I put this on the other thread, but I actually meant it to go here. So here it goes:

...I've found a site that seems to have a scan of the David Mason article from The Dark Horse--terrible scan quality, but something rather than nothing. Let's see if this works: The Song is Drowned....

Thanks for that link, Maryann. It was good to see a review of the whole span of Donaghy's work.

Look, I'm not proud of that old review. As a result, I abandoned the publication of Hierophant .

FOsen

Frank, have some poets been keeping you up too late?
Love from Colorado.
Dave

Yes! Though I suppose I’m noticing, too, that I’ve don’t feel like Donaghy tried to “pull off” obscurity: it’s always felt to me like something he came by naturally. His obscurity, while real, strikes me as largely incidental, the mere byproduct of his kind of voracity. His real aim, I’ve always felt, has been to connect with you.

Connecting. I know that he (like you, right, Katy?) was a great fan of the little poemlet from Keats, This Living Hand. I think, too, of Machines: “So this talk, or touch if I were there . . .” Or of his little poem written for the tattoo festival, which purportedly became a tattoo itself: “Copy this across your heart, / Whisper what your eyes have heard, / To summon me when we’re apart, / This word made flesh, this flesh made word.” When I say “connect with you,” I really mean something that is more like an incarnation: the poet’s words, tattooed on the reader’s body, “summon” him as they’re read. The word literally becomes flesh as the reader’s synapses fire in the precise order dictated by the poet’s words. Maybe a better word for “connection” would be “communion.”

Of course, one doesn’t need to get into all this woo-woo to appreciate Donaghy for his more public virtues: a stunning command of craft, a formidable intelligence, an irrepressible sense of fun, a level of sheer showmanship that rivals even Yeats. Here’s a long poem that I’ve loved forever, even though when I think of the constellation of Donaghy’s work, this one isn’t really among the brightest lights. But what I love about it is how unabashedly, chock-full of fun it is – albeit intellectual pleasure. It expects a reader to know a little bit about a lot of things, and a lot about a few things. You have to know quite a bit about Django Reinhardt, the semi-literate jazz guitarist with the crippled hand. You have to know a little bit about Paul de Man, one of the progenitors of deconstructionism - particularly about the scandal that erupted when de Man’s early Nazi apologetics were discovered in the 1980s, a time when de Man was perhaps the most influential literary critic in the Anglophone world and Donaghy was in graduate school for English (here I paraphrase: “I discovered that studying literary criticism because you love poetry is a little bit like studying vivisection because you love dogs”; deconstruction, indeed). You have to know a little bit about jazz. It helps to have a few words of French. Failing all that, you need five minutes, Wikipedia, a modicum of native curiosity, and a sense of humor. Donaghy himself gives you the trailhead: “Django Reinhardt and one ‘P. DeMan’ stayed at the same hotel in Cannes in 1942, the Palm, where Reinhardt was playing. Louis Vola was the bassist and manager of Reinhardt’s band, The Hot Club de France.”

The Palm

la connaissance aux cent passages
Rene Char

Indeed. I often think of this poem when I think of critical writing about Donaghy. Even though I’ve committed some myself, I always feel that when I do I’m truly, deeply missing the point – almost as much as I miss the point when I ask myself whether P. de Man ever came within 100 miles of Django Reinhardt. I feel like this poem is so dense with wit, so of a piece with itself, that the wisest course is to sit back and voluptuate in its pleasures. Some of those pleasures, to be sure, require knowledge. But whilst being revealed as not knowing something is a drag, knowing things together is fun. Donaghy appears to assume that his reader knows what he knows – a compliment, I think. At the very least, he assumes curiosity.

Something else I love about him is his willingness to tweak that same curiosity, to turn it back on the reader – that is, to out and out manipulate readers. I find it squeal-inducingly delightful, not so much manipulation as prestidigitation. This is the point in the Donaghy discussion where the word “trickster” starts to loom large, though I don’t think he tricks just for the sake of trickery, to get one over on readers or to show off. He tricks to serve his point. I think his point is usually pleasure – delight – surprise – but then, I am probably wrong. I think I’m wrong because I’m remembering just how seldom any of us ever have a particular point we’re serving. Are motives ever pure, or even merely unitary? It’s doubtful. Our motives are legion, just like our selves. Show me a confessional “I,” and I’ll show you a mask – which is to say, a manipulation. At least some folks are up front about it, which ends up being a whole lot of fun, even as it requires much, much, much more effort.

Pornography

The bodies of giants shine before us like a crowded fire.
One might quite credibly shout ‘Theatre’.
I can’t watch this. Instead, I’ll stare at the projector beam
The smoke and dust revolve in and reveal.

indentedRemember my story?
How one grey dawn in Maine I watched from my car
As a goshawk dove straight down toward the pines?
I said the dive was there before the hawk was,
Real as a wind shear before the blown snow reveals it.
The hawk became its aim, made one smooth purchase
In a splintering of twigs. A hare squealed, and I watched the bird
Slam the air in vain till it gave up and dropped its catch.
I told you how I sat and watched the rabbit die,
And described blood steaming on the frosted gravel.

indentedRemember how angry you were
When I told you I’d made it up?
That I’d never been to Maine or owned a car?
But I told my tale well, bought your pity for the hare,
Terror for the hawk, and I served my point,
Whatever it was.

indentedAnd remember that time
I was trapped in a cave and saw shadows on the limestone wall?
When the scouts freed me and carried me to the cave mouth
The true light burned my eyes like acid. Hours passed
Before I found myself safe in the Maine woods, resting in my car.

THE END is near. The final frame of Triumph of the Will
Slips past the lens and the blank flash blinds us.

Hi Dave! Great to see you here.

