-- which I have neglected but now I've started on it.

Yes, thanks, Katy! And thanks to everyone who contributed! Much appreciated.

Duncan

Thanks to all of you - rereading the thread I found the unfortunate haste in which I had to write so many of my posts sadly in evidence - but I'm glad if people got something out of the discussion! I'll just add, please do, if you haven't yet, go back and read all the links. There's gold in there... and especially the interview with MD, filmed talking about poetry and dance. Many thanks to Maryann and everyone at Eratosphere for inviting me to do this!