Michael Donaghy
 

It's hard to know how to start this thread: I've been invited, and many thanks to Eratosphere, to present this Distinguished Guest feature on the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy, who lived in London. I think he, not I, is the Distinguished Guest; I'm just his proxy for the occasion.

By the way, my mention of his three national and geographical identities is deliberate. He’s not the kind of poet you can peg with a label and feel like you "know" something about him. A natural observer and questioner of the status quo, Donaghy fell between movements and identities, and it has been pointed out many places that identity itself is a big theme in his work. (“Smith” is the poem most critics mention here; There’s also “ Fraction:” “I had her eyes,/ The aunt’s, that is, who, the story goes,/ was bought to the jail to sort the bits in tubs.”) Even to call him paradoxical wouldn't be right, because even that is a construct based on predictability: "If A, then also A-..." He’s more than that: an original: “My people were magicians…”

The familiar details are: born in the Bronx in 1954 to Irish parents. Moved back to Ireland for a time, it didn't work out, back to the Bronx. A pioneering school programme such as we can't now imagine allowed him to learn to play the flute, and this led to his near-legendary status in Irish music circles. He played in the crossover Irish/jazz band Lammas with Don Paterson. Poetry editor of Chicago Review, published a pamphlet called Slivers, and then came to live in London in 1985. His first full collection, Shibboleth, was published in London in 1988. Errata followed, and then Conjure. Prizes and awards were won. His workshops became known for the careers that had started in them. And then in 2004 he died suddenly at the age of 50.

It was universally agreed that his was one of the most profoundly felt losses the UK poetry scene can remember. Shock waves went out in all directions, and there are still books being published with Donaghy memoriams in them.

His posthumous collection, Safest, came out in 2005, and a Collected Poems in 2009 – alongside the Collected Prose, called The Shape of the Dance.

Rereading the poems this week – out of the Collected, not the individual books, so I’ve been able to skip around – what strikes me is how they still have the power to really surprise, even when I keep thinking I already know them. I think this surprise is an excellent place to start.

He’s known as a formal poet. He wrote a lot about formal concerns, the necessity of some kind of formal negotiation in the making of a poem. He was very keen on the “making” aspect, saying that evidence of craft and work is a sign that a poem (or poet) is trustworthy. But what form this “form” of his takes is another question. He wrote tight little rhymes lyrics in quatrains; he wrote postmodern collages of voices; he wrote sonnets and Browningesque monologues and free verse and blank verse and riddles and hoaxes and spoofs and prose poems. Poems that stay in one part of the page and poems that move around it. In "My Report Card," first published on The Poem website, he quotes:

"... a fidgety affectation of style after style which suggests that unlike more mature poets of his generation, Donaghy has not yet found his voice." F. Olsen, "Noted in Brief", Hierophant, Spring 1993.

What F. Olson failed to notice was, in short, the voice. Donaghy's poems are always elegant. They have sometimes staggering emotional depth, and range. They are models of concision. And often very, very funny.

His frame of reference is simply enormous: his subject matter includes ancient Japan, drug-running, postmodernism, jazz, art history, Chicago cops, GIs in the Second World War, sex, death, Shakespeare, religion, movies, machines (as in “Machines”), Homer, surrealism, tattoos, vomiting, and many, many objects. He was fascinated by the object, as in the skull of Yorick: “Look,” the poet says to the reader, holding it up. He even has a poem called “I Hold in My Hand an Egg.”

Right now I hold in my hand a poem by Michael Donaghy:

Music Sounds and Helen Passeth over the Stage

Fireworks crackle and the groundlings gasp and cough
and a drag queen in stuff brocade and starched ruff
glides across the stage on a starry trolley drawn by ropes.
Puppet. Hellbait. Tricktrap. Doctor, wait! She isn;t real.
You're doing all the work. She has no lines -
all smoke and candlelight and burning towers.
Not that peerless dame of Greece, this poxy boy
dangling beneath a spangly sky in Rothergithe
the thirtieth summer of Elizabeth. Curtain.

