Don Paterson, Queen's Medal
 

I just stumbled (belatedly) on the news that Don Paterson has won the Queen's Medal in Poetry for his recent book Rain. What I know of Paterson's work is sonnets and other forms--and I like it tremendously--so I wondered how much of the new book is formal.

I've been able to find the title poem online:

"Rain"

and it looks exciting and encouraging.

Just found another one: "Two Trees"

What else from the book is out there? Has anyone here read it? I see now that it apparently hasn't yet been released in the US. What about our UK contingent?

Coincidentally, I've just been re-reading Landing Light, and trying to persuade myself to like it more than I did first time - and failing. I like it less. In general, I find it hard to like the facile couplets he's so fond of. They make me wish I was reading Pope - which isn't an easy thing to make me want.

Still, he's better than his late chum, Michael Donaghy, who I really can't stand. And he wrote a beautiful essay about prosody in Poetry Review a while back. For me, he's like Zadie Smith - better at writing about his art than doing it.

Now those are intriguing reactions, Adam, especially as regards Donaghy. I'll have to hunt around and add links later, but I know there's stuff on these boards that expresses quite favorable opinions of him, particularly of his posthumous collected and his essays.

My own reaction to D. is mixed, and I've assumed the fault was mine and it marked me as a Reader of Very Little Brain--sometimes Donaghy is just difficult. But would you say more about which poems don't satisfy you and why?

And I mean either Paterson or Donaghy or both.

Yes, I have Rain. I am a big Paterson fan, as I said recently elsewhere in this forum prompting John W to remind me that he was just as sexy and had more hair. :)

I think a problem with getting famous and receiving awards (if such can be called "problem") is that the reader will often expect every poem to be a little masterpiece, one that will reach out from the page and touch him/her deeply. No book of poetry that can do that with every poem, alas.

I have Rain beside my sofa and reach for it now and then to read or re-read a poem at a time. My favorite (I think, at least so far) is Sky Song (after Robert Desnos): it is one of those poems that successfully seduce women. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Desnos

I think D.P. is a woman's poet. Ruth Padel says in one of her crit books that every time she used one of his poems in her column, she got lots of fan mail from women/girls asking for more by him. This was a pretty long time ago--he was younger then and writing the kind of poetry young men write and that young women fall for. I suspect he had more hair then too (not that I see any correlation between hair-lush poets and sexy poetry).

That said, many of the poems in Rain are acknowledgements to the poets that D.P. admires. I like that idea--standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before, esteeming one's peers.

Crossposted with M.C.

Yes, that sexiness thing - a bit of a mystery. The poem RP refers to is "Imperial" about deflowering a virgin. As a would-be fair-minded male, I find it hard to swallow the idea that a poem beginning thus -

Is it normal to get this wet? Baby, I'm frightened -
I covered her mouth with my own -

is sexy. Ditto the close, where the "flag of surrender" (a white sheet) is replaced by "the flag of Japan" (a bloodstain on the white sheet).

But then young women find DH Lawrence sexy. Not my middle-aged job to know why, I suspect.

Both Paterson and Donaghy are tricksy poets - very clever and inventive. The oddest thing for me, in relation to D's recent death, is the outpouring of grief for D not just as an artist but as a much-loved man. I find the personality expressed in his poetry thoroughly rebarbative. Sean O'Brien, a big big fan, calls him a poet of "good faith" - to me he's precisely the opposite. Compare our own outpouring for Margaret Griffiths - don't we think she is the real thing? I find her work much much better, and much more expressive of a delightful nature, than anything written by either of these blokes. Or O'Brien - a bit of a charlatan, I think. Certainly a glib over-producer.

That kind of poet really winds me up.

Ruth Padel, on the other hand - she's great, though her Darwin book was published too soon, I think. Maybe I just prefer poetry by women!

"Let us now praise women / with feet glass slippers wouldn't fit" CS

Ah, Adam, your comment is the sort of thing that turns me inside out and makes me enviously ask myself "why didn't you go on to London from Stockholm?" OK, I know the answers, but still..

Aren't they lucky to have you and aren't you lucky to have them!