John, that is a truly splendid post. Thanks. I especially loved "one doesn’t need to get into all this woo-woo to appreciate Donaghy"... You've hit it on the head though, and of course I didn;t mean "pull it off" as in for the sake of it.

We had a VERY interesting discussion last night over "Interviews." Well, I liked it because I never tire of this one. Accessibility and what the poet's allowed to allude to, etc. Oh, I think I said this last night. Well, it's obviously the same for "Palm," which I have also always loved, though I think everything I know about Paul de Man I learned from this poem, and you.

That quote about the vivisection is one of my all-time favourites; but lately I've got overload-related memory loss and can barely remember my own name, so thanks for quoting it. And that theory-vs-practice (or what one friend recently referred to, in a private email (!) as "praxis") debate encapsulates what Michael so loathed and feared about the academic or postmodern oor experimental or innovative or post-innovative poetry world. The fact that its generative impulse seemed to come from somewhere besides the joy of the poetry. But he understood joy, so I don't think he was closed off to anything on principle. Always open to it.

What the students immediately said on reading "Caliban's Books" (Bear with me. I'm trying to conjure my father...") is how he's coming out of the poem to directly speak to you, the reader. They loved it: they felt really addressed. It was wonderful to read these poems with people.

This is another mishmash of a post, after that beautiful little essay! I'll have more time tonight. I'll see if someone, anyone, can send me that Astrea Williams poem; I'm gutted not to have it.

Yes, that is a splendid post, John. And Frank, poor Frank, Mason's crack was perfect! I was always struck by Michael's voice which I found instantly recognizable no matter what persona he had donned. And a truly distinctive voice is rare among contemporary formalists, and therefore much to be treasured.

Katy, sorry, didn't mean to make you a straw man there - of course you don't think Donaghy pulled stuff off for the sake of it. You said it best yourself: he seemed to be moving toward joy. And there's a certain joy in doing really hard things and making them seem effortless. Isn't that one of the things we all like about Richard Wilbur?

I also really like what you said about learning de Man from "The Palm." Yes, I've learned a lot from Donaghy, on a number of topics. Of course, I always take those things with a shakerful of salt (as in his notoriously invented Welsh poet) but for every one of those, there are a dozen Claude glasses.

But back to those pears. I'd like to revise my remarks a little. "The Palm" works, I think, even if you know zilcho about Django Reinhardt and Paul de Man. You probably do have to have, though, at least an intuitive sense of the tension between "theory and praxis" (ha), or at least that poets and critics sometimes don't get along. You have to know what France was in 1942. Katy, I suspect I was your mirror image here: I came to this poem knowing the Paul de Man story but pretty fuzzy about Django Reinhardt, who I got to know only after the poem prompted me to. The really wonderful thing is how the poem (really, all of Donaghy's work as far as I know it) just keeps coming together more and more, the more you know about whatever arcane topic he's writing about.

And of course, lots of times there's nothing arcane about it, or he simply gives you everything you need in the poem. I'm away from my book at the moment, but what's the name of that wonderful poem about the failed candidate for priesthood with the remembering problem? The one with the "cathedral inside the cathedral" in his head? That's a good example of Donaghy clearing the way for the reader entirely, and it's just wonderful storytelling.

I think that's really the thing that sets Donaghy apart from so many contemporaries: storytelling. He's always wanting to tell you a story, to have your attention and then do something with it, something delightful. It's intensely generous.

John, you mean "City of God." It's a perfectly delineated explanation of the Renaissance Memory Palaces that he used to talk about. He loved them!:

To every notion they assigned a saint,
to every saint an altar in a transept of the church.
Glancing up, column by column, altar by altar,
they could remember any prayer they chose.
He'd used it for exams, but the room went wrong -
a strip-lit box exploding slowly as he fainted.
They found his closet papered wall to ceiling
with razored passages from At Augustine.

I love that poem; I won't spoil the end for anyone who might be soon to read it, but suffice to say it gets dark.

The storytelling thing is absolutely key, and you know, is there enough storytelling in our contemporary anecdotal-epiphany poetry? Or in the other, fractured-narrative poetry? I'm all for a dislocation, God knows, but then there's that other thing, the man muttering "into his deranged overcoat" who stoppeth one of three. "I MUST TELL YOU THIS!" Michael was ALWAYS mentioning the Ancient Mariner, the ancient mariner was like a guide to him, like his own Virgil showing him the circles of narrative poetry hell. Look at "Black Ice and Rain" - commentators mention Browning for good reason, but you hardly ever see comment regarding Coleridge - or Dante. Or take that crazy one about the deranged cabby, "Timing."

You hear the whole story, but you also get - in the periphery - the fact that the person is deranged WITH their story that they live to tell it. It's both witness and the fascination of the derangement itself, the compulsive compulsion.

(Admittedly in that one you also get something else at the end - but what? It's just so creepy.)

As to Django Reinhardt, there was one person in the class last night who knew all about the 1913 Duchamp history but didn't know about the Delta bluesmen.

So far from this thread I've got a picture of someone who made up multiple personalities and argued with himself online, wrote poems that were lies (although the lies were admitted in the poems), and jumbled up a few esoteric ideas in the guise of erudition (T. S. Eliot did a far better job of that).

Also, no one person could possibly have a liking for and knowledge of jazz who also liked that awful diddly-diddly Irish music. Mutually exclusive.

I can see how a few young, impressionable girls on a poetry course could be bowled over by this kind of hard drinking, drug taking persona. What I don't get is how any adult could take him seriously.

God knows I hate Simon Armitage, but I'd sooner be locked in a room with him for a month (with him reciting his own "poetry" constantly) than read any of MD's drivel.

Good grief!

Philip