[John Hutchcraft]

Originally Posted by David Mason

This to me is "closure" done well--the click of the hasp on a well made box, but the sense of something still breathing, still open.

Dave - yes! I would argue that Donaghy aimed for that very effect. In fact, I think he wrote about it. I suppose it's probably crass to link to myself, but, damn it, it came up naturally. A while back I wrote an essay on this very topic that Kate was kind enough to place in Umbrella. If anybody's interested, it's here. It's a close read (of the already-referenced-here "Upon a Claude Glass") and hence the bit on closure comes in the last three paragraphs.

(I apologize in advance for some of the more breathless passages, from which Kate gamely tried to save my obstinate ass.)

* * *

Editing in: Peter, I love your third point, about the varying identity of the implied listener. I haven't read that anywhere, and I think it's a spot-on observation. Many thanks!

[Katy Evans-Bush]

That's a great piece about the Claude Glass. I don't think it's over the top at all! And why shouldn't it be, anyway - it isn't a review, it's a close reading of something that grips you, whcih should include WHY it grips you...

I spent some time looking for over-neat clinching couplets, and while I did find some closing couplets, the most noticeable effect I noticed was that after a while every poem I saw seemed to have this thing going on, and then I thought: well, that's just what poems DO at the end, surely? And it worked for Shakeapeare. I'd even argue that he did it MORE than Donaghy.

I was also thinking about the progression idea. Dave's got it, I think - the movement from cleverness and maybe a slight brittleness to a deeper, more fluid, more - is aged the wrong word, as in oak-? - outlook. And elan, isn't that a great word.

One other "clever" poem I love is "Shibboleth." He said he wrote that out of the experience of being American and moving to London, which I find howlingly funny. Yes! Fortunately I'm long past that anxiety now but it is a very, chillingly, funny poem.

[Kevin Cutrer]

The things that I listed that bug me about Donaghy are also what endear him to me. If I were to list other poets I read and love, I might say the same of them. And, no, I don't think "drugs, sex, and bad soul" are his top notes... I'm more attracted to his storytelling, and his engagement with the reader. But I think that for those readers like Philip the more wilder elements are a barrier. I read Donaghy for a few years before I knew of his drug habits, which I only learned from Tim Murphy's remembrances. When I encountered those references, I never assumed he had firsthand knowledge, but I thought it likely. In any event, that's totally beside the point.

About the closing couplets... I agree that Donaghy makes that work. It's also one of the most daring techniques he employs (that, and the unabashed conceits worthy of Donne). I agree with David... it is like the box is being snapped shut, but paradoxically it still breathes. What first jumps to mind here is the closing of "Reprimands" when Thomas chooses to "...wet with blood his faithless hand." There is a contemporary aversion to the kind of closure that Donaghy tends to employ in these poems and I think it comes from a postmodern unease with the whole idea. And I don't think one can encounter it without thinking of Shakespeare, which is either to the poem's benefit or detriment.

It's interesting that so chilling a poem as "Shibboleth" was inspired by his move to London. It seems he never took the most obvious route from inspiration to poem. It would have been too easy to write a poem about the American new to London trying to get the lingo down. What if Donaghy had written a poem with a confessional "I" that directly addressed his anxieties?

[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.

[Peter Coghill]

A lot of words have been thrown about MD, the one for me is showmanship, he likes to put on a show.

BTW my points weren't meant to run him down but to try to focus in a bit more in detail on things I noticed about his work.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Ah, Kevin - but what would be gained by the mere anecdotal? For one thing alone, it would underline one's "otherness" in the very place one is trying to fit into! Why not take the path of more wit, and make something universal - which also, for private amusement, reverses the direction of the impetus?

But more to the point, why should Donaghy write in a confessional "I"? I mean, it wasn't his thing. Our particular era is obsessed with this confessional "I", but before 1950 it wasn't in any way de rigeur. I for one feel really excited when I discover a new poet who isn't just talking about himself the whole time. It all begins to feel a little like lifestyle articles, after a while.

Also - one of the chief benefits of not taking the "most obvious route" to a poem is that it will have gained a life beyond its original impetus. It will be - in fact - less obvious. Supposing the story about the man from Porlock were true, would we rather have "Kubla Khan," or a poem about a man trying to take a nap and being woken up by the front door?

And trust me, if you've never spent years surrounded by people all reminiscing about things you've never heard of, you don't know how important it is to be able to at least fake it!

