 As
Reviewed By: |
The Many Truths of Michael Donaghy Michael Donaghy (1954-2004) |
As
Reviewed By: |
The Many Truths of Michael Donaghy Michael Donaghy (1954-2004) |
Imagine growing up in a society where one's first and only experience of music occurred in a schoolroom, where the beauty of music was meticulously analysed and explained to you and where you were judged by your ability to explain it in turn. In one sense, of course, your appreciation of music would be exquisitely sophisticated because tunes wouldn't be tinkling persistently out of lift speakers or commuter's headphones. Music wouldn't be an "on" switch away, so you'd be more alert to its nuances when you did hear it. But let's face it, you wouldn't be queuing round the corner for the experience. It would always be more "improving" than pleasurable.
This gently trenchant voice belongs to my friend and teacher Michael
Donaghy, who died in London on September 16 this year. Michael was—as
well as a generous spirit—both an
important lyric poet and an original thinker who spent his life
championing poetry as an essential (and essentially) human activity which
is “hardwired into the brain.”
Michael spread by talk and example a feeling for poetry as a vital
dialogue with the world around us, with other poets, with the canon, with
form. As he wrote, and read, and talked, a whole sweep of
poetic-past-&-present was in view, like London seen from the heights
of Parliament Hill. He used to say that every poem written changes the
canon in some slight way, just a miniscule shift of its balance—that
in writing a poem you have a duty to consider the ones that came
before it. This makes sense; the reader has some of those other poems in
his or her mind, after all; but it was also about keeping faith. In terms
of his own work, this translates into a feeling that working within a form
creates a “serendipity” via which the poem happens “by negotiation
with a resistant medium.”
Well [he continues] that's more or
less our (urban, Anglophone) experience of poetry. Perhaps its low profile
has to do with the way it's taught. On the graduate level, modern
pedagogues have long felt disinclined to lead tour groups around the
gallery waving their pointing sticks at the sheer genius of the Old
Masters. They want to be the main event. Literacy corrupts, they seem to
be saying, and Literature, the common ground of writing agreed to be
worthy of cultural survival, is the tool of the oppressor. If poetry
depended on intellectuals for its survival it would be about as current as
hieroglyphics.
Michael was born in 1954 to Irish Catholic parents; the Bronx he grew up
in was full of immigrants of one kind or another. He
became, and this is not unconnected to his poetry, an accomplished Irish
musician, playing flute and bodhran with an assortment of different
groups and also spontaneously, at the drop of a hat. He studied at
Fordham University and then at the University of Chicago, where both his
arts prospered: he became poetry editor of the Chicago Review and founded the Irish music ensemble Samradh Music.
Over the years he played in various bands including Lammas, a jazz band
led by his friend Don Paterson. (One gig, a source of great amusement
among his friends, was the premier of the film Titanic
in Leicester Square, where he and his fellow-musicians had to dress in
rags—à la Leonardo di Caprio—and
play haunting melodies in the foyer of the cinema as the film stars
entered.)
He
moved to London in 1985 (right after the publication of a pamphlet of his
work, Slivers; and if anyone has
a copy, I’ll buy it). The chronology of his career is short: his first
collection, Shibboleth (1988)
won the Whitbread Poetry Prize. The
Geoffrey Faber Prize followed in 1990.
Errata was
published in 1993, and in 1994 was chosen for the New Generation poetry
promotion—which famously re-branded poetry as “the new rock &
roll,” and which Michael called “an
attempt to actually manufacture a group of poets in the way that
television tried to manufacture the Monkees as a pop group.” In
1999 he took part in the Poetry Society’s Poetry Places promotion, which
resulted in his monograph Wallflowers—a lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling
from which the two quotes above are taken.
His third collection, Conjure
(2000) won the Forward Prize for best collection, as well as being
shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He was awarded a
Cholmondeley Award in 2003 and was also made a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature.
I can’t remember the first poem of Michael’s I read. But I remember
reading it. I remember that tight feeling in my throat as I read, laughing
almost with the excitement; and at the end it made me cry. It might have
been “Not Knowing the Words,” in which his father mourns his
mother’s death: The last I saw of him alive, he pressed me to his coat. Or
it might have been “My Flu”: …I’m curled up, shivering, fighting to wake, Or
possibly “Needlework” (tattoos
commissioned for the 1999 Last Words Poetry Festival, Salisbury),
which goes like this:
i.
