Hi Kevin, good point about the "sui generis" issue. Of course writing is a community, across time and space, so every writer is always in a dialogue with other writers as well as readers. TS Eliot of course outlined this for us in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." (And don't forget Borges!) And as well as that, writers are in a group of their living peers - by generation, geography, proclivity, etc. Small differences may be magnified, and large ones go unnoticed; I think Eliot touches on that too, in that same essay. We're just too close to say who Donaghy is like or not like, or how unusual he is in his own peer group - though he does feel unusual to me. For "his own peer group" by the way, the list starts with people like Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Sean O'Brien, Glyn Maxwell, Jo Shapcott...
So time will tell. Currently in Britain there's a counter-trend developing which values contemporary poetry over older "canonical" works, so Donaghy may become more and more unusual.
As for the irritants, well everyone's entitled to those! (But really? Are sex, drugs and bad soul really the Donaghy topnotes?) I guess as in relationships the things that attract you to someone eventually become the reasons you break up. And the poetry world, at least here in the UK, has changed so much even in the six years since he died that you can't help wondering what his reaction would be to certain developments. There's this whole new crop of poets springing up, younger and more hooked in to current American, for example, writing; strains of postmodernism and crossover practice - what do we call it, "post-division"? - that simply can't be ignored or written off... it's a great, a very vibrant and multiplicitous time to be writing.
So who else do you read? When you get sick of Donaghy? Who's your antidote?
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