I'm not sure I follow this "drugs" thing. For one thing, is this reminiscence of Tim's (I was there the night he met Michael's class, by the way) really material to an understanding of the poetry?

My understanding of how this stuff works is that the writer pays attention to, absorbs, and utilises the various spores that float in the cultural ether. Or, as Henry James put it: "Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost." Michael's poem "The Drop" is modelled on Eliot's "Journey of the Magi." The story is made up to be a modern version of a life-changing journey. "From The Safe House" is also imaginative, rather than autobiographical. "Black Ice and Rain" ditto.

I don't really know what to say about your statement that the "wilder elements are a barrier" to some kinds of readers. I'm sensing disapproval. There's not really much that can be done about that. I hear John Berryman was alcoholic. It's literature, not a schools outreach programme.

As to the Donne-ish conceits and other grand gestures, I think it's important to note that they employ a sensibility that is contained within postmodernism. And indeed modernism: he had a long apprenticeship to Pound before he moved on, and it's everywhere in his work. His "Seven Poems from the Welsh" is postmodern, though admittedly it belongs to the early, "clever" period. "Interviews" employs a modernist collage technique, and more than nods to surrealism. Even the title of "True" reflects the poet's fascination with out culture's deeply embedded unease with the whole notion of legitimacy, identity, truth. The spurious footnotes, invented histories, the mixing up of genres and tropes, gratuitous plundering of the "posh shop" of Western Civilisation - he is a child of his age. And his own railing on against postmodernism only tells half that story.

I see what you're saying about "closure;" it's not fashionable. But I'm not sure you get that much of it in Donaghy.

I'm really glad you do like the poetry, though! The poetry is the point here, not the cult of personality.

Well, I feel like a company rep. I've gone on enough for now...

[Tim Murphy]

No observation from me is needed. When Mikey writes about alcohol or drugs, whatever his speaker's persona, he writes with an authority that can only be grounded in experience. Alas.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Wow, I cross-posted with not only one but a couple of people! Excellent posts all. Mr H is holding us aloft here, I feel.

Apologies for what looks like tetchiness in my previous reply - it's actually me trying to phrase things properly. Before dinner.

Peter you don't need to give a caveat. I wish Philip had come back. I think the point is that were talking about someone who was an integrated mind. Once somebody is that, they can only be themselves. (This is why only real originals can be parodied.) And to this extent it's not their job to be perfect, it's only their job to be themselves.

I've written before about the classes he taught - to a very much greater extent than other poetry tutors, he didn't give rules, he gave pointers. The idea was that you were there to write as much like yourself as you could - not to mimic his taste or style. The range among the group was very broad, and as time has passed and people have been published, this has been noted. So this is the above principle put into action.

Here's a funny think. He admits somewhere that he had a big Ashbery period in his youth, but got over it, and never published any of it. Here, vis a vis that idea of negotiating with the form, is an amusing passage from his review of Rebel Angels, the anthology that "launched" New Formalism... actually, in the collected prose, this essay and the letter to Ian Duhig that follow it are intensely interesting. He writes to Ian explaining the book form an American vantage point, he having taken the opposite view of it from Ian's (who didn't get the politics). But it's important to note that he did not consider himself a New Formalist: "No. No room for membership cards in my wallet."

So here's the passage at hand:

Jarman and Mason probably wouldn't designate Ashbery a New Formalist though he's employed such highly conventional forms as the pantoum and the sestina as "devices for getting into remoter areas of consciousness." "The really bizarre requirements of a sestina," he told New York Quarterly, "I use as a probing tool rather than as a form in the traditional sense... rather like riding downhill on a bicycle and having the pedals push your feet. I wanted my feet pushed into places they wouldn't normally have taken." But surely this is precisely the function of "form in the traditional sense" - that serendipity provided by negotiation with a resistant medium...

[Kevin Cutrer]

I hope it's clear that I think a confessional "I" version of "Shibboleth" (or, really, any of his clearly persona poems) would be dreadful. Katy, I think your "lifestyle article" comparison is apt. Of course when it's done well it works just like any other approach. I keep remembering Philip's "lies" remark, and I wonder why anyone would object to Donaghy's myriad masks when there are countless others out there documenting their lives (some good, some dreadful).

I wasn't being disapproving when I made that "barriers" remark, but merely trying to indicate where some people might find fault. Also, my point about the closing couplets was that many people automatically dismiss them because they are not exactly fashionable. In short, I think we're in total agreement about these things, Katy! I've had to write these posts quickly, so maybe I haven't come across as I'd like.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

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.