[Tim Murphy]

At the eighth Conference on Form and Narrative at West Chester, I saw a fellow smaller than I, dressed in a black leather jacket, ruinously handsome in the way that a few men nearing fifty can be. I walked up to admire him and was astonished to learn that he was Michael Donaghy, whose work I knew from a broadsheet published by Acumen in Britain. I asked what had brought him across the Atlantic, and he told me “I came to meet Dick Davis, Sam Gwynn and you.”

That night Michael would recite brilliantly to the assembly, but even many rows back in the auditorium, Alan and I could see that the poet looked deathly pale. Afterward we found our host Michael Peich with Donaghy in the lobby. They were about to leave for the hospital. Donaghy had suffered something worse than an attack of stage fright. His cardiac arhythmia was acting up—despite his youthful looks, the poet was prematurely afflicted with ill-health. But arhythmia affected only Michael’s heart, not his verse:

The Bacchae
Look out, Slim, these girls are trouble.
You dance with them they dance you back.
They talk it broad but they want it subtle
and you got too much mouth for that.
Their secret groove’s their sacred grove --
not clever not ever, nor loud, nor flaunt.
I know you, Slim, you’re a jerk for love.
The way you talk is the what you want.
You want numbers. You want names.
You want to cheat at rouge et noir.
But these are initiated dames --
the how they move is the what they are.

Michael’s verse was jazzy, it was sexy. He loved to jar people. Like Greg Williamson, he was an inveterate mixer of diction. His mind channel-surfed the world. He would hear a song, see a woman, read of ancient Greece—and all these disparate things would combine in a poem. “Initiated dames” indeed.

Donaghy spent his lifetime in three great cities: New York, Chicago and London. In the latter, he achieved wide recognition for his verse, winning major prizes for both of his collections. A skilled flautist and penny whistler, he augmented his miserable earnings from teaching and poetry by playing traditional Irish music with a variety of bands. He certainly carried that musical gift into his poetry.

Eight months after I met Michael at West Chester, we spent some time together in London, where I’d gone to launch my second collection, Very Far North, for Waywiser Press. Michael was teaching night classes in creative writing for City University of London. I recited poetry to his pupils, then accompanied them to a nearby pub for a round of ale. We were both on and off the wagon, but Michael’s idea of sobriety did not involve desisting from marijuana and cocaine, which I had abjured twenty years earlier.

Michael’s poems are full of violence, vodka, drugs, and melodrama. He assumed unpredictable voices—one could never tell whether his personae were imaginative projections or shards of self. He also invoked his Catholic upbringing in bizarre ways. Religious imagery is everywhere in his poetry. A tremendous spiritual tension drove his work, and his life. Charles Martin’s great title “For a Child of Seven, Taken by the Jesuits,” would be perfect for the yet-unseen Collected Poems of Donaghy.

Co-Pilot
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness,
Sitting on my shoulder like a pirate’s parrot,
Whispering the Decalogue like a tiny Charlton Heston.
Tch, he goes. Tch Tch. He boreth me spitless.
Tonight I need a party with a bottomless punchbowl
Brimming cool vodka to the lip of the horizon.
I’ll yank him from his perch and hold him under
Until the bubbles stop.

Michael couldn’t kill the God perched on his shoulder, but death found him suddenly last fall, during the happiest period of his life, when he had married and fathered at last. He had already anticipated and rehearsed his own end in an eerie poem called ‘The Turning.’ .

The Turning
If anyone asks you how I died, say this:
The angel of death came in the form of a moth
And landed on the lute I was repairing.
I closed up shop
And left the village on the quietest night of summer,
The summer of my thirtieth year,
And went with her up through the thorn forest.
Tell them I heard yarrow stalks snapping beneath my feet
And heard a dog bark far off, far off.
That’s all I saw or heard,
Apart from the angel at ankle level leading me,
Until we got above the treeline and I turned
To look for the last time on the lights of home.

That’s when she started singing.
It’s written that the voice of the god of Israel
Was the voice of many waters.
But this was the sound of trees growing,
The noise of a pond thrown into a stone.

When I turned from the lights below to watch her sing,
I found the angel changed from moth to woman,
Singing inhuman intervals through her human throat,
The notes at impossible angles justified.