"Baby, I'm frightened" is, I think, a very young poet's voice. Though much anthologized, I find the poem part and parcel of the romanticized "God's Gift to Women" perspective that young male writers/poets often have of themselves and (hopefully) grow out of. I admit that my appreciation of that poem was not immediate--I initially found it off-putting, and my current appreciation is not for the content but for the take it gives on the human psyche--or parts thereof. Or maybe it just reminds me of "Poets I Have Known". :eek: A fan has many blades.

Yes, knowing CS is great. But living in Bristol can feel as remote from London as Stockholm, especially in these Arctic-oscillation-induced snowy times. We've just cancelled next Sunday's meeting since yet more snow is promised.

I'll bet travelling from Uppsala to the capital is easy, even in this deep winter. We just don't have enough experience of the white stuff. Minus 15 degrees last night -- in the drizzle capital of England.

Adam, I am surprised, appalled even, at your comments on Donaghy. Four present or former moderators here, Gwynn, Murphy, Lake, and Evans-Bush, have published elegies for our esteemed friend, whose death is not recent, having occured 63 months ago. The fall of 2004 was an awful time for poetry, as Thom Gunn, Tony Hecht, Don Justice, Virginia Hamilton Adair, and Fred Morgan all died. The worst loss, though, was Mikey's because unlike the aforementioned, he did not die in the ripeness of his years but long before his time. I find nothing difficult or show-offish about Michael's work. Did you ever see him perform? It was amazing, all from memory, with impeccable timing and delivery.

FYI, the next Dark Horse will contain my essay in defense of Donaghy. I wonder if my case will change any minds.

De gustibus, Tim. I don't think his ability as a performer has any relevance to the quality of his writing. though it's true that ordinary poetry can seem exceptional when well performed. The point I'm making about my dislike of his writing is partly that it's so much a performance. There's much too much "aren't I clever!" for my taste. Certainly his memory was remarkable, and I envy that.

Overall, I suspect that his reputation will settle down, and the current tendency to hyperbole will look a bit embarrassing in a few years. Sean O'Brien and John Kinsella are putting him on a level with Browning - Browning!.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

Chris, I thank you for weighing in. Adam, I thank you for posting Paterson's poems. My, he is fine. I'm not ready to compare Mikey's poem for Ruairie with any poem by Don. Ask me in two hundred years.

I write poems for my nephews, because a son of my own is out of the question.

Chris, you’re defence of “old son” is ingenious, but leaves me just as convinced that the poem is a cold contrivance. It also leaves unaddressed the fact that the locution grates (at best) on British ears. Gregory may have a different view, but so far I have yet to find a fellow-countryman of mine who doesn’t feel that.

More significantly, you’re adding to the hagiographic tendency – do you really believe that MD possessed the power of prophecy? Maybe since the hyberboles do come thick and fast. Something quite unusual is happening to create this flood of hero-worship. For obvious reasons it didn’t occur when Ted Hughes or Philip Larkin died (though it’s pleasing to see Hughes being steadily rehabilitated as a man, not just as a major poet), or even after the death of George Mackay Brown, a more endearingly quirky character. All three were difficult, strange men, and didn’t excite the same personal devotion that Donaghy, to his credit, aroused in people. But it’s premature to put him on the same level as those three, and yet it seems impossible to make the case that he ever did anything wrong.

And as for the question of what three lines can do to undermine a poem – well, it seems to me that a single misplaced word can do that. Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” risks collapse by his ill-judged appeal to the dead of Treblinka and Pompeii, which diminishes an otherwise magnificent poem. In Donaghy’s case, it’s not just that in one poem he swerves away from seriousness to call in question his commitment to the foregoing narrative. This tendency to undercut, to wrong-foot the reader, is essential to his art, a signature feature. You either like it or you don’t, but it is hugely significant. In this he is thoroughly Post-modern, but I’m an unreconstructed Modernist, and I find the PoMo thing distasteful on the whole.

Maryann, the Paterson I don’t like is the one who places technique at the forefront, as if it mattered for its own sake. I don’t care for virtuosity per se, in literature or in music. It has to be servant, not master. Paterson recently ruffled a lot of feathers by announcing that as an editor, before he reads a submitted poem, he holds it at arm’s length and squints at it through half-closed eyes. He can tell by the mere shape whether it’s a good poem or not. Dear God! This has caused me difficulties in reading him ever since, not least where he indulges in a wacky form (or layout) for its own sake.