Whichever one it was, I was slain by the combination of his direct, clear, calm
voice, his dazzling technique, and the redemptive vision which makes his work
essentially, to me, Mozartian.
And that’s not even the only Donaghy tattoo poem; there’s another one
(“Liverpool”): …Like Tracy, who confessed she’d had hers done
Herein, come to think of it, lies part of the paradox that is Michael’s gift
(aside from his love of paradox, which is equally beguiling). His gorgeous
lyrical voice (and I do mean voice, not “voice.” Once you’ve ever heard
him read, you’ll never forget his intonations: check it out here)
speaks of the world we actually live in, with its tawdry or poisonous, or
trivial or embarrassing, realities. His work is full of humour - black of
course, but expressed in lush rhetorical tropes full of layered meaning.
“Black Ice and Rain” tells the story (Ancient Mariner-like) of a party guest
who strays into an out-of-control relationship complete with bad sex, religious
fetishism, and car crash: Lighting a meltdown of Paschal candles In
“Timing” a reminiscence about the narrator’s war horrors— Yes I know it’s not funny. A prisoner told me —is
suddenly revealed to be your most-feared cab driver (Michael had great anecdotes
about cab drivers); and the surreal tall-tale “Signifyin’ Monkey” (a
sneaky sestina) begins like this: Okay, I’ll tell it, but only if you buy lunch.
Like Mozart’s music, Michael’s poetry can switch emotional register with a
flicker, from line to line, pulling you with it through “mandarin” to
“earthy demotic” diction to a conclusion you hadn’t seen coming.
Religious imagery is everywhere in Michael’s work. Though he wasn’t a
religious man in any orthodox or identifiable sense, his belief in the
importance of even tiny things, his obsession with patterns (mnemonics, music,
dance steps, mechanicals, cultural traditions, poetic form), seem somehow almost
sacerdotal. Of course, these tendencies were amply furnished with the tasseled
clutter of a Catholic upbringing. This said, with his humane vision, wide
reading and rare logical beauty he is also a poet of the Enlightenment (and one
who can write about Curtis Mayfield).
“Okay,” you’re saying, “but the Enlightenment’s over—I
read that in the TLS—and I’m an atheist, so why is he important?”
Well. Importance, as we learn in “The Classics” (from
his “O’Ryan’s Belt” sequence), is
a small matter; it’s a small thing that gets big, and these poems get big.
Read one, read two, and they stay with you. The internal logic, the solid frames
within which they operate, the cool baroque vision, are unique.
Michael Donaghy’s influences reflect his amazingly wide frame of reference and
also the level of his engagement. Marvell, Donne and Herbert, with their elegant
logical and formal constructs, are there in poems like “The Present,”
“Machines,” and “Glass,” which is a quatrain version of a sestina—a
sort of tetrina: This is a cheapjack gift at the year’s end.
Browning and Coleridge are there with their shocking unreliable narrators in
rich, arid situations; the American “old formalists” Hecht, Wilbur, and
Merrill (whose Ouija-generated Changing
Light at Sandover Michael highlighted as another example of “negotiation
with a resistant medium”);
MacNeice; Bishop (“The knife there on the shelf—
/
it reeked of meaning, like
a crucifix”); Derek Mahon, whom he claimed always as one of the poets who gave
him a kind of “permission.” And of course the lush and concentrated Keats:
Michael would conversationally break into a perfect recitation of “Ode to
Melancholy.”
References to other poems often crop up in his work, and whole poems are
modelled on works by other poets. He has given at least one interview
on how “The Drop” was based structurally on Eliot’s “Journey of the
Magi,” which in turn contained at least one line which had been lifted from
Pound. (He also wrote a series of poems as if translated from the old Welsh;
although they have been mistaken for real translations, he said he was just
practicing the form.) And it is the opinion of this author that Patrick Kavanagh’s
“Epic"— I have lived in important places, times —was
the model for Michael's “The
Classics.” This
latter poem reproduces the internal structure of declarative statement (“I have lived…” /
”I remember it…”), moves on to the confrontation—and
here the Donaghy train echoes Kavanagh’s blue cast-steel—and
finishes with a flourish, even using the same caesura to create the
transformative rhetoric of the final line. The difference lies there, where
Donaghy takes the argument one step further, in the manner of Cavalcanti to
Dante. I remember it like it was last night,
In the current postmodern climate there is
always debate around the lyric "I" in poetry. At the same time the New
Formalists are largely in retreat from mid-century confessional excesses.