If you understand, friend, explain to them
So they pray for me. How could I go back?
How could I bear to hear the heart’s old triads--
Clatter of hooves, the closed gate clanging,
A match scratched toward a pipe--
How could I bear to hear my children cry?

I found a rock that had the kind of heft
We weigh the world against
And brought it down fast against my forehead
Again, again, until blood drenched my chest
And I was safe and real forever.

Since my return to the Catholic faith, I have prayed for Michael’s soul every morning and evening—the response he asked in ‘The Turning.’ Through this disturbing work I hear echoes of C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra Trilogy, where the Oyeresu (archangels) glimmer at impossible angles to the worlds they rule. I surmise Michael also had Stevens’ Key West in mind. “The lights of the fishing boats at anchor there” prefigure the lights of the village seen for the last time by the young luthier as his death angel sings.

Above all, I hear the Bible, “the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying Alleluia.” (Revelations, 19:6) Surely that is a source of Michael’s unerring sense for lineation, something one finds so rarely in the fractured prose that generally passes for free verse. Donaghy is further proof of what R. P. Warren told me at Yale, and might also have told Michael in the Green Room of the West Side Y, when they met there in 1974: “Boy, if you want to write free verse, you must first learn to write formal verse.”

The morning after his collapse at West Chester, Michael ridiculed the episode as “a gypsy wedding rioting in my heart.” The previous day he had described his early job as a doorman in New York: “I kept my Hopkins hidden in my hat.” Michael just spoke in perfect pentameter, and I tried for several years to write a poem about him. After his premature death, the unfinished project took on real urgency.
The Doorman
i.m. Michael Donaghy

You kept your Hopkins hidden in your hat
to pass time when gypsy cabs were weaving.
A matron in whose presence hats came off
spotted the poet you were forced to doff
and whisked you to her gracious East Side flat
where thirty stories up
Margaret are you grieving
over Goldengrove unleaving?
her voice was tea poured in a china cup.
She bought you tickets to the ‘Y,’ that hall
where Eliot intoned
his Four Quartets, where Frost read Mending Wall,
and Dylan Thomas sang his lines half-stoned.

Busking for the supper on your plate,
you married Maddy late
as gypsy weddings rioted in your heart,
that tympanum where all our meters start.
A frail expatriate,
you wowed the ‘Y.’ Your patroness returned
to hear firsthand how much her guest had learned.
She watched you springing for the microphone
to read without a text,
master of pacing, phrasing, pitch and tone.
Pity the poor bastard who went next,
yet even he is grieving
your prematurely leaving
a stage so few could ever wholly own.

It is a great grief that the angel of death took Michael in his fiftieth year; but grace a Dieu, he graced this world for two decades beyond the young luthier’s age before his turning. The body of work Michael left us, with its “inhuman intervals,” is “safe and real forever.”


There was an outpouring of sorrow after Michael’s death. Our friend Katy Evans-Bush, Michael’s student and my colleague at the Eratosphere, provided me links to the London paper where condolences were offered. There were some memorable things said by minstrels and poets. Within days of the tragedy Paul Lake composed this reflection.

The Water Glass

When water poised above the rim,
He noted it was surface tension
That held the audience and him
Spellbound. That night, the whole convention
Trembled on edge till Michael quipped,
“What could a surface be tense about?”
And laughter broke like water. Then
He made a splash when he passed out.
The doctors looking at his chart
Were puzzled by the tinny tunes
His organs made, but Michael felt
“A gypsy wedding in my heart,”
And we all laughed. Now it’s as if
With flute and whistle, he’s danced off
To join that gypsy caravan
In noisy mirth, as dark drips down
Night’s tent, beyond the edge of town.

After Alan Sullivan came to my rescue and helped me finish The Doorman, Mister Gwynn weighed in with this:


For M. D.

September 16, 2004

Younger than I, perhaps the braver man
Or just the bigger fool, you kept on going
Down the fast track. Wired and wound tight, you ran
Circles around us all, Mike, surely knowing
Someday we'd grant you, browsing through your pages,
The same damned envious love we have for those
Who've spoiled us with their terse and primal rages,
Making our subtlest stanzas sound like prose.