High summer. Locusts chirrup in the scrub.
Gongs. Ægypt. Enter: Athenian actor chanting
My name is Helen and I will now recount my sorrows...

Here are a couple of links:
Donaghy on The Poetry Archive
two poems on The Poem
The Interior of a Heron's Egg, by Joshua Mehigan
an essay by me in the Contemporary Poetry Review

N.b., I was going to link here to the books on Amazon or somewhere - but an extensive and time-consuming search has just led me to conclude that both the Collecteds - the Poems, and The Shape of the Dance, his collected prose - are out of print! Copies are going for exorbitant sums online. Staggering. I apologise; however, I also recommend that readers here do the necessary to get hold of Donaghy's poems. You can still buy the individual collections, at least from the UK.

So good to see this thread here, Katy (and to see you back on the Sphere). Just a quick note, for now... When I was working on a DLB entry about Michael Donaghy ten years ago, we corresponded by email, and at one point I pressed him about F. Olsen's review. I think I asked for his response to it. He finally admitted he'd made it up. Typical, isn't it? So him! Of course, by that time he was self-conscious about himself as a self-mythologizer, and for all I know, he might have been making up having made it up.

It's terrible that his collected poems and prose are already out of print. I can hardly believe that.

Thanks so much for hosting this discussion.

'The Brother' was one of the highlights of Paterson's 101 Sonnets, and his very short essay 'The Exile's Accent' was easily the best of a collection of Bishop criticism put out by Bloodaxe Books, 'Poet of the Periphery'. The only two occasions I've come across his name were enough to lodge it in memory, and I'm glad of the opportunity to learn more about him.

Catherine, HA! Okay, there you go. The stories of this stuff are legion. On the Poem message board he invented a load of different personae, one of whom was a very annoying young man called carlton, if I recall correctly. (This being the name of the doorman in Rhoda should have tipped me off immediately.) This character used to spouht such annoying drivel that I got into argument after argument with him. Much later I found out that everyone except me knew it was Michael, but he had forbidden them to tell me, because I was giving such good value. (My reaction to this disclosure is not the point of the story.) After he died, and after that discussion forum had gone south, the erstwhile webmaster of the site - another poet, AB Jackson - sent me an email one day, where he had managed to salvage a page of the forum. It was a group of characters having a heated debate among themselves, complete with inappropriate ad hom remarks, and every one of them is Donaghy. The only other person is me, halfway through the thread, and my whole comment is: "LOL."

Brian, yes, "The Brother" is great. Another poem about identity - even about ontological identity. It's on the Poetry Archive, which I've linked to above - you can hear him reading it.

Thanks for these many links, and for your reflections, Katy. I've been searching for a way to contribute something constructive to a discussion of a poet I'm still learning about, and I've found another piece of yours that seems to me helpful: a piece from Baroque in Hackney in September 2009 on the fifth anniversary of Donaghy's death. I like it especially for those tips of his on the making of poems, and I'm promising myself to make special attention to their use in my next efforts.

One other thing I'm reflecting on is the occasions when I feel myself resistant to a Donaghy poem. The resistance seems to have much to do with the mercurial quality so many commentators have referred to, the complete changeability of the persona in the poems. It's difficult to abandon the effort to find some nonfictional core in the poems--some real "I" to be related to as a friend. I realize that's the same silly error as saying "the poet" instead of "the narrator." It's an error Donaghy forces us to correct if we're to read him comfortably.

I'm looking now to see if David Mason's piece from The Dark Horse is available online at all....

Maryann, I think the poet, the nonfictional "I," is there in the changeableness: you're with a friend who knows every place in town, & all you have to do is keep up... His voice seems to me reliable, in its mannerisms for one thing - its tone, its tics - and in its concerns: the Bronx, Chicago, Irishness, displacement, identity, religion, and in its (for lack of a better word) hagiographies, half of which are false. (Or are they?) In this trickery he is literally Mercurial. But he's reliably mercurial, and is indeed asking what reality is, how you tell something's real. These are important concerns, always.