His couplets seem to trundle along like streetcars, and yes those irregularly-lined rhyming poems do have an Ogden Nash quality. Paul Muldoon can get away with them, but not Paterson.

He’s been doing a lot of translation lately, and his Rilke and Transtromer get a lot of praise, but I find them flat, and they take too many metrical and rhyming liberties for my taste. But I’m not well-enough versed in his work to go further than that.

I would just add that Donaghy's poems are not as difficult as some make them out to be. Rather, the poems themselves are something of a collective shibboleth. That is, some pronounce Donaghy better than others.

Nick

I shall pay closer attention to you, Adam, when you get a whole lot closer to writing as well as Paterson or Donaghy.

Whoa! That was a low blow!

I haven't read all the hero worship you mention; the only essay I've read is Tim's above, plus the occasional elegy or comment on the Sphere. & yes, I do think it at least plausible that he had a more intimate sense of his approaching death than we might easily credit. Not a full-blooded prophecy or a prediction to the hour, but a strong feeling that his time was limited, out of which that poem seems to have been written. I don't know, I never met the man, or heard him read, I'm just judging from the poem, which my knowledge of his early death renders the richer. Finally, you can make the case he made as many mistakes as you please, but those who disagree don't have to be persuaded, if we don't find the case persuasive.

That said, I think the best line quoted in this thread is Paterson's: See how the true gift never leaves the giver. I'm glad to be reminded of that.

Chris

Paterson's had a whack at Tranströmer? When? I was keen on Tr. a few years ago, and thought I'd dug up most of the English translations. He also did some Machado, didn't he?

This isn't premonitory. It is certainty. Michael knew he was not long for this world, and I knew it too. I clasped him to my chest and said goodbye.

Paterson doesn't really "translate". He uses (after XX) for a number of earlier poets (such as Machado) to indicate that their work has inspired his. At least that is the impression I have.

Every reasonable person knows his or her time is limited. It is a romantic illusion to ascribe premonition or presentiment, though it is encouraging for one's self-esteem to remember after the fact that one did indeed feel in his bones that X was going to die, and Y would be lost in a snowstorm and Z's house would burn down the very night it did.

But superstition thrives today just as it did several millennia ago. So much for homo sapiens sapiens.

Tim, your grief at the loss of your friend the artist deserves great sympathy, but it can’t dictate another person’s response to the art. As for whether or not a poet of my insignificance deserves to express an opinion on Michael Donaghy, well Sam Johnson had the answer to that. To a man who said we shouldn’t find fault with Milton because we couldn’t do anything as good ourselves, Johnson replied, “No sir, you may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table. It is not your trade to make tables.” However rickety my tables may be, I am allowed to find fault with another man’s, no matter how eminent.

David, I have no doubt that your essay is admirable. My problem is that that I’m feeling railroaded by the number of encomia that have come out since MD’s death and the appearance of the collected works. If I am told many more times why I must admire him, I’ll end up chewing the carpet. Donaghy is the one recent writer whose entire oeuvre I’ve read, some poems half a dozen times in the past few months. I’ve given him my best shot. Enough, enough.

Brian I don’t know where I’ve seen the Paterson “translations” – Poetry Review, I think, and maybe the London Review of Books. Janice is the oracle, all right.

And Janice, welcome back! How are you???

Well, that's the nub of it, isn't it? Labels and judgments aside, I think Adam's right that one of MD's "signature feature[s]" - is to engage in a sort of trickery. Of course, MD himself knew this, and set out to do it consciously. That his work is shot through with magicians and magic tricks (as well as jokes, another form of misdirection) is not accidental. Speaking of "signature features," see also 'Smith': "Every signature's a trick we learn to do consistently, like Queequeg's cross or Whistler's butterfly." Donaghy's work is in many ways about indirectness, about falseness - if that's what you'd like to call performance, artifice, wit. As you say, one likes it or one doesn’t. I appreciate your taking the time to lay out a dissenting view in what amounts to hostile territory. As one who finds the PoMo thing to be, well, an inescapable part of living life in the 21st century, I don’t share your distaste for MD, and actually find that it confirms what I’ve suspected – that he is a representative poet for our time.