Still, it's a lovely night, and these regrets
Shouldn't keep us from one toast, you'd agree.
I pull the cork, reach for the cigarettes,
And tilt one for you, Michael Donaghy,
Who spoke your lines like offerings to the gods,
Cheating at nothing, nothing but the odds.

Paul and I were born three years before Michael, and Sam three years before us. Only Michael died at fifty. We are being given time to complete our work, time that was denied Mikey. Note Sam’s words, “offerings to the gods.” In the last three days I have earned Michael a plenary indulgence which entails a spiritual exercize that I have reduced to verse.

The Dispensation

My dear Lord, today is All Saints’ Day,
and the Church offers plenary indulgence
to those who attend High Mass, who tend the graves
of their forebears and confess their grievous sins.
A mercy to be claimed or given away,
it is my gift to Michael Donaghy.

Adam, I don't remember where I published this. Atlanta Review, maybe. My elegy Doorman originally appeared in the Hudson Review. But it expresses the love that many of us felt for Mikey.

[Adam Elgar]

Donaghy's death is a tragedy for his family and friends, of course, Tim. It just has no bearing on the quality of his poetry. I'm not obliged to like it, any more than if Don Paterson died tomorrow, I'd have to start liking his.

[Tim Murphy]

You and I, Adam, vehemently disagree on the merit of Michael's work.

[Gregory Dowling]

Here's a link to an essay Katy Evans-Bush published on Donaghy in Contemporary Poetry Review after his death. It's a very good essay, and brings across both his personality and his poetry in a very winning way, I think. I only met him once, at my first West Chester conference in June 2004, but found him very engaging. He actually took the trouble to introduce me personally to Anthony Hecht, as I told him that I was a great admirer of his poetry. Both poets, as Tim has recorded, died that same year.

I greatly look forward to reading Dave's essay.

Adam, if you enjoyed Michael Donaghy's essay on prosody, you should get hold of his collected prose. It's a wonderful volume and I'm sure you'd find a lot to admire.

[Adam Elgar]

MD's prose is indeed excellent. He has much to say of great value about the art of poetry - like Paterson, and like Zadie Smith on the novel. I just don't like much of the poetry itself. To be precise, there are about a dozen poems I like very much. Same goes for the early poems in Paterson's "Landing Light" - in both cases, these are the poems that do least to draw attention to their own cleverness, or where the cleverness isn't indulged in for its own sake.

And Donaghy undoubtedly had a great talent for friendship. He could, however, put rather too much performance into his teaching.

[Tim Murphy]

I just read Dave's essay. He stakes out a very large claim for Michael and backs his argument with citation after citation from Mikey's poems. If you don't subscribe to TDH, here's a new reason to do so. The best sort of criticism doesn't just take a swat at an author, but it makes you want to read every word the author committed to the page. I think this is what Wilbur was after when he said of David's The Poetry of Life that "he gives new meaning to the term humane letters." It is a terrific essay, perhaps David's best.

Adam, thanks so much for all the heavy lifting you're doing over at the translation panel.

[Adam Elgar]

Literary opinions are rarely changed by the opinions of others. Numerous judges of the Man Booker Prize have wryly described the futile and excruciating debates they are forced to go through before failing to agree and coming up with a compromise winner who was nobody’s first choice. It happens pretty well every year, and is probably a feature of most prize panel dynamics. These things can be visceral, and quite unmoved by “evidence” – for example, my inability to like the sound of the organ, even though JS Bach seems to me the greatest of composers by a country mile.

All one can do is state a position. In the context of the astonishing intensity of the admiration for MD, substantially generated by people who knew and loved him, it is possible – indeed only fair – that a counter-view be posited. And there are reasons in this case for a particular kind of disquiet in which the authorial personality is a valid element of the debate. Usually I’d declare it off-limits. And in any case, dissent from a prevailing view is an honourable position to adopt. Interestingly, David calls his essay a “defense”. I’m not alone.

Donaghy’s work is repeatedly analysed in terms of its ability to complicate the relationship between author and reader. Another way of looking at this is to question his readiness to engage genuinely with the reader. His poetry has a (to me) distasteful habit of feigned truth-telling, where he deliberately undercuts what might purport to be a real engagement by denying it. The locus classicus is

“My father’s sudden death has shocked us all.
Even me, and I’ve just made it up.”