I have to say, one of the reasons I find his work so exhilarating is the lack of the quotidian "I" we see so very tediously much of in so much poetry. I love that we get taken out of it into all kinds of places, and meet so many characters. This all-consuming interest in the world is much more refreshing to me than mere self-observation.

(Just as a suggestion for an access route!)

Glad you like the essay. His advice is invariably good!

Are Picador's editors out of their bleeding minds? Out of print?

Here's a link--and I'll add more as I find them--to an interview with Donaghy. This one is a hoot because MD is resolutely refusing to take the interviewer's pre-designed leads:

Lidia Vianu interview with MD

This link to the TOC of Magma in 1996 will bring you to the poem "The Hunter's Purse" and at least part of a Donaghy interview, sadly truncated, by John Stammers.

And some video clips of Donaghy speaking: rescen.net

Thanks for being here, Katy!

And thanks for the additional links, Maryann! That last one was very funny! I knew nothing of him before today, but I'm learning a little, link by link. I only wish I had access to more of his poems!

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!

Thank you, Kevin Cutrer, for that marvelous reflection on Mikey. And good on you Katy, for kicking Picador in the butt. I best know Michael's first two collections, and the double volume is a great book I recommend to all and sundry.

Tim it was more like a friendly email to the lovely people in the publicity department! :D

Just quickly, I was reading Wallflowers on the way home last night, and I'm thinking one thing it's really important to remember is the extraordinary breadth of Donaghy's influence. Or, more than that. The ability he had to internalise, assimilate, synthesise, different ways of meaning. He was profoundly influenced, I think, by jazz - and by surrealism, and Dada - or possibly by the more ancient trickster figure of whom they were the emissaries. He loved Borges. The message is that, sadly, if you think you've got him pegged in any way, you have to remember he knew more than you! I say "you," I mean "me." But the message here for us all is to widen our reading. Take everything on that you possibly can, read outside your comfort zone and find the good in things.

One thing that's more widely known nowadays than it was at the time is that Michael had an alter ego who wrote avant garde, or innovative, or experimental, or whatever you want to call it, poetry. Astrea Williams. He railed on, and I think in the last couple of years it did take on an air of railing, about postmodernism, but then he also - through this trickery, through the breadth of his understanding, understood postmodernism, in a different way. He just didn't subscribe to it as a system.

He brought one of Astrea Williams' poems in to class one night and read it to us, and then started ranting and waving it around: "It's shit! I wrote this in 5 minutes! It's garbage, it means nothing! How could it mean anything??" He said, "And right after I wrote it, I sent it to some magazine, and they've published it. So that's the word for you guys: it doesn't matter what you write somebody somewhere will publish it. It's not hard to get published."

Now the thing is, that poem he wrote is not bad. In fact, it's got a lot of good stuff in it. (Horrifyingly, I've just gone to look it up - and the website's down!! And surprisingly it's not on my computer. This is bad news, but I know someone somewhere will have it.) It's funny, and erotic, and interesting, and actually not unadmired in the communities of people who read that kind of poetry. It sounds great, is touching, is beautiful. And the thing is, he went to the trouble of doing it. This is the guy who said that the negotiation with form (and if disjunctive syntax isn't a formal restriction I don't know what it is) is what creates trust between the poet and the reader. He's also the guy who wouldn't leave the stuff he disliked alone. And wrote with his usual, however fast, attention to sound and emotional content and was incapable of making it bad, in fact. Therefore I think it's safe to say he was fascinated by this "dark side" of contemporary poetry, I mean really actually fascinated, and wanted to seek to understand it. Well, he did understand it. What he was threatened by, I think, was its orthodoxy; orthodoxy of any kind was what he couldn't work with. Orthodoxy is the enemy of poetry, after all.