The Paterson poem I think suffers in comparison. The self-conscious allusion to Dante, the overt sentimentality, the bizarre moment of machismo – ugh. The last line I think aims for a cheap shock and, sadly, succeeds. I find it all a bit maudlin, a bit too direct. I read Haunts as Chris does – in fact, precisely as he does, insofar as he’s described his reading – and think it operates much more subtly. Personal knowledge of MD’s early death almost inescapably adds a layer of resonance, though I feel confident that MD himself would cringe at such a biographical reading. I think his defenders, of whom I am one, do him a disservice by emphasizing his biography or personality – MD himself repeatedly stated that they had no real place in reading his work, which is, I think, impersonal in the best sense, much as MD designed it. Haunts of course reads much the same as a poem from any father to any son, or at least from a fictive father to his son. That being said, one need not impute the power of prophecy to say that MD “knew” he would die young, which is to say, he had a reasonable fear of it, given his medical history. Again, though, I emphasize that the poems simply don’t need this sort of information.

In any event, as I said before, thank you, Adam, for expressing a dissenting view. I feel sure that MD’s work can withstand criticism, and yours has been as articulate and cogent as one could hope.

Many thanks, John. Much appreciated. And that's a very fine analysis of the Paterson.

I should add that there are at least a dozen Donaghy poems, maybe even twenty, that I like very much. For a reader as hard to please as I am, that's a pretty good proportion.

Yes, Adam, a dozen poems is a pretty high hit rate, particularly considering that MD completed only three books. What I'm really waiting for is criticism that makes sense of the entirety of MD's ouvre, not just the dozen or so pieces that critics consistently return to, which tend to be (with the exception of Black Ice & Rain) shortish lyrics, often in traditional forms. I think it's worth noting that MD was a strange kind of formalist - he paid a ton of attention to form, and even to tradition, but his notion of both was capacious enough for his books to include, for instance, prose poetry. I know a number of ardent defenders of Donaghy who actually agree with you - that there's about a dozen good poems, and a lot of dross. I think his work is far more even than that suggests. His taste, I think, was broader than that of his critics, most of whom read him as a much more conventional traditionalist than he really was.

Ah, well. Thanks for the discussion. Life outside calls, so bye for now.

Hey, as I said, I didn't know him. I don't think I even encountered his poetry, or much of it, until people started posting it after news of his death. Anyway, MD's early death makes "Haunts" a better poem, so it figures in my reading.

By the way, I agree with Clay. It has been useful to me to look at the specific moments in Donaghy to which you object and to think about them. Plus, I've enjoyed it. So, thanks for the discussion, Adam.

Adam, I owe you an apology, and it is tendered.

I actually reviewed Rain for Agenda, though I'd rather none of you read it, as it is rickety and contains at least one horrible error ('always not' for 'not always'. Ouch). I think Rain is a very fine book, though I wish Paterson's poems didn't so frequently have a tendency to withdraw at the last minute. The title poem is a good example. It is beautifully written, starts with a punch or ten, but boils down to a vague and disappointing nothing ('And none of this, none of this, matters', or something like that). A little masterpiece pedestrianised. Some of the poems are masterful, though. 'The Swing', for example, or 'Two Trees'. And the Donaghy sequence is one of the most powerful 'new' poems I've read in a long time. He's less good when he tries to be too clever, or abstruse. I'm not sure what some of his poems mean and they don't make me want to work them out. The blank poem is a little too papery for my tastes. Actually, when you know who it is about even that wins you over.

I think God's Gift to Women was one of the first poetry books I bought at the time it came out. I was about sixteen. I've lapped up Paterson's books ever since, and always felt the same burning admiration tinged with irritation. Yes, he knows how to win prizes. A friend of mine was one of his MA students at St Andrews. Apparently Paterson is the most ruthlessly motivated and driven individual he's ever met. When I saw him give a reading a few months ago he was charming, but read very badly at about six decibels. A fairly severe cold certainly didn't help him. Still, he stuck it out and so did we.

