John: snap! We've cross-posted.
Okay, so I've thought about this for a bit. It has admittedly felt odd, conducting a conversation like this, over several days, on this strange hybrid public/private, literary/personal basis.
There is a slightly irritating tendency in any discussion of Michael Donaghy, I have to admit - and it has got worse since he died - for conversation to become kind of hushed and pious, or for sentimentality to creep in. Even now it's very common, if his name comes up, for someone to say: "How long is it? four years. What - SIX years? Seems impossible!" And shake the head, and then everyone sits silent for a minute. It happened yesterday.
There's even a new genre of poems in new collections in the UK, even now, and almost obligatory: the Donaghy poem. They're still cropping up in books, and I've read very few that actually evoked Michael at all. (They were mainly by Ian Duhig.)
But in the face of this, and a slight mutual congratulation that may creep in, it's important to remember we're talking about someone who wrote poems. And taught. And had a wife and kid and house and car and laptop. Even Keats wasn't perfect; I'm sure lots of people found him annoying. Mr D could be very annoying, too. Sometimes he annoyed me almost as much as Keats. But Keats' reputation was made sickly after he died, just as Donaghy's is being solidified into just this annoying trickster character... There's an excellent book, in fact, called Posthumous Keats, that traces the development of this hagiography over a century - starting with the ruckus over his death in Rome and the ensuing ruckus over what to write on the tombstone - and it's fascinating. Actually, it's specifically fascinating in the light of having gone through this experience of Michael dying and watching how people then treat his legacy, memory, etc.
There was a similar vein last year in researches I was doing around Ernest Dowson, with Arthur Symons writing a memoir that did Dowson no favours and sealed in one particular perception...
But really. Shall we just consider the work for a minute? Philip, I'd be glad if you could come back in and give a balanced, rational view of what you like and don't like about this poetry. There's plenty quoted above. You can get a lot more detailed information than what you relayed in your post by reading David Mason's essay - linked by Maryann on Page 4, I think - or Joshua Mehigan's, which I linked on Page 1. It would be interesting to discuss properly, rather than just bandy epithets.
|