[Katy Evans-Bush]

Hi Dave! Great to see you here.

John, that is a truly splendid post. Thanks. I especially loved "one doesn’t need to get into all this woo-woo to appreciate Donaghy"... You've hit it on the head though, and of course I didn;t mean "pull it off" as in for the sake of it.

We had a VERY interesting discussion last night over "Interviews." Well, I liked it because I never tire of this one. Accessibility and what the poet's allowed to allude to, etc. Oh, I think I said this last night. Well, it's obviously the same for "Palm," which I have also always loved, though I think everything I know about Paul de Man I learned from this poem, and you.

That quote about the vivisection is one of my all-time favourites; but lately I've got overload-related memory loss and can barely remember my own name, so thanks for quoting it. And that theory-vs-practice (or what one friend recently referred to, in a private email (!) as "praxis") debate encapsulates what Michael so loathed and feared about the academic or postmodern oor experimental or innovative or post-innovative poetry world. The fact that its generative impulse seemed to come from somewhere besides the joy of the poetry. But he understood joy, so I don't think he was closed off to anything on principle. Always open to it.

What the students immediately said on reading "Caliban's Books" (Bear with me. I'm trying to conjure my father...") is how he's coming out of the poem to directly speak to you, the reader. They loved it: they felt really addressed. It was wonderful to read these poems with people.

This is another mishmash of a post, after that beautiful little essay! I'll have more time tonight. I'll see if someone, anyone, can send me that Astrea Williams poem; I'm gutted not to have it.

[John Hutchcraft]

Katy, sorry, didn't mean to make you a straw man there - of course you don't think Donaghy pulled stuff off for the sake of it. You said it best yourself: he seemed to be moving toward joy. And there's a certain joy in doing really hard things and making them seem effortless. Isn't that one of the things we all like about Richard Wilbur?

I also really like what you said about learning de Man from "The Palm." Yes, I've learned a lot from Donaghy, on a number of topics. Of course, I always take those things with a shakerful of salt (as in his notoriously invented Welsh poet) but for every one of those, there are a dozen Claude glasses.

But back to those pears. I'd like to revise my remarks a little. "The Palm" works, I think, even if you know zilcho about Django Reinhardt and Paul de Man. You probably do have to have, though, at least an intuitive sense of the tension between "theory and praxis" (ha), or at least that poets and critics sometimes don't get along. You have to know what France was in 1942. Katy, I suspect I was your mirror image here: I came to this poem knowing the Paul de Man story but pretty fuzzy about Django Reinhardt, who I got to know only after the poem prompted me to. The really wonderful thing is how the poem (really, all of Donaghy's work as far as I know it) just keeps coming together more and more, the more you know about whatever arcane topic he's writing about.

And of course, lots of times there's nothing arcane about it, or he simply gives you everything you need in the poem. I'm away from my book at the moment, but what's the name of that wonderful poem about the failed candidate for priesthood with the remembering problem? The one with the "cathedral inside the cathedral" in his head? That's a good example of Donaghy clearing the way for the reader entirely, and it's just wonderful storytelling.

I think that's really the thing that sets Donaghy apart from so many contemporaries: storytelling. He's always wanting to tell you a story, to have your attention and then do something with it, something delightful. It's intensely generous.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

John, you mean "City of God." It's a perfectly delineated explanation of the Renaissance Memory Palaces that he used to talk about. He loved them!:

To every notion they assigned a saint,
to every saint an altar in a transept of the church.
Glancing up, column by column, altar by altar,
they could remember any prayer they chose.
He'd used it for exams, but the room went wrong -
a strip-lit box exploding slowly as he fainted.
They found his closet papered wall to ceiling
with razored passages from At Augustine.

I love that poem; I won't spoil the end for anyone who might be soon to read it, but suffice to say it gets dark.

The storytelling thing is absolutely key, and you know, is there enough storytelling in our contemporary anecdotal-epiphany poetry? Or in the other, fractured-narrative poetry? I'm all for a dislocation, God knows, but then there's that other thing, the man muttering "into his deranged overcoat" who stoppeth one of three. "I MUST TELL YOU THIS!" Michael was ALWAYS mentioning the Ancient Mariner, the ancient mariner was like a guide to him, like his own Virgil showing him the circles of narrative poetry hell. Look at "Black Ice and Rain" - commentators mention Browning for good reason, but you hardly ever see comment regarding Coleridge - or Dante. Or take that crazy one about the deranged cabby, "Timing."

You hear the whole story, but you also get - in the periphery - the fact that the person is deranged WITH their story that they live to tell it. It's both witness and the fascination of the derangement itself, the compulsive compulsion.

(Admittedly in that one you also get something else at the end - but what? It's just so creepy.)

As to Django Reinhardt, there was one person in the class last night who knew all about the 1913 Duchamp history but didn't know about the Delta bluesmen.

