[Katy Evans-Bush]

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.