Even, as in the case of Astrea Williams, the orthodoxy of one's own declared beliefs. (It;s just this ability to transcend his declared beliefs, by the way - and it corresponds hugely with the lack of the confessional "I" in his poetry, which so many people comment on - which makes him so BIG, in the sense of deep and expansive. You should never think you've got him really pegged, because the fact is that he knew more than you. (One thing he knew, of course, was which bits he had made up!) Genius is what we call that I think.

I have Astrea's business card (complete with fake mobile number), and it makes me sad to think there won't be a collection of her poetry.

In the meantime, we can read a poem of Michael's like this one, very much in his own usual style, from Errata:

Interviews

Yvette lets a drop
Of red blot brilliant
On the bedsheet.

1913. She looks up
From painting her toenails.
Marcel is ahead of his time,
Yvette is still dressing.

He finds a note
From Apollinaire:
'Knight to
Queen's rook three.'

and checks the board.
He looks at the little horse, snaps
It across the room,
A distance

Of fifty years
To a studio in Neuilly
Cassette wheels spinning
Throughout the interview
And he thinks of bicycles.

Q: Where does your anti-retinal attitude come from?
A: From too great an importance given to the retina.

1913. It's getting late.
The sun obscures
As it illuminates
Garden and gardener...

Etc. This poem is three pages long and incorporates snatches from another interview, with the bluesman Son House, purportedly elsewhere on the same tape. I won't even discuss who the characters are, because it would be giving away the development (as in the development of a strip of film) of the poem - they're historical, and he's virtually told you: this is deep engagement with Dada. It's the side of Donaghy - or the seam in him - that is less often discussed, but is very much about what it means to make - or to mean - something.

And only my own take on it, as I've never read any critical material about this element in his work, either - and only a first draft as I've been jotting this down before work, and it's necessarily short.

You should never think you've got him really pegged, because the fact is that he knew more than you. (One thing he knew, of course, was which bits he had made up!) Genius is what we call that I think.

Now I’m really scared. Now I know that I should read him with shite for brains, since, golly gee whiz, what the f*** do I know?

This doesn’t strike me as a helpful way to approach reading a poet.

Sorry, Andrew, that's the last impression I want to give! I should have clarified: I find it intensely exhilarating.

There are so many poets who are perfectly nice but never really surprising. The ones I go back to time and time and time again, the ones who buck me up, are the ones who are, on rereading, a surprise every time. I knew this work very well already, and what I found this past week, rereading, was poems that looked totally different to me now than they did ten, five, two years ago. They were new all over again.

Partly that's to do with my other reading in the interim, which means I now get references I maybe missed earlier. (And this is fine! As TS Eliot says, the poem does its work on the reader without being rationally understood. The power comes from other places. Emphatically, if you had to get every reference or allusion, if you had to be able to explain a poem to be allowed to love it, no one would ever be allowed to start reading poetry. It's really okay not to get a reference, and this was something that came up time and again in a Donaghy workshop. He said: "If one person in the room gets it, that's enough.")

And partly it's because the work is so complex - it comes out of such an integrated inner space, as I said above, which is teeming with thousands of snippets and references and ideas and touchstones - that it's there for you to meet halfway from several different angles. Or from wherever you are.

I emphatically don't think it's anything to do with shite-for-brains! I apologise if I gave that impression.

One of the reasons Donaghy was so magnetic a teacher was this tremendous authority that was because he just did know about things. He read voraciously, across disciplines, remembered everything, followed slightly recherché lines of inquiry to unexpected conclusions that rounded back in on the matter at hand - could recite almost anything you cared to name at the drop of a hat - and lived and breathed poetry. You couldn't slip anything past him, ever. He used to quip that he couldn't read prose. To me that's the guide you want through the poetry world.

