Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam Elgar
This tendency to undercut, to wrong-foot the reader, is essential to his art, a signature feature. You either like it or you don’t, but it is hugely significant. In this he is thoroughly Post-modern, but I’m an unreconstructed Modernist, and I find the PoMo thing distasteful on the whole.
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Well, that's the nub of it, isn't it? Labels and judgments aside, I think Adam's right that one of MD's "signature feature[s]" - is to engage in a sort of trickery. Of course, MD himself knew this, and set out to do it consciously. That his work is shot through with magicians and magic tricks (as well as jokes, another form of misdirection) is not accidental. Speaking of "signature features," see also 'Smith': "Every signature's a trick we learn to do consistently, like Queequeg's cross or Whistler's butterfly." Donaghy's work is in many ways about indirectness, about falseness - if that's what you'd like to call performance, artifice, wit. As you say, one likes it or one doesn’t. I appreciate your taking the time to lay out a dissenting view in what amounts to hostile territory. As one who finds the PoMo thing to be, well, an inescapable part of living life in the 21st century, I don’t share your distaste for MD, and actually find that it confirms what I’ve suspected – that he is a representative poet for our time.
The Paterson poem I think suffers in comparison. The self-conscious allusion to Dante, the overt sentimentality, the bizarre moment of machismo – ugh. The last line I think aims for a cheap shock and, sadly, succeeds. I find it all a bit maudlin, a bit
too direct. I read Haunts as Chris does – in fact, precisely as he does, insofar as he’s described his reading – and think it operates much more subtly. Personal knowledge of MD’s early death almost inescapably adds a layer of resonance, though I feel confident that MD himself would cringe at such a biographical reading. I think his defenders, of whom I am one, do him a disservice by emphasizing his biography or personality – MD himself repeatedly stated that they had no real place in reading his work, which is, I think, impersonal in the best sense, much as MD designed it. Haunts of course reads much the same as a poem from any father to any son, or at least from a fictive father to his son. That being said, one need not impute the power of prophecy to say that MD “knew” he would die young, which is to say, he had a reasonable fear of it, given his medical history. Again, though, I emphasize that the poems simply don’t need this sort of information.
In any event, as I said before, thank you, Adam, for expressing a dissenting view. I feel sure that MD’s work can withstand criticism, and yours has been as articulate and cogent as one could hope.