Quote:
Originally Posted by Katy Evans-Bush
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.
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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
That motorcycle downstairs never starts
but, like a statue with a stomach flu,
disturbs him with its monumental farts.
His phone won’t stop. His arts review is due
and must be in the post by half-past three
to make this issue of Je Suis Partout.
And here’s another merde to fuel his rage:
he has to wrestle with a rusty key.
Though they assured him this machine was new,
he’s got to press the ‘j’ against the page
whenever he types jazz or Juiverie
and he uses these words frequently.
It jams again, the phone rings. Bang on cue,
the motorcycle starts. The curtains part
on the Palm Casino, 1942.
Although he thinks she’s buying out the town,
the critic’s wife sits on an unmade bed
in room 6, naked, as her palm is read
by a guitarist in a dressing gown.
He reels off lines in the forgotten script
that maps her palm: Here is your first affair . . .
He looks at her but she can’t help but stare
down at the hand in which her hand is gripped.
Rethinking his title, ‘For the Masses’,
typewriter underarm, the critic passes
in the hallway a trolley of caramelized pears
and a fat man with a string bass case who stares
suspiciously back behind dark glasses.
Could this be M. Vola, room 9, who plays
that nigger music for Vichy gourmets,
hunting the gypsy guitarist in his band?
The critic squints to memorize his face
as the lift cage rattles open for Vola and his bass.
Voila! He’ll call it ‘Rhetoric and Race’.
But back to those pears. Glazed, tanned,
they fall in behind a whole roast pig
delivered to the gypsy’s room before the gig.
He watches the waiter watch his crippled hand
as, with the other, he tries to sign his name.
He’s new at this. It never looks the same.
The typewriter? Dismantled. All the keys
arranged across a workbench side by side.
And the critic hissing Can I have your name please?
and What do you mean you’re not qualified?
and Shall we call the police judiciaire?
Tomorrow he will not be everywhere.
Tonight the gypsy counts in the Quintet.
They’ll play until the curfew lifts at dawn.
They have to call this foxtrot ‘La Soubrette’
but it’s ‘I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm’.
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.