Wowie! Well, I heard about this one on the grapevine & thought I'd poke my head in.
Adam, I think I detect a change in your tone from the beginning of the thread; I admit I was shocked at the personal insults - for example, the quoting of an unnamed person who had once done something with Donaghy and "found him thoroughly obnoxious!" This seems a bit snide and secondhand. For the record, though I also know exactly what you mean when you refer to the outpourings etc - to which my couple of essays probably count as contributions - for the record, Donaghy was eccentric, he was a strong personality - though not forceful in the same way as, say, O'Brien - he could be difficult, impossible, drunk, he could be clueless, he would cadge drinks, he was certainly a worry! But it is hard to imagine him being even remotely "obnoxious." He never got in anyone's face.
The love of tricks, illusions and trickery was emphatically not coldness or "PoMo" gameplaying. It comes from a fascination with the mind itself. He loved Borges and the Renaissance Memory Palace, and mnemonics, and little gadgets, and machines. That's why he wrote about them, and constructed his poems like them, and wrote about the nature of thought and knowing and memory and being. Paterson wrote a thing in the paper the other week saying MD has been "caricatured as some kind of charming modern metaphysical", which I think is also a wilful misreading. Metaphysics isn't about being "charming," it's about relating one kind of knowledge to - or through - another. Science and feelings. It isn't a caricature to aply the word to Donaghy; some of his poetry is specifically metaphysical; it's another kind of conjuring. DP was lamenting the cult of personality that's grown up, too, though over half his article was about it, so he was also perpetuating it. There is a definite probem with this posthumous reputation, just as there was - and I'm not making spurious biggings-up here! - with Keats'. The friends were too vociferous; there were spats and feuds; each of them sought to control the Keats he himself remembered. There's a fascinating book about it, Posthumous Keats, and it fills me with a kind of despair.
Now, I'm not saying anyone has to like the poetry. Like a few others here I feel the best of the work will stand. And trying to please everyone is the surest route to hell. But to dislike it properly would be much better - for the sake of the disliker! - than just saying it's difficult and tricksy and anyway he can't possibly have been as sweet as everyone says. Chris Childers has read "Haunts" absolutely accurately, and quite elegantly in fact. The tone is complicated. Donaghy understood the idiom all right. His touch is featherlight and he never lays on the explanation for free at the end.
John Hurchcraft's remark about readers having a narrower frame of reference than the poet is also spot on. Donaghy had a bigger frame of reference - he simply knew more - than anyone I've ever met, and I was brought up by Russian New York intellectuals. If he was clever, he was clever for himself. To impute to him some sort of shallow, showy-offy impulse would be completely wrong.
I also agree with John H's read of Waking With Russell. I can never see it without thinking: "But you're waking among BABIES!" Damn it.
Anyway, 12-20 poems in an oeuvre that size is impressive, so if that's your idea of hating, Adam, I'm content with it! And MD's clearly got to you, for you to put so much effort into this.
I involved my esteemed other in this conversation and he had a comment, btw: he said he's never understood what's supposed to be wrong with "coldness" in art. He said: "Look at Leonardo! Mozart! Michelangelo! Dante!" There is a certain detachment which the BEST art has; all the heat and bluster can tend to burn a work out. I think it's the detachment - another metaphysical trait - that gives Michael's work it's phenomenal grace. He's not cold. He's just not shoving our faces in his feelings.
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