The rightly celebrated “Black Ice and Rain” ends with a gratuitous nod to “My Last Duchess” which merely has the effect of calling an abrupt halt to the relationship one was starting to have with the characters (despite the remorseless coolness of the poet’s tone). Until the last three lines it was still possible to believe that he cared about these three people, until suddenly the narrative voice says “never mind all that, let’s have a clever and cynical meta-textual allusion instead.” If only he’d omitted the last three lines.

The silliest of these tricks is the invention of Sion ab Brydydd in a solemnly plausible joke essay – why do it? And why demonstrate in doing so that you don’t know the meaning of “helix”. If you’re going to show off your cleverness, it’s a minimum requirement that you get your facts right.

Anyway, to wrench the discussion back to Don Paterson, with whom Maryann began it (sorry for the deviation, Maryann), here are two poems about fathers and very young sons.


Waking with Russell

Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.


Haunts

Don’t be afraid, old son, it’s only me,
though not as I’ve appeared before,
on the battlement of your signature,
or margin of a book you can’t throw out,
or darkened shop front where your face
first shocks itself into a mask of mine,
but here, alive, one Christmas long ago
when you were three, upstairs, asleep,
and haunting me because I conjured you
the way that child you were would cry out
waking in the dark, and when you spoke
in no child’s voice but out of radio silence,
the hall clock ticking like a radar blip,
a bottle breaking faintly streets away,
you said, as I say now, Don’t be afraid.



One of these strikes me as intensely moving, deeply felt – even, to use a corny word, sincere. The other seems cold and self-focused – and expert of course, but the tone is wrong. The engagement is with the narrator himself more than his son, the child merely the pretext for the father’s emotion, whereas Paterson’s emotion is engaged entirely with the “gift” that is his son. Donaghy’s poem leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Part of the problem is the off-note “old son” with which he starts. He’s adopted a slightly old-fashioned Briticism which is not actually used by fathers to sons. It’s often in fact used between men of similar ages. Either Donaghy has misunderstood the idiom, or he’s mischievously undermining the intimacy proper to parent and child. I grieve to suspect the latter. But in any case the key movement is away from the child to the father, the child as the “mask” of the father’s own face. Perhaps it’s great poetry: there’s some very vivid imagery, but the piece as a whole repels me.

I could just as easily cite Paterson’s “The Thread”, a tragically moving poem with no parallel for emotional impact anywhere in Donaghy’s oeuvre. (Or admittedly, in Paterson's, but how often do we come across something as gripping as this?)


The Thread

Jamie made his landing in the world
so hard he ploughed straight back into the earth.
They caught him by the thread of his one breath
and pulled him up. They don't know how it held.
And so today I thank what higher will
brought us to here, to you and me and Russ,
the great twin-engined swaying wingspan of us
roaring down the back of Kirrie Hill

and your two-year-old lungs somehow out-revving
every engine in the universe.
All that trouble just to turn up dead
was all I thought that long week. Now the thread
is holding all of us: look at our tiny house,
son, the white dot of your mother waving.


This is heart-rending. And even in the intensity of his loss, the poet's motion is outwards, towards the others that he loves.
I’ve not heard even MD’s greatest fans claim that he’s capable of rending the heart, but if what the reader wants is chilly expertise, Donaghy has it in spades.

[Maryann Corbett]

Adam, no apology is needed for a digression that is teaching me so much. Thank you for the time, thought, and work you've devoted to the essay above. The distinction you make between the braininess of Donaghy and the emotional pull of Paterson describes my own reactions pretty well. I'll still be very interested in David's essay, and I'm a subscriber to TDH, so I know I'll see it.

I didn't know "The Thread" and am glad to have been introduced to it.

Shall we say something about the types of Paterson poems you like less? You mentioned the couplets, which I suspect are the ones I've seen reviewers refer to as "Ogden Nash-like." To me, that means lines that rhyme but are of very different lengths; in Nash these are deliberately unskilled-looking, on purpose and for humor. How about some examples of what doesn't work for you?

