Wordshop Revisited

Mike enjoyed a certain conspiratorial manner when he  showed me poems. ‘What do you think of this?’, he asked me in a hushed private tone. I was amazed and charmed by the poem’s conversational, vernacular diction and its sardonic wit. It also harked back to an era of excess and dissolution that Mike and I were more than familiar with; we were born in the same year, although Mike was older – a fact I never tired of reminding him. I think we both knew either of us could  have been Green. As it was, we were each lucky enough to go on to get know August – a kindred spirit and a wonderful poet. 

Green sees things in waves by August Kleinzahler

Green first thing each day sees waves—

the chair, armoire, overhead fixtures, you name it,

waves—which, you might say, things really are,

but Green just lies there awhile breathing

long slow breaths, in and out, through his mouth

like he was maybe seasick, until in an hour or so

the waves simmer down and then the trails and colors

off of things, that all quiets down as well and Green

starts to think of washing up, breakfast even

with everything still moving around, colors, trails,

and sounds, from the street and plumbing next door,

vibrating—of course you might say that’s what

sound really is, after all, vibrations—but Green,

he’s not thinking physics at this stage, nuh-uh,

our boy’s only trying to get himself out of bed,

get a grip, but sometimes, and this is the kicker,

another party, shall we say, is in the room

with Green, and Green knows this other party

and they do not get along, which understates it

quite a bit, quite a bit, and Green knows

that this other cat is an hallucination, right,

but these two have a routine that goes way back

and Green starts hollering, throwing stuff

until he’s all shook up, whole day gone to hell,

bummer . . .

                         Anyhow, the docs are having a look,

see if they can’t dream up a cocktail,

but seems our boy ate quite a pile of acid one time,

clinical, wow, enough juice for half a block—

go go go, little Greenie—blew the wiring out

from behind his headlights and now, no matter what,

can’t find the knob to turn off the show.

Michael sat at the head of the table with the faintest hint of laughter curling the sides of his mouth. He had recently taken half the reins as co-editor of the poetry section of the Chicago Review.

At 18, the youngest in the group, I was making this pitch for a poem featuring a woman on a boat in a brown tissue-paper suit.

“What is it you like about this poem?” The tone from Pat, Michael’s co-editor, was hardly matter-of-fact.

I had no coherent response.

“I can see the brown tissue paper,” she said. “What about the rest?”

Michael’s expression surrendered to impish.

The summer of 1982, almost everyone else on the poetry staff had left the University of Chicago campus. That left Michael, Pat and myself to shuffle through the manuscripts that fell literally over the transom in a basement space in Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece Robie House. We shared the cluttered room with an atomic energy research group. The hands of a clock on the wall were stuck minutes away from nuclear Armageddon.

On a bright summer night, Michael walked me the several blocks from Robie House to my sublet on Blackstone Avenue. I invited him in and offered him a plate of Vanilla wafers with a glass of milk.

“You’re an important member of the staff,” he said. “You have a good sense of language.”

I wanted to fall on my knees and perform some kind of Greek-style reverential rite with an incense burner. I refrained.

By chance I caught Michael on flute with his Irish band in the Daley Plaza downtown, a venue the city dubbed “Dancing under the Picasso.” Live bands played at noon, from classic Swing to all kinds of world music, a phrase not yet in popular use.

We office workers abandoned paper-bag lunches and kicked up our heels. As a summer secretary at the legal firm Sidley & Austin, I never missed “Dancing under the Picasso.”

I tapped my feet wildly to every song from the Irish bands, responding with equal enthusiasm to each group, including the guys that offered up something akin to a cover of the 80s hit “Come on Aileen.”

Michael waltzed over to chat. “We don’t actually consider this Irish music,” he said, the impish expression in full bloom.

“You don’t?” I pondered the contrast.

Rhythm, language, taste, refinement, origins, authenticity—poetry. I had a lot to learn. Good thing Michael co-piloted the Chicago Review poetry section that year. 42 years later, I’m still grateful.

It’s worth noting that Donald Justice was only forty-one in 1966 when this poem was published.  It speaks to me from a different generation, of a serious resignation to ageing, with expectations of maturity, responsibility and well-polished shoes.

Forty seems to me now to be joyfully and absurdly young but at my first reading of the poem, at City University in the 1990s I remember that I found it deeply unsettling.  I had recently passed that birthday milestone and I was asking myself the most brutal of questions: Am I old? It was difficult to concentrate on critical appreciation when my own sub-text was so fraught.  Eventually the sheer quality of the poem, juxtaposed with Michael’s reading, his beaming smile and forever-young persona, proved so engaging that I pulled through.

