Eh, Kevin, haven't we all! I guess I just go into auto-refute - the company rep, as I said. But yes, I mean if you just take "readers at large," there are several reasons why people might be put off reading this poetry - just as they might be put off any book, poetry or other. It's not about a girl; it expects you to pay attention and be interested in unpredictable things; it addresses all kinds of subject matter, which no one person is likely to recognise all of; there isn't a "main character" - which is what it suddenly looks like what we're saying about the "central voice." In addition, though there is love poetry, and there is deep emotional content - and there are reflections on personal sotuations (eg "Caliban's Books") - it's not exactly a wallow, is it. You're not going to read it and be going, "Wow, I can really relate to this." In other words, he's showing you other worlds, not (however you may intersect) your own.
This seems an important point to me. Right now at least in the UK there's a comedy revival on (again). The comics who are really popular seem to deal in a kind of "Oh GOD, yes," kind of comedy - in other words, the comedy of recognition: "You know when..." Then we've got reality TV - often scripted or at least heavily produced and directed, but predicated on our seemingly endless desire to recognise "ourselves" on TV. Drama is more or less out, with the exception of a big few. (Mad Men is a case in point, and I have theories about that, too. It's also very much about recognition.) You can evewn extrapolate to politics! Though on this board that may be dangerous. but one thing all sides seem to agree on is that, to get elected or to hold public trust in America these days (& I mean America: Britain's gone back over to the toffs, in a big way) you have to appeal to people as a reflection of themselves. Political credibility is based on recognition.
Now apply this concept to poetry, and what do you get? Anecdotal poems. Sensitive explorations of young parenthood, told in the first person. Life-cycle crises we all share (and recognise): age, illness, dying parents, parenthood. It's easy, because you're already in it. It says it's about them, but it's about you.
Same with fiction, of course. Novels about "issues."
Now, of course I firmly believe all good literature is "about" "us." But you have to go inside it and look around. You have to go halfway, or more than halfway, to meet it. You have to trust the author to know more than you and to be able to teach you. But we, the collective contemporary "public" "market-value" we, want to recognise ourselves, to say "Hey, that could be me." (And it could. I also believe that. But not in a Simon Cowell way.)
Switching tack, I've just been revisiting on Facebook a survey the BBC did a while ago of "the nation's favourite books," & where some are seeing a reassuring fondness for the classics, I'm seeing a slightly depressing lack of initiative on the part of the reading public. I have a theory, by the way, which is that if the bookshop chains and publishers wanted poetry to sell, it would. Because they'd sell it. They'd put posters in the underground and sell interviews with its authors into the nationals; they'd get PR on the basis of poets' private lives, they'd get dumpbins and make in-store displays... of course the book covers would have to be more commercial. Even within fiction there's a truism that books with big publicity will sell. And books with no publicity won't. But right now what we've got is a situation where the big conglomerates will barely even publish poetry any more, let alone promote it. So it's driven out of the main stream, and you get a situation that's almost like Samizdat. It's another discussion for another day, perhaps, but there is a point.
It's that, in this utopian world, poetry would have its genres and types and sections just as fiction does now. I mean, it DOES. Admitting this and allowing each poet to thrive on his or her own strengths, and be found by his or her own suitable audience, would help a lot. Donaghy will always appeal to those with a relatively mandarin taste, though his real shtick is what I think someone's called a mandarin demotic. But he might go with novelists like Umberto Eco or Italo Calvino, or the aforementioned Pessoa, or Lawrence Sterne. Or you could put him with Byron, or Merrill, or right there with Donne, or in certain moods Queneau... not that poems like "The Present" and "Haunts" aren't pretty straightforward in their own ways.
I think, going backto the "sui generis" remark earlier, that where he is unusual is in his breadth or reading and breadth of influence - that is, breadth of writers from whom he's helped himself to what will help him do his own thing. This is the unique selling point: that he brings together that which was separate, into a new thing.
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