Poetry Notebook (19 page)

By a mental mechanism that can only be guessed at, he saw the connection between the Earth turning and himself turning over in bed. With the second phrase, ‘our side feels
the cold’, guessing becomes entirely inadequate. Does he mean that our side of the bed is a simile for Europe torn by politics? Better for the reader to just enjoy the feeling of
disorientation – or rather, of being oriented toward everywhere, a sliding universality. After the war Auden wrote a masterpiece of a lyric that was all hits from start to finish: ‘The
Fall of Rome’. Since there isn’t a line in it that does not demand quotation, the poem is a cinch to learn. But few poems are packed as tight as that with memorable moments. Quite early
in
Endymion
we come across

The cadence is unforgettable, but there is nothing else like it for miles on either side. It’s a hit. One can imagine a critical work of great length which would consist
of nothing but hit moments extracted from poems from the beginning of time, with a paragraph attached to each quoted moment speculating on how it came into the poet’s mind. An entertaining
book, perhaps, and an enticing introduction to poetry: but as for the critical content, speculation is all that it would be. The truth is that Seamus Heaney had no clue where he got his picture of
the porpoises as the flywheels of the tide: it was just something he could always do and the other boys couldn’t.

•

Looking back through these pages, I catch myself in a posture about the ‘Ode on Melancholy’. Like any other work of literature, it is my favourite only when I am
reading it. One of the characteristics of a work of art is to drive all the other works of art temporarily out of your head. If comparisons come flooding in, it means that the work’s air of
authority is a sham. No such fears with the ‘Ode on Melancholy’, which, at the time I first went mad about it, I could recite from memory – well, almost. In the matter of
memorization, length sets severe limits. Hence the absurdity in the final scene of the movie Truffaut made out of Ray Bradbury’s supposedly prophetic dystopian novel
Fahrenheit 451.
People walk around in the forest reciting
Anna Karenina
, etc. A nice idea, but wishful thinking, even when applied to poems. In the old Soviet Union, where, for obvious reasons, there was a
great emphasis on memorizing contemporary poems, the manuscript still counted. People remembered things only until they could get them safely written down.

When Don Paterson asked me to write an introductory essay for Picador’s projected collection of Michael Donaghy’s critical writing, I saw immediately how such a
piece might fit into a Poetry Notebook. So far I had several times touched upon the connection between poetry and the criticism of poetry, but I had not pursued the matter. When talking about
Donaghy, the subject was unavoidable. He had put the adult part of his short lifetime into resolving just those two forces: to create, and to understand. His career also raised the topic of the
relationship, in modern times, between Britain and America, as it was acted out in the literary haunts of London. Questions of national origin need not necessarily play a crucial part in the
appreciation of a poem, but they often play a part in the history of how poetry gets written. Donaghy never lost his American voice, but there was an element in his critical prose that might not
have been expected: definitely not from Deadwood, he was a deep believer in the formal element. Even when they sounded casual, his poems were dedicated to that conviction. His work was an example
of the daunting thoroughness by which Americans, when they put their minds to it, can be better at making our stuff than we are, starting with moleskin trousers and elastic-sided boots. Daunted
though we might be, however, we need to remember that this branch of American cultural imperialism is no more threatening than a dream come true. We wanted a world of the arts, and we got it.
Donaghy enjoyed the cultural paradoxes that came with international territory. Even beyond his untimely death, his every paragraph is alive with delight, as critical prose ought to be.

First published as the introduction to Michael Donaghy,
The Shape of the Dance,
2009

Michael Donaghy’s death at fifty was a cruel blow but he had already done enough as a writer of poetry to establish himself firmly among recent poets who matter. His
achievement as a writer about poetry, however, is still in the process of being assessed and absorbed. The first and best thing to say about his critical writing, I think, is that it was necessary,
even when that fact was not yet generally realized. If we can see now why his views on poetry were so vital, it is because they help us to recognize what was missing. Nobody else in his generation
had such a generous yet discriminating scope. It is still the kind of scope we need, but now we have his example. He called true poetry ‘the alchemical pay-off’, and his criticism shows
how prose can be that too.

Born only two years before Allen Ginsberg’s
Howl
was published in 1956, Donaghy grew up as an Irish Catholic in New York at a time when American poetry was supposedly breaking its
last bonds with the transatlantic formal tradition. He was never automatically contemptuous of the results that accrued to this final freedom. He just doubted its validity as an historical
movement. Whether by instinct or from his training as a musician – questions of underlying psychology preoccupied him all his short life – he was suspicious of the idea that freedom
from all restriction could yield perfect creative liberty. (He always insisted that even
Howl
was not the Whitmanesque ‘barbaric yawp’ that Ginsberg claimed, but a carefully
worked and reworked artefact.) At Chicago University, where Donaghy edited the
Chicago Review
and founded his music ensemble, he was already grappling with the critical questions that arose
from a too confident assertion of American separateness.

In pursuit of his future wife, and perhaps also in pursuit of a more nuanced context in which to work, he moved to London in 1985, and steadily established himself as an imported expert who knew
more than the locals. Actually this, too, was an American tradition that went back as far as Henry James, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, not to mention the Eighth Air Force during the Second World
War, but his presence was refreshingly new to a whole generation of young British poets who came to his classes. The impact of his own collections of poetry might have been enough to pull them in,
but his powers as a mentor kept them glued to their chairs. There was a paradox in that. Donaghy never ceased to warn against the menace of the ‘creative writing’ industry on either
side of the Atlantic: hundreds of creative writing teachers with nothing useful to say, thousands of creative writing students publishing first collections that would go nowhere.