Michael greatly admired this poem for its craftsmanship. It is sparely and concisely written, with a masterly use of concrete imagery. It clearly demonstrates one of Michael’s key tenets: to show, not tell. There is no direct mention of age or the passing of time.  Instead, the poem works on images of closing doors, descending staircases and mirrors. Justice uses the image of a bathroom mirror, to reflect across generations, a device that Michael used himself, conjuring his own father in Caliban’s Books and later on, his son in Haunts.

This is probably the main lesson I learned from Michael: the power of a well-chosen image, not as a static prop but as something mutable and open to different interpretation.  A successful image is alive, sometimes illusory, often morphing into something else, “two profiles in silhouette, or else a chalice, depending how you look”.

As a teacher Michael was always encouraging and supportive but I remember the first time I wrote a poem using effective imagery … his appreciation at my rite of passage. After that I had an idea of what I was aiming for. It was something like magic!

Michael was incredibly serious about poetry and writing but alongside that, he had a tremendous spirit of playfulness. I am smiling now as I remember something I saw him do on stage, at least twice.  He would reach into his pocket and suddenly discover an exotic feather, like one from a feather boa or a fin-de-siècle Parisian bordello. He then addressed the audience with a quizzical look, raising the question of how it got there. The perfect mix of image, innuendo and delight!

It amuses me that after a longish life, I can only recall two jokes and they were both from Michael, when he entertained us after class in The Bull.  It’s the way he told ‘em!

Men at Forty by Donald Justice

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices trying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

In 2000, I signed up for Michael’s Chelsea-based poetry class. The first of three years I spent in his classes. After years of half-finished drafts and ideas, I had decided to knuckle down and take ‘this poetry thing’ more ‘seriously’. I knew next to nothing about Michael when I signed up — I mainly liked the time, the place, and the price. What a stroke of luck that I took the plunge; my life and writing would be much poorer if I hadn’t.

The first session, Michael blew in late and spent a few minutes grappling, Jacques Tati-like, with the overhead projector. I think we looked at a Paul Muldoon poem, ‘Cuba’ probably. First upside down, and then the right way up but inverted, and then upside down again but the right way around, and so on. The performance poetry of the projector, so familiar to all of us who taught and were taught at a certain stage of technological advancement.

After we had considered and discussed the poem, he went around the class taking the register and asking about our current poetic enthusiasms. I saw him draw a little map on a sheet of A4 of our seats and our names. I’ve done this in all the classes I’ve taught since.

The first time I heard Michael recite was the second class in, the night after he’d won the Forward Prize for Conjure. We were keen to celebrate and pleaded for him to read us something from the book. I didn’t know that he performed from memory and I didn’t know the poem, as I had only just bought Dances Learned Last Night. The next few minutes were mesmerising. He took off his coat and began:

What did they call that ball in Citizen Kane?
That crystal blizzardball forecasting his past?
Surely I know the name? Your mum’s souvenir
of Blackpool, underwater, in winter –

Sometimes it’s embarrassing to sit in the presence of a poet reciting from memory. It can be uncomfortable, too intimate — you’re afraid of them slipping off the tightrope or dissolving the very fabric of art like those self-deleting sutures. But this performance was agile, absorbing, nuanced, and alive to the sentience of each word and syllable. It pushed many buttons for me, including cinema, Blackpool, symbolic objects, the eternal dramatis personae of family. And the poem is full of puns, and shifts of gear, and knowing disingenuousness: all of which I love to see in poetry:

Catch! This marvellous drop, like its own tear,
has leaked for years. The tiny Ferris wheel has surfaced
in an oval bubble where it never snows
and little by little, all is forgotten. Shhh!

I often think of that oval bubble: a safe haven; a terrifying trap; a sanctuary; an asphyxiation; a transparent nutshell to be bounded in, like a king of infinite space; a poem; a classroom; the held gaze of a mentor, a master; a last refuge; the place where they’ll eventually find your body; the caul you must claw through for everything to begin.

This wonderful poem has stayed with me. By the way, there’s an excellent analysis of it in Don Paterson’s Smith, if you want more rigour, and less memoir. Years later, a few years after Michael’s sudden, shocking death, I wrote a poem for my first book called ‘Gyroscope’ which owes a lot to ‘Our Life Stories’:

From Blackpool, with a miniature Tower

from which it leaned at laughable angle

with the plausibility of angels

Morris dancing on the point of a pin.

I’m sorry I was never able to hand Michael a copy of my first book. Many of his students and friends feel this way. He would have been delighted for us. He would have set us straight over a few things. In 2015 I had to memorise an hour of my own poetry for a show called Sunspots. Michael was my inspiration. I’m so glad that he helped me to take this whole poetry thing more seriously and yet, vitally, more jovially and playfully.

Our life stories by Michael Donaghy

What did they call that ball in Citizen Kane?
That crystal blizzardball forecasting his past?
Surely I know the name? Your mum’s souvenir
of Blackpool, underwater, in winter –
say we dropped