Well - I admit that's not my absolute favourite moment in the oeuvre. But in my case, it's the slightly queasy word "Dearest" that I don't like.
I love puns too. I thrive on them. I mean, not only do I think they're the highest form of humour, I think they can even sometimes be deeply mysterious and not even funny. Paul Muldoon, of course, was the poet who - in the generation immediately preceding Donaghy's, that is, they're the same age-ish - Muldoon created a whole style and gave the rest of us permission to use words in certain ways. He brought assonance back in in a huge way - he turned it and pararhyme into full rhyme, in effect - and he brought puns blinking out into the sunlight. So you can't ignore him. Though I feel a Donaghy pun is more like a Donne pun, and I've always thought it was a wonderful serendipity that they're next to each other on the bookshelf.
In other news, speaking of the craze for the contemporary, I just this minute opened up my POETRY magazine email newsletter, and read this apposite beginning:
Quote:
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“People cry out that poetry has to be contemporary. . . . But I believe poetry is the one thing in our time that cannot be contemporary.” So argues a very well-known poet in the pages of this month’s issue of Poetry. That poet is Giacomo Leopardi, and he expressed this view way back in 1823—but his daybooks, ably translated for us by W.S. Di Piero, are still provocative today, as you’ll discover.
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It relates more to what I said than what you've just said, John - and if anything it shows why we needed TS Eliot back in 1823!
And I've just remembered a book I saw today in the Oxfam Bookshop:
The Shock of the Old. It turns out to have been a BBC series on British buildings.
By the way, it seems to me that - what with my remark about "Dearest" and others preceding - the thing people may be objecting to slightly is a certain archness. I'd hardly be in a position to object to such a trait, and I think I am aware that Donaghy possesses it. It's worth pointing out here his direct bloodline (as it were) from James Merrill - another poet who gets called arch, crazy, etc. He in fact introduced me to Merrill, and I remember the occasion as of the top of my head blowing in and the refreshing breeze blowing right down to my heart. Wowie.
The thing to realise about both of them is that they're both completely genuine in their archness. It isn't an affectation. I see it in their cases - certainly in Michael's - as more like something to do with an intellectual hyperactivity... and Merrill of course had his own little esoteric side, with the Ouija board. I love
The Changing Light of Sandover, his twenty-year Ouija epic. Donaghy was very interesting on the subject of that, by the way. His feeling was that the spirits, who of course included Auden, Yeats & co, were metaphors for poetic creation.
There are passages in
Sandover that are so suddenly, shockingly beautiful that I can barely even read them.
There's another line to be traced here. When Michael published his first book he asked an older poet to write a blurb for the cover: it was Alfred Corn. And Alfred Corn's first book had an encomium upon it from Merrill.
So, no: none of us is sui generis: everyone comes from somebody.
Speaking of narratives, what about
The Incense Contest?