But his British students knew that they had found a teacher who transcended his own suspicions. At least a dozen gifted young poets benefited from his combination of a broad sympathy and a tight
focus on language: if they are now a school without a name, it was because he taught them the merits of unbelonging. He had an even wider field of influence, however, through the pieces he wrote
for such outlets as
Poetry Review
. Many of these pieces, undertaken as journeywork at the time but always lavished with the wealth of his knowledge and the best of his judgement, are
collected in this book, and it is remarkable how they coalesce into the most articulate possible expression of a unified critical vision. He was a crucially important reviewer, and my chief concern
here is to say why.

When reviewing another poet, Donaghy relied first and foremost on his ear for loose language. Devoid, on paper at least, of malice or professional jealousy, he could nevertheless quote a dud
line with piercing effect. Robert Bly thought he was being profound when he wrote: ‘There’s a restless gloom in my mind.’ Donaghy could tell that whatever was happening to
Bly’s mind at that moment, it wasn’t profundity. But he made such judgements a starting point, not a death sentence. What had the same poet written that was better? Donaghy could quote
that, too. He was always searching for the language that had reached a satisfactory compression and power of suggestion. (It didn’t have to come from ‘the tradition’, or even from
a poem: he was a close listener to song lyrics, playground rhymes, and street slang.) When he found it in a poem, he had his principles to help him explain it.

To his chief principle he gave the name ‘negotiation’. A sufficiently tense diction, the alchemical pay-off, was, Donaghy argued, most likely to be obtained from a contest between
what the poet aimed to say and the form in which he had chosen to say it. If the poet tied the creative process down to his initial commitment, with no formal pressure to force him to the
unexpected, there was no contest; and a contest there had to be, no matter how loose the form. Always a great quoter, Donaghy, on this point, quoted Proust to telling effect: ‘The tyranny of
rhyme forces the poet to the discovery of his finest lines.’ The tyranny didn’t always have to be of rhyme, but there had to be some tyranny somewhere. Negotiation was Donaghy’s
touchstone concept, and lack of negotiation was the reason why he thought an informal poem was even more likely to slide into banality than a formal one. When he found intensity within an
apparently formless work, it was because the author had imposed some kind of discipline upon himself, locally if not in general. He found a good example in C. K. Williams, whose ten-beat loose
lines had, in Donaghy’s opinion, an underlying formal drive, proving that something concrete had been negotiated even when the poem steered towards abstraction. This capacity to find
practical merit even in what he was theoretically against was a precious virtue.

It was matched by an equal capacity to find the limitations even in what he was theoretically for. John Updike’s poetry was as formally virtuose as might be wished, but Donaghy thought
that too much of it was too much so. There were too many poems that ‘almost made it before the skill took over’. The implication was that a display of skill should not be an end in
itself, even though to eschew skill altogether was a bad way of avoiding the danger.

In this way, Donaghy left a door open so that he could get back to the informal spontaneity of American modernism after William Carlos Williams and praise it where praise was due. His openness
to the possible strength of the informal poem lent him the authority to say that the rewards from a formal poem could be greater, just as long as they had been properly negotiated. But he was
always certain that the informal poem had far more dangerous ways of going rotten than the formal one. When the formal tradition decayed, the result was, at worst, sclerosis: a malady whose chief
symptom he neatly summed up as ‘rhyming in your sleep’. But the informal tradition in decay was an infinitely adaptable virus which would always try to pass itself off as the next
development of the avant-garde. Donaghy the mighty quoter liked to revisit his favourite quotations, and the one that he revisited most often was from Auden. ‘Everything changes but the avant
garde.’ But the witticism isn’t the whole truth. The avant-garde does change, in its scope: it continually increases its territorial claims. Logically it should have run out of steam
when the ne plus ultra stood revealed as the reductio ad absurdum sometime during the reign of Dada, but here we are, almost a hundred years later, and there are still poems exploding all over a
full page in the
London Review of Books
like fine shrapnel, just as if Apollinaire had never done anything similar.

Donaghy, not very neatly for once, referred to such abjectly posturing stuff as L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry. He was borrowing the title of the busy movement’s home-base magazine, but he might
have done better just to call it poppycock. Large-heartedly, he found enough time for this tirelessly self-propagating fad in which to decide that it added up to nothing. (His rejections were
seldom immediate, but they were always decisive when they came.) Donaghy’s British acolytes were not encouraged to follow the example of those established poets, often well protected within
the academy, whose poetry is beyond criticism because it is about nothing except language. Donaghy wanted his young hopefuls to write negotiated poems, which are never just about language even when
they say they are. Some of his modern models were British, or at any rate Irish: he said he didn’t mind being asked to talk about ‘Auden & Co’ as long as it was understood
that the ‘Co’ meant MacNeice. There was a whole teaching programme hidden in that one remark, because it will always be true that a neophyte stands to learn more from MacNeice than from
Auden: it is useful, if frustrating, to try copying MacNeice’s strictness, but it is fatal to try copying Auden’s apparent nonchalance.

But for his British students and readers, Donaghy’s most provocative models for the accomplished poem were Americans. His range of examples drew from the two great lines of achievement
leading on from Whitman and Emily Dickinson but he lent no credence to schools, only to the intensity of the individual talent. In one of his reviews, he ascribed to Richard Wilbur ‘the most
flawless command of musical phrase of any American poet’. It’s a mark of the consistent authority of Donaghy’s critical prose that the confidence of such a judgement sounds
precise, instead of just like a puff on a jacket. In the quarter of a century before Donaghy became active as a reviewer, the outstanding critical voice in London had been Ian Hamilton. Nobody
wrote a better argument than Hamilton, but not even once did he say something like that about Wilbur, or indeed about anybody. Hamilton was strongest when he found weakness. Donaghy, in so many
ways the heir to Hamilton’s seals of office, was no more forgiving to lax expression, but far less inhibited about communicating enjoyment, instead of just leaving it to be inferred.