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