Michael, who sometimes did write autobiographically, distrusted it, and said no
one should assume that the word “I” meant that anything in a poem was based on
fact. "We are constantly deluding ourselves about our pasts,”
he told Magma (issue 2,
“Presiding Spirits,” see link above); There is a slight temptation to talk instead about the lyric “who?”—but if one reads Michael’s three collections (published in 2000 by Picador, UK, as two books: Dances Learned Last Night, incorporating Shibboleth and Errata, and Conjure) it becomes pretty clear that this is more smoke-and-mirrors. There may be access here to a level of identity anxiety usually only seen in Woody Allen, in the kid who realized in confession that it was a sin of arrogance to presume that one’s sins had been committed by one’s own self—in the kid “Smith” looks back on, whose signature at seven was unreadably ornate —and
while “the brother I never had” in “The Brother” is: thumbing cool oil on our mother’s forehead
Even Michael’s Sion ap Brydydd (d. 1360) in “Seven Poems From the Welsh,”
having been lent the fees to be educated as a medieval court bard, “held that
post for less than a year when he was dismissed for neglecting to repay the loan
and he spent his remaining years among the criminal element of Aberystwyth.”
It’s also worth noting that practically the only other information we’re
given on Sion ap Brydydd is that: ...recent
computer analysis of Y Hiraeth, his 30,000-word description of the interior of a
heron’s egg, has revealed two columns of slant rhyme weaving through the text
line by line in a perfect double helix pattern. [...]
How such a poem could have been written under such exacting formal
constraints is a puzzle. Why it was written is a positive enigma.
But! This mathematical truth (emotional precision) of Michael’s—the
opposite of the poetry as self-expression which fills so many workshops, schools
and little magazines—was
the reason why Michael was so special and, yes, important. He knew what he was
about. He was never willing to be aligned with any Movement or School. Asked
about the New Formalists (with whom surely he had a poetic if not a political
affinity) he would reply, “the old formalists never went away.” He
distrusted the manifesto, the treatise, the club—in
fact, everything but the poem and the response to it.
Writing “only three a year,” as he said, he was nevertheless a very busy
man. He taught four famous classes a week, undertook commissions, appeared
repeatedly on the BBC educational series Arrows
of Desire, gave generously of readings and interviews and appeared in poetry
festivals in the UK and the US.
His workshops were legendary (or in Epic fashion they soon will be)—they
were the starting-places for several successful UK poets, as well as some still
(we hope) to rise. He was unfaltering in his demonstration of how each poem
should be evaluated in terms of what it was trying to be—its
own truth—and
read as itself, not against a template of someone else’s Ideal Poem. This
meant that everyone left his classes encouraged and also braced by his
standards. By simply putting knowledge in front of people, he made it available
to those who could see it, and those who couldn’t went away happy and none the
wiser.
In a recent tribute to him in the Independent
on Sunday (October 3, 2004), many people said the same thing: he could
never say no. He was everywhere. He wrote blurbs, intros, critiques, chapters,
you name it, and now we’re incredibly lucky he did. Michael’s sudden death two months ago from a cerebral hemorrhage has shocked the whole poetry world; he was a colleague, mentor, or friend to everyone who knew him. He wished he’d been better published in the US, but his appearances at the West Chester Poetry Festival and other places have gathered a small, devoted following in his native country. Michael leaves his wife, Maddy, and eight-year-old son, Ruairi.
I’ll finish with a true story—emailed
in his usual way to everyone, some time last year. Michael writes: I was driving through Islington one night a few weeks ago when I saw a man kneeling on the pavement outside Get Stuffed, my favourite taxidermists. “Call an Ambulance” he said when I wound down the window. So I did. When I got out and approached him, though, I could smell the booze from ten feet away. Too late. I had to wait forever with him for the ambulance to turn up while he insulted me and spat at me and told me he was Brendan Behan's cousin! I know he wasn't just bullshitting me because I know Dominic Behan and this guy had all the details. And of course, he bore (excuse me) THE UNBEARABLE LIKENESS OF BEHAN. So it must be true.
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