[Chris Childers]

Re: "old son," I think your complaint ill-founded. First, Donaghy is using the colloquialism literally--he's addressing his son, who, old enough to read the poem, is both old and his son. That's how you make a prefabricated expression work in a poem. Second, he's using it as you say the colloquialism is used, the father's age at time of writing and the son's at the age at which the poem imagines him addressed being approximately the same. This multi-layered usage is the sort of thing poetry does, and ought to do; it seems incredible to me that you feel it "mischievously undermines the intimacy proper to parent and child." I find the poem moving: the father is speaking to his son from out of death, haunting him, just as the son haunted the father with that unchildlike admonition so many years ago when he was too young to remember or know whereof he spoke. The poem's "Don't be afraid" reflected back at the son therefore means don't be afraid at my death, and don't be afraid at your own; and what would seem an unsatisfactory injunction coming from one living man to another ("courage is no good, it means not scaring others") gains far greater authority from beyond the grave: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. I don't know when Donaghy wrote this poem or when it was published, but it seems to me that it was written in prophetic anticipation of his early death, and that that death, although tragic, makes of this a more intense and interesting and haunting poem. I agree with your admiration of the two Patersons you quote, but don't see why MD's poem has to do the same things: "Waking With Russell" is about life, "Haunts" is about death; the Paterson is a hug, the Donaghy, a mirror. Both move me, in different ways.

As for the Browning allusion in "Black Ice and Rain," I have to say that I've taught the Browning for several years, and I've taught "Black Ice and Rain" before, though not recently, and never noticed the 'allusion'--there are no precise echoes, the way Eliot alludes to Marvell, say, and although the reference to "exquisite taste" and "showing me your things," as well as the turn outward from narrative back to addressee, I'll admit, could conspire to conjure, however faintly, the Duke of Ferrara, surely this 'allusion' is not strong or clear enough to jolt one out of admiration for a poem one had been enjoying up to that point? Moreover if it is an allusion it invites us to contemplate the relationship between the source and the context into which it has been placed; must this make it a chilly intellectual game that inhibits intimacy?--even if, in this instance, it does serve to complicate the relationship between speaker and addressee, and by extension, writer and reader, one facet of MD's poetry that apparently turns you off. My opinion is that it need not be read as an allusion, need not jolt one out of the poem, which is manifestly brilliant, and that it would only do so if you're looking for things to dislike, rather than things to like.

You're right, of course, that this sort of discussion never changes anyone's mind, and you are certainly entitled to your own tastes and experiences reading, etc., etc., but I'm equally entitled to say that I find them alien and incomprehensible. I don't know if Donaghy will be read in 200 years, but he is self-evidently an excellent poet, and that's enough for me.

Chris

[David Mason]

Adam, I think it's too common to cite "Black ice and Rain" as one of Michael's best and compare him to Browning. But I do agree with you that such comparisons miss the mark. Michael's an entirely different kind of animal, though, like Browning, a master of dramatic voice. His sensibility is, for me, more like a bizarre marriage of Nabokov and Mahon--the latter a poet he adored--with a dash of something utterly American. His is a mid-Atlantic voice, not British, but not totally American, and his playful attitude toward his own erudition is part of the charm. The TLS critic attacked Michael's intellect by suggesting that he could not have heard a Purcell pavane played on the harpsichord, for example (referring to "Machines"), but that is not true, since Purcell composed so that a number of his pieces could be played on whatever instrument came to hand. I'll check the reference to "helix," but would suggest that Michael usually turned out to be very deliberate in his use of any term. And I actually think his poems are more bitingly moving than Paterson's precisely because of the partial deflection of emotion felt deeply. Michael's best poems are always more than games--there's always a complicated emotion driving them. In other words, I would suggest that you're not able or willing to catch his tone--and tone is a very difficult matter to discuss in writing. In my essay I note how Michael outgrew the mere cleverness of his weakest poems, but how the hard-won emotions are there from the very start. I think "Black ice and Rain" is less impressive than early poems like "Remembering Steps to Dances Learned Last Night" and "The Tuning." And I think critics who can stay with him and pay close attention will be rewarded over time. Finally, I think he has a lot of teach us about the management of formal matters--the way he can depart from a pattern without wrecking it, for example. Anyway, my essay might be of interest, though you seem to have made up your mind already.

Best,
Dave