[John Hutchcraft]

Yeah, Kevin, I'm inclined to think that confessional "I" poem might have sort of sucked. Which is to say, I can't even imagine such a straightforward treatment from this sleight-of-hand artist.

We've come back around to Donaghy the storyteller, Donaghy the dramatist (even if only in monologue, not for stage). Katy, you mentioned The Incense Contest. Such a fantastic poem. More appealing to me, in many ways, than Black Ice & Rain. But so many of Donaghy's poems are terrific dramatic monologues. The Commission is a favorite of mine. I guffaw every time I read it, painfully. And the Chamber of Errors creeps me out every time I read it, entirely.

And of course he's got plenty of shorter poems that assume a specific, recognizable persona (as compared to an indeterminate or tricksy one) yet don't quite announce themselves as dramatic monologues. His poem Ovation, from Errata, comes to mind (somebody mentioned Dante's influence on the dramatic monologues earlier . . . well, there it is, along with a sinner from an entirely different era). Sometimes, as in Ovation, these poems feel like riddles. The fun, and chill, of Ovation is figuring out who's speaking. When you do - wow. Wow and ugh.

Aside from Donaghy the dramatist, we've also been talking about Donaghy the formalist, while noting that his view of form was expansive. Katy has suggested (and here I'm going to run a little ways with what she's actually said) that the kernel of Donaghy's "formalism" wasn't really formalism at all; it was instead his belief, roughly, that writers spur themselves on by mediating resistance. I say this isn't really formalism because form is external & verifiable; the process Donaghy describes is fundamentally internal, and known only by its fruits. It's a view of form that lets one freely use the traditional forms - and Donaghy could use them all - but doesn't need them. To the extent that New Formalism suggested that traditional form was a necessary part of writing good poems (and I realize that extent was limited), Donaghy had pretty much nothing to do with New Formalism - despite doing traditional form as well as those who bear its standard.

With a view of formalism like his, one preoccupied with mediating internal resistance and less focused on satisfying the external demands of traditional structures, it's no wonder that Donaghy the formalist could produce striking free verse and prose poetry.

Here's an example from the former. (And by the way . . . before we all get too carried away about the "I" missing from Donaghy's poems, isn't this it? And isn't this the same guy who appears in Local 32B? And in the poem about the driving lesson? MD didn't seem so much to shy away from identity as to use it, yes, manipulate it - which may be why this aspect of his art is so off-putting to some. Anyway, here's that free verse poem.)

Quorum

In today's Guardian, the word quorum
is spelled the same as oqurum,
the only surviving word of Khazar,
according to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Oqurum, meaning "I have read."

The original pronunciation is lost for ever,
but I weigh three syllables in my palm,
against "paprika" and "samovar,"
"cedarwood" and, for some reason,
"mistletoe." I have read . . .

an entire literature,
and enacted all that it describes.
On a winter morning, in an ochre room
that we can never enter, the resonance
of those imaginary consonants

the elders whisper over ancient documents
flickers the blood bright shadow
from a glass of tea.

* * *

Formal? No. Formed? Yes. One of the things I like about it is that he actually doesn't mind, in a free verse poem, violating what I take to be a more-or-less unspoken rule in free verse, and resorts to end rhyme! A triplet, no less. I know it's not an unheard-of move, but it underscores, I think, the commitment to an internal sense of form.

And then there are the prose poems. Here's one from Shibboleth:

The Toast

You may have glimpsed a version of the Toast - our most curious tradition - played by our children on the streets of your cities at twilight, or seen, at our weddings, the young men dressed in red shot silk, wineglasses balanced brim-full on the backs of their hands, shuffling the intricate steps whilst reciting the tongue-twisting parable of the tailor's thimble.

The age and meaning of the Toast are much disputed. Heraklius contends that the ritual is merely a corruption of a trick schoolboys once used to remember the names and dates of our country's defeats. It will be noted that Heraklius is a northerner. A more promising avenue of investigation lies in the fact that, "the thimble," familiar to us from the nursery as part of the dandling-song of the infant prince exposed on the hillside and raised by fieldmice, is in fact a rebus for remembering the constellations, and the accurate dancing of the toast was a skill much prized among our seafaring ancestors who chanted the story to navigate, stomping the deckboards and raising ladles of fresh water to the Pole Star.

And it was said to be once a trial for witches or spies from the north who, unable to mimic the nimble steps and rhymes would trip up, drop the chalice, and seal their fates. And some scholars say that the story is only a code for the steps of another dance, long since forgotten, but often depicted in the goblet-bearing youth motif of our pottery.

* * *

So, here again is "an entire literature" from a civilization we'll never see, this one shot through with so many of the Donaghy preoccupations: the idea of the shibboleth (see also: "Analysand," "Shibboleth," "Majority" ["the name of our tribe means human being"]); the folk-art theme (see, well, all of Wallflowers); the terror of political paranoia (see the many Donaghy poems where he somehow managed to address the Nazi phenomenon from fresh angles).

This is why the criticism of Donaghy as lacking a "voice" doesn't resonate with me. Whether or not one recognizes a "voice," I think that's just the wrong metaphor. What comes through in the poems is a single mind, an unusually capacious one to be sure, and one that likes to play dress-up, but recognizable, and deeply integrated. Music, sex, and drinking, yes - but also Catholicism, memory, tribe, magicians, the Irish, parents, children, country, postmodernism, scoundrels . . . it's a complex and distinct palate, and it runs across whatever form Donaghy happened to select, or mask he decided to wear. It's not a confessional I, but it's an I.