As for the rhymes and metrical quirks and kinks: the only more famous poetical Dundonian is, of course, a certain William McGonagall. And I think he (er, Paterson) is a fine critic. I love the essay in his sonnet anthology, though I presume some here would disagree about his definition of what counts as a sonnet.

Rory

Sometimes, by sheer dumb luck and not knowing enough to be timid, I manage to ask a question that gets people flashing insights around in the wildest ways. I lucked out this time, and I have to express my gratitude.

But don't let this stop you!

Tim, thank you. I likewise mean no offence in my overstatements - I usually do a better job of separating the personal from the artistic, and will try to do so in future.

Rory, what you say about Don P is very enlightening. I might find it hard to resist reading your review in spite of your wishes!

Wowie! Well, I heard about this one on the grapevine & thought I'd poke my head in.

Adam, I think I detect a change in your tone from the beginning of the thread; I admit I was shocked at the personal insults - for example, the quoting of an unnamed person who had once done something with Donaghy and "found him thoroughly obnoxious!" This seems a bit snide and secondhand. For the record, though I also know exactly what you mean when you refer to the outpourings etc - to which my couple of essays probably count as contributions - for the record, Donaghy was eccentric, he was a strong personality - though not forceful in the same way as, say, O'Brien - he could be difficult, impossible, drunk, he could be clueless, he would cadge drinks, he was certainly a worry! But it is hard to imagine him being even remotely "obnoxious." He never got in anyone's face.

The love of tricks, illusions and trickery was emphatically not coldness or "PoMo" gameplaying. It comes from a fascination with the mind itself. He loved Borges and the Renaissance Memory Palace, and mnemonics, and little gadgets, and machines. That's why he wrote about them, and constructed his poems like them, and wrote about the nature of thought and knowing and memory and being. Paterson wrote a thing in the paper the other week saying MD has been "caricatured as some kind of charming modern metaphysical", which I think is also a wilful misreading. Metaphysics isn't about being "charming," it's about relating one kind of knowledge to - or through - another. Science and feelings. It isn't a caricature to aply the word to Donaghy; some of his poetry is specifically metaphysical; it's another kind of conjuring. DP was lamenting the cult of personality that's grown up, too, though over half his article was about it, so he was also perpetuating it. There is a definite probem with this posthumous reputation, just as there was - and I'm not making spurious biggings-up here! - with Keats'. The friends were too vociferous; there were spats and feuds; each of them sought to control the Keats he himself remembered. There's a fascinating book about it, Posthumous Keats, and it fills me with a kind of despair.

Now, I'm not saying anyone has to like the poetry. Like a few others here I feel the best of the work will stand. And trying to please everyone is the surest route to hell. But to dislike it properly would be much better - for the sake of the disliker! - than just saying it's difficult and tricksy and anyway he can't possibly have been as sweet as everyone says. Chris Childers has read "Haunts" absolutely accurately, and quite elegantly in fact. The tone is complicated. Donaghy understood the idiom all right. His touch is featherlight and he never lays on the explanation for free at the end.

John Hurchcraft's remark about readers having a narrower frame of reference than the poet is also spot on. Donaghy had a bigger frame of reference - he simply knew more - than anyone I've ever met, and I was brought up by Russian New York intellectuals. If he was clever, he was clever for himself. To impute to him some sort of shallow, showy-offy impulse would be completely wrong.

I also agree with John H's read of Waking With Russell. I can never see it without thinking: "But you're waking among BABIES!" Damn it.

Anyway, 12-20 poems in an oeuvre that size is impressive, so if that's your idea of hating, Adam, I'm content with it! And MD's clearly got to you, for you to put so much effort into this.

I involved my esteemed other in this conversation and he had a comment, btw: he said he's never understood what's supposed to be wrong with "coldness" in art. He said: "Look at Leonardo! Mozart! Michelangelo! Dante!" There is a certain detachment which the BEST art has; all the heat and bluster can tend to burn a work out. I think it's the detachment - another metaphysical trait - that gives Michael's work it's phenomenal grace. He's not cold. He's just not shoving our faces in his feelings.