[Philip Quinlan]

So far from this thread I've got a picture of someone who made up multiple personalities and argued with himself online, wrote poems that were lies (although the lies were admitted in the poems), and jumbled up a few esoteric ideas in the guise of erudition (T. S. Eliot did a far better job of that).

Also, no one person could possibly have a liking for and knowledge of jazz who also liked that awful diddly-diddly Irish music. Mutually exclusive.

I can see how a few young, impressionable girls on a poetry course could be bowled over by this kind of hard drinking, drug taking persona. What I don't get is how any adult could take him seriously.

God knows I hate Simon Armitage, but I'd sooner be locked in a room with him for a month (with him reciting his own "poetry" constantly) than read any of MD's drivel.

Good grief!

Philip

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Fair enough, Philip. (Who are these young, impressionable girls you say were so bowled over by this druggy persona?)

I'm curious about this concept of two different kinds of music being "mutually exclusive." Are there lots of things that automatically exclude other things, merely by virtue of being liked? And do you like many of them?

I also wonder if you read novels, or if you consider them "lies." And, if so, what is your definition of "the truth?"

I'm interested in the difference between knowing esoterica and being erudite. I suppose it must be something to do with depth of knowledge, or some element of judgement and discernment. Can you show me where you think Donaghy's discernment is lacking, so that the pretended erudition is revealed as mere esoterica?

Why don't you like esoterica?

Would you like to tell us what it is you do like, and why?

[John Hutchcraft]

I will go out on a limb to say that we adults who do find value in Donaghy's work probably don't do so because we're crazy, or crippled by bad taste, or dazzled by some flim-flam persona, or hopelessly ensorcelled by the poet's personal charm. Ruling out those possibilities, just for the sake of argument, I wonder if there are any other ways to explain affection for this poet . . .

But in any event, Philip, your fighting words aside, I get that this poet isn't for you. Fair enough. And history may even prove you right about the superficiality of his charms and the profoundly minor quality of his work.

Then again, it might not. In any event, no one here is a neutral third-party arbitrator of what's Good and Right in poetry (because no such thing exists). So why don't we try to have a more interesting conversation than the one about who's bestest and who's worser?

These Donaghy threads frequently devolve into the poet's admirers rhapsodizing, until the poet's detractors just can't stand all the glowy encomia any longer and decide to take the man down a peg. Again - why don't we try a different conversation?

I'm squarely pro-Donaghy. I'll just say it: he's my "favorite poet" (odious phrase). But I don't hold any illusions about his being somehow "perfect" - as if there was any way to meaningfully measure perfection in art. I'm interested to hear where he falls short for readers, the ways that some readers (including several I know of and whom I deeply respect) find themselves resisting the work. It's a little bit like finding out that someone doesn't like your favorite flavor of ice cream, and, in the grand scheme of the universe, about as important. In any event, there's an interesting way to have that conversation.

I wonder if we'll have it.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

John: snap! We've cross-posted.

Okay, so I've thought about this for a bit. It has admittedly felt odd, conducting a conversation like this, over several days, on this strange hybrid public/private, literary/personal basis.

There is a slightly irritating tendency in any discussion of Michael Donaghy, I have to admit - and it has got worse since he died - for conversation to become kind of hushed and pious, or for sentimentality to creep in. Even now it's very common, if his name comes up, for someone to say: "How long is it? four years. What - SIX years? Seems impossible!" And shake the head, and then everyone sits silent for a minute. It happened yesterday.

There's even a new genre of poems in new collections in the UK, even now, and almost obligatory: the Donaghy poem. They're still cropping up in books, and I've read very few that actually evoked Michael at all. (They were mainly by Ian Duhig.)

But in the face of this, and a slight mutual congratulation that may creep in, it's important to remember we're talking about someone who wrote poems. And taught. And had a wife and kid and house and car and laptop. Even Keats wasn't perfect; I'm sure lots of people found him annoying. Mr D could be very annoying, too. Sometimes he annoyed me almost as much as Keats. But Keats' reputation was made sickly after he died, just as Donaghy's is being solidified into just this annoying trickster character... There's an excellent book, in fact, called Posthumous Keats, that traces the development of this hagiography over a century - starting with the ruckus over his death in Rome and the ensuing ruckus over what to write on the tombstone - and it's fascinating. Actually, it's specifically fascinating in the light of having gone through this experience of Michael dying and watching how people then treat his legacy, memory, etc.

There was a similar vein last year in researches I was doing around Ernest Dowson, with Arthur Symons writing a memoir that did Dowson no favours and sealed in one particular perception...

But really. Shall we just consider the work for a minute? Philip, I'd be glad if you could come back in and give a balanced, rational view of what you like and don't like about this poetry. There's plenty quoted above. You can get a lot more detailed information than what you relayed in your post by reading David Mason's essay - linked by Maryann on Page 4, I think - or Joshua Mehigan's, which I linked on Page 1. It would be interesting to discuss properly, rather than just bandy epithets.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I have been an ardent fan since I read "Machines",

Thanks, Katy, for hosting this thread.