It's hard to know how to start this thread: I've been invited, and many thanks to Eratosphere, to present this Distinguished Guest feature on the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy, who lived in London. I think he, not I, is the Distinguished Guest; I'm just his proxy for the occasion.
By the way, my mention of his three national and geographical identities is deliberate. He’s not the kind of poet you can peg with a label and feel like you "know" something about him. A natural observer and questioner of the status quo, Donaghy fell between movements and identities, and it has been pointed out many places that identity itself is a big theme in his work. (“Smith” is the poem most critics mention here; There’s also “ Fraction:” “I had her eyes,/ The aunt’s, that is, who, the story goes,/ was bought to the jail to sort the bits in tubs.”) Even to call him paradoxical wouldn't be right, because even that is a construct based on predictability: "If
A, then also
A-..." He’s more than that: an original: “My people were magicians…”
The familiar details are: born in the Bronx in 1954 to Irish parents. Moved back to Ireland for a time, it didn't work out, back to the Bronx. A pioneering school programme such as we can't now imagine allowed him to learn to play the flute, and this led to his near-legendary status in Irish music circles. He played in the crossover Irish/jazz band Lammas with Don Paterson. Poetry editor of
Chicago Review, published a pamphlet called
Slivers, and then came to live in London in 1985. His first full collection,
Shibboleth, was published in London in 1988.
Errata followed, and then
Conjure. Prizes and awards were won. His workshops became known for the careers that had started in them. And then in 2004 he died suddenly at the age of 50.
It was universally agreed that his was one of the most profoundly felt losses the UK poetry scene can remember. Shock waves went out in all directions, and there are still books being published with Donaghy memoriams in them.
His posthumous collection, Safest, came out in 2005, and a
Collected Poems in 2009 – alongside the Collected Prose, called
The Shape of the Dance.
Rereading the poems this week – out of the
Collected, not the individual books, so I’ve been able to skip around – what strikes me is how they still have the power to really surprise, even when I keep thinking I already know them. I think this surprise is an excellent place to start.
He’s known as a formal poet. He wrote a lot about formal concerns, the necessity of some kind of formal negotiation in the making of a poem. He was very keen on the “making” aspect, saying that evidence of craft and work is a sign that a poem (or poet) is trustworthy. But what form this “form” of his takes is another question. He wrote tight little rhymes lyrics in quatrains; he wrote postmodern collages of voices; he wrote sonnets and Browningesque monologues and free verse and blank verse and riddles and hoaxes and spoofs and prose poems. Poems that stay in one part of the page and poems that move around it. In "My Report Card," first published on The Poem website, he quotes:
"... a fidgety affectation of style after style which suggests that unlike more mature poets of his generation, Donaghy has not yet found his voice." F. Olsen, "Noted in Brief", Hierophant, Spring 1993.
What F. Olson failed to notice was, in short, the voice. Donaghy's poems are always elegant. They have sometimes staggering emotional depth, and range. They are models of concision. And often very, very funny.
His frame of reference is simply enormous: his subject matter includes ancient Japan, drug-running, postmodernism, jazz, art history, Chicago cops, GIs in the Second World War, sex, death, Shakespeare, religion, movies, machines (as in “Machines”), Homer, surrealism, tattoos, vomiting, and many, many objects. He was fascinated by the object, as in the skull of Yorick: “Look,” the poet says to the reader, holding it up. He even has a poem called “I Hold in My Hand an Egg.”
Right now I hold in my hand a poem by Michael Donaghy:
Music Sounds and Helen Passeth over the Stage
Fireworks crackle and the groundlings gasp and cough
and a drag queen in stuff brocade and starched ruff
glides across the stage on a starry trolley drawn by ropes.
Puppet. Hellbait. Tricktrap. Doctor, wait! She isn;t real.
You're doing all the work. She has no lines -
all smoke and candlelight and burning towers.
Not that peerless dame of Greece, this poxy boy
dangling beneath a spangly sky in Rothergithe
the thirtieth summer of Elizabeth. Curtain.
High summer. Locusts chirrup in the scrub.
Gongs. Ægypt. Enter: Athenian actor chanting
My name is Helen and I will now recount my sorrows...
Here are a couple of links:
Donaghy on
The Poetry Archive
two poems on
The Poem
The Interior of a Heron's Egg, by Joshua Mehigan
an essay by me in the
Contemporary Poetry Review
N.b., I was going to link here to the books on Amazon or somewhere - but an extensive and time-consuming search has just led me to conclude that both the Collecteds - the Poems, and The Shape of the Dance, his collected prose - are out of print! Copies are going for exorbitant sums online. Staggering. I apologise; however, I also recommend that readers here do the necessary to get hold of Donaghy's poems. You can still buy the individual collections, at least from the UK.
Michael Donaghy
Hybrid Mode
