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.
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