AND, he was the least judgemental, most generous tutor I've ever come across; he listened, really listened, to everybody. Clive James notes that when reviewing he looked for, and found, the good. I think this spirit of curiosity and sharing is a powerful engine for poetry (or any other art.) As Donaghy says: "It's only polite to steal everything you can."

I'm sorry I don't have time now to sift for more involved quotes. But "genius" is a descriptive, not a value-loaded, term. It doesn’t even mean you have to agree with him.

Thanks, Katy. That clarifies. I’m still waiting for the books I ordered before I can really dig into Donaghy’s poetry, but I can tell from what I’ve seen that he was the real deal.

Katy, I'm greatly enjoying your insights into Michael whom you knew so well and I never had time to know nearly well enough.

Ah, Tim, that's what the books are for! The essays, in particular, are just like talking to Michael. Wallflowers is pretty indispensible on this side of the Atlantic; they might still sell it direct from the Poetry Society (who published it); I'm not sure.

Now, I'm teaching tonight so won't be around till later... I was planning to do a class on constructing a poem out of two ideas or feelings or images, rather than just one - allowing this dialectic tension, or what you want to call it, to give the two a chance to interact and make a better poem than just writing about one of them. Don Paterson in his (slightly controversial) TS Eliot Prize lecture a few years ago referred to this as the secret of poetry: two-in-one. This is very consistent with the Donaghy aesthetic. I see it as being akin to his idea of " negotiating with the medium" creating a "serendipity" that made you arrive at things you ordindarily wouldn't. In a poem it acts like the tesnion of the plot in a story: the protagonist's desire, and the complication, which sets the plot in motion and leads to the resolution. You can't have the resolution without the complication.

I'm going to take the opportunity of having been rereading all this work to frame the discussion around some poems of Michael's. One is "The Interview," which I quoted the beginnig of, above. That of course sees the interview cut with one from Son House, on blues. Art and music.

And maybe "The Brother." I'll think of a couple, & report back later.

Thank you, Katy, for directing me to "A Darkroom." What a powerful poem. What sets him apart from many poets is that he wasn't content with just writing about the darkroom process (I would have felt accomplished had I merely arrived at that image of the family coming out of nothing), but he weaves in a holocaust narrative (which is achieved through a succession of images and their inevitable associations). And there is the understated conceit that runs through the entire poem linking memory to the delicate art of developing photographs in a darkroom. This poem is a fine example of his faith in the reader to make those connections. To pull this off without seeming needlessly obscure is a real feat that appears effortless with Donaghy.

With Tim, I'm grateful that you're taking the time to share your insights. "Interviews" is another favorite of mine, though I'm less familiar with it. I love, too, his engagement with the avant garde he railed against. I've always thought that Donaghy had a keen understanding of postmodernism, and that made his arguments all the stronger when it came to form (these arguments were also compounded with his intimate knowledge of music).

In his recent essay in The Dark Horse (which is sadly no longer available on the website), David Mason compares him to Bob Dylan's clown character in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. When I read about his experiments under the Astrea Williams pseudonym, and the internet discussion threads in which he dukes it out with several invented personae, I can't help but think of Dylan himself (and that may be because I listen to an inordinate amount of the fellow). Neither artist is satisfied with a singular path.

Kevin, yes of course, it's "Interviews." For soem reason I have a mental block on that. We had a great class; but it's nearly 1am now and I have to go to bed!

I love that you say "needlessly obacure" (as in NOT), as we had that discussion tonight over the abovenamed poem. Interestingly, one person knew all the Duchamp & Apollinaire references but missed the blues ones. I just say, you can never tell what people will know or not know! Donaghy pulls this off, I believe, with his demotic register and his confidential way of speaking to the reader. You may realise you don't get the reference, but he never makes you feel stupid.

And yeah, I was looking for a link to David Mason's essay but no, it isn't online. Shame; it's a wonderful essay. The Dylan comparison is really interesting.

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