[Tim Murphy]

Thank you, Kevin Cutrer, for that marvelous reflection on Mikey. And good on you Katy, for kicking Picador in the butt. I best know Michael's first two collections, and the double volume is a great book I recommend to all and sundry.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Tim it was more like a friendly email to the lovely people in the publicity department!

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Just quickly, I was reading Wallflowers on the way home last night, and I'm thinking one thing it's really important to remember is the extraordinary breadth of Donaghy's influence. Or, more than that. The ability he had to internalise, assimilate, synthesise, different ways of meaning. He was profoundly influenced, I think, by jazz - and by surrealism, and Dada - or possibly by the more ancient trickster figure of whom they were the emissaries. He loved Borges. The message is that, sadly, if you think you've got him pegged in any way, you have to remember he knew more than you! I say "you," I mean "me." But the message here for us all is to widen our reading. Take everything on that you possibly can, read outside your comfort zone and find the good in things.

One thing that's more widely known nowadays than it was at the time is that Michael had an alter ego who wrote avant garde, or innovative, or experimental, or whatever you want to call it, poetry. Astrea Williams. He railed on, and I think in the last couple of years it did take on an air of railing, about postmodernism, but then he also - through this trickery, through the breadth of his understanding, understood postmodernism, in a different way. He just didn't subscribe to it as a system.

He brought one of Astrea Williams' poems in to class one night and read it to us, and then started ranting and waving it around: "It's shit! I wrote this in 5 minutes! It's garbage, it means nothing! How could it mean anything??" He said, "And right after I wrote it, I sent it to some magazine, and they've published it. So that's the word for you guys: it doesn't matter what you write somebody somewhere will publish it. It's not hard to get published."

Now the thing is, that poem he wrote is not bad. In fact, it's got a lot of good stuff in it. (Horrifyingly, I've just gone to look it up - and the website's down!! And surprisingly it's not on my computer. This is bad news, but I know someone somewhere will have it.) It's funny, and erotic, and interesting, and actually not unadmired in the communities of people who read that kind of poetry. It sounds great, is touching, is beautiful. And the thing is, he went to the trouble of doing it. This is the guy who said that the negotiation with form (and if disjunctive syntax isn't a formal restriction I don't know what it is) is what creates trust between the poet and the reader. He's also the guy who wouldn't leave the stuff he disliked alone. And wrote with his usual, however fast, attention to sound and emotional content and was incapable of making it bad, in fact. Therefore I think it's safe to say he was fascinated by this "dark side" of contemporary poetry, I mean really actually fascinated, and wanted to seek to understand it. Well, he did understand it. What he was threatened by, I think, was its orthodoxy; orthodoxy of any kind was what he couldn't work with. Orthodoxy is the enemy of poetry, after all.

Even, as in the case of Astrea Williams, the orthodoxy of one's own declared beliefs. (It;s just this ability to transcend his declared beliefs, by the way - and it corresponds hugely with the lack of the confessional "I" in his poetry, which so many people comment on - which makes him so BIG, in the sense of deep and expansive. You should never think you've got him really pegged, because the fact is that he knew more than you. (One thing he knew, of course, was which bits he had made up!) Genius is what we call that I think.

I have Astrea's business card (complete with fake mobile number), and it makes me sad to think there won't be a collection of her poetry.

In the meantime, we can read a poem of Michael's like this one, very much in his own usual style, from Errata:

Interviews

Yvette lets a drop
Of red blot brilliant
On the bedsheet.

1913. She looks up
From painting her toenails.
Marcel is ahead of his time,
Yvette is still dressing.

He finds a note
From Apollinaire:
'Knight to
Queen's rook three.'

and checks the board.
He looks at the little horse, snaps
It across the room,
A distance

Of fifty years
To a studio in Neuilly
Cassette wheels spinning
Throughout the interview
And he thinks of bicycles.

Q: Where does your anti-retinal attitude come from?
A: From too great an importance given to the retina.

1913. It's getting late.
The sun obscures
As it illuminates
Garden and gardener...

Etc. This poem is three pages long and incorporates snatches from another interview, with the bluesman Son House, purportedly elsewhere on the same tape. I won't even discuss who the characters are, because it would be giving away the development (as in the development of a strip of film) of the poem - they're historical, and he's virtually told you: this is deep engagement with Dada. It's the side of Donaghy - or the seam in him - that is less often discussed, but is very much about what it means to make - or to mean - something.

And only my own take on it, as I've never read any critical material about this element in his work, either - and only a first draft as I've been jotting this down before work, and it's necessarily short.

[Andrew Frisardi]

You should never think you've got him really pegged, because the fact is that he knew more than you. (One thing he knew, of course, was which bits he had made up!) Genius is what we call that I think.

Now I’m really scared. Now I know that I should read him with shite for brains, since, golly gee whiz, what the f*** do I know?

This doesn’t strike me as a helpful way to approach reading a poet.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Sorry, Andrew, that's the last impression I want to give! I should have clarified: I find it intensely exhilarating.

There are so many poets who are perfectly nice but never really surprising. The ones I go back to time and time and time again, the ones who buck me up, are the ones who are, on rereading, a surprise every time. I knew this work very well already, and what I found this past week, rereading, was poems that looked totally different to me now than they did ten, five, two years ago. They were new all over again.

Partly that's to do with my other reading in the interim, which means I now get references I maybe missed earlier. (And this is fine! As TS Eliot says, the poem does its work on the reader without being rationally understood. The power comes from other places. Emphatically, if you had to get every reference or allusion, if you had to be able to explain a poem to be allowed to love it, no one would ever be allowed to start reading poetry. It's really okay not to get a reference, and this was something that came up time and again in a Donaghy workshop. He said: "If one person in the room gets it, that's enough.")

And partly it's because the work is so complex - it comes out of such an integrated inner space, as I said above, which is teeming with thousands of snippets and references and ideas and touchstones - that it's there for you to meet halfway from several different angles. Or from wherever you are.

I emphatically don't think it's anything to do with shite-for-brains! I apologise if I gave that impression.

One of the reasons Donaghy was so magnetic a teacher was this tremendous authority that was because he just did know about things. He read voraciously, across disciplines, remembered everything, followed slightly recherché lines of inquiry to unexpected conclusions that rounded back in on the matter at hand - could recite almost anything you cared to name at the drop of a hat - and lived and breathed poetry. You couldn't slip anything past him, ever. He used to quip that he couldn't read prose. To me that's the guide you want through the poetry world.

AND, he was the least judgemental, most generous tutor I've ever come across; he listened, really listened, to everybody. Clive James notes that when reviewing he looked for, and found, the good. I think this spirit of curiosity and sharing is a powerful engine for poetry (or any other art.) As Donaghy says: "It's only polite to steal everything you can."

I'm sorry I don't have time now to sift for more involved quotes. But "genius" is a descriptive, not a value-loaded, term. It doesn’t even mean you have to agree with him.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Thanks, Katy. That clarifies. I’m still waiting for the books I ordered before I can really dig into Donaghy’s poetry, but I can tell from what I’ve seen that he was the real deal.

[Tim Murphy]

Katy, I'm greatly enjoying your insights into Michael whom you knew so well and I never had time to know nearly well enough.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Ah, Tim, that's what the books are for! The essays, in particular, are just like talking to Michael. Wallflowers is pretty indispensible on this side of the Atlantic; they might still sell it direct from the Poetry Society (who published it); I'm not sure.

Now, I'm teaching tonight so won't be around till later... I was planning to do a class on constructing a poem out of two ideas or feelings or images, rather than just one - allowing this dialectic tension, or what you want to call it, to give the two a chance to interact and make a better poem than just writing about one of them. Don Paterson in his (slightly controversial) TS Eliot Prize lecture a few years ago referred to this as the secret of poetry: two-in-one. This is very consistent with the Donaghy aesthetic. I see it as being akin to his idea of " negotiating with the medium" creating a "serendipity" that made you arrive at things you ordindarily wouldn't. In a poem it acts like the tesnion of the plot in a story: the protagonist's desire, and the complication, which sets the plot in motion and leads to the resolution. You can't have the resolution without the complication.

I'm going to take the opportunity of having been rereading all this work to frame the discussion around some poems of Michael's. One is "The Interview," which I quoted the beginnig of, above. That of course sees the interview cut with one from Son House, on blues. Art and music.

And maybe "The Brother." I'll think of a couple, & report back later.

[Kevin Cutrer]

Thank you, Katy, for directing me to "A Darkroom." What a powerful poem. What sets him apart from many poets is that he wasn't content with just writing about the darkroom process (I would have felt accomplished had I merely arrived at that image of the family coming out of nothing), but he weaves in a holocaust narrative (which is achieved through a succession of images and their inevitable associations). And there is the understated conceit that runs through the entire poem linking memory to the delicate art of developing photographs in a darkroom. This poem is a fine example of his faith in the reader to make those connections. To pull this off without seeming needlessly obscure is a real feat that appears effortless with Donaghy.

With Tim, I'm grateful that you're taking the time to share your insights. "Interviews" is another favorite of mine, though I'm less familiar with it. I love, too, his engagement with the avant garde he railed against. I've always thought that Donaghy had a keen understanding of postmodernism, and that made his arguments all the stronger when it came to form (these arguments were also compounded with his intimate knowledge of music).

In his recent essay in The Dark Horse (which is sadly no longer available on the website), David Mason compares him to Bob Dylan's clown character in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. When I read about his experiments under the Astrea Williams pseudonym, and the internet discussion threads in which he dukes it out with several invented personae, I can't help but think of Dylan himself (and that may be because I listen to an inordinate amount of the fellow). Neither artist is satisfied with a singular path.

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Kevin, yes of course, it's "Interviews." For soem reason I have a mental block on that. We had a great class; but it's nearly 1am now and I have to go to bed!

I love that you say "needlessly obacure" (as in NOT), as we had that discussion tonight over the abovenamed poem. Interestingly, one person knew all the Duchamp & Apollinaire references but missed the blues ones. I just say, you can never tell what people will know or not know! Donaghy pulls this off, I believe, with his demotic register and his confidential way of speaking to the reader. You may realise you don't get the reference, but he never makes you feel stupid.

And yeah, I was looking for a link to David Mason's essay but no, it isn't online. Shame; it's a wonderful essay. The Dylan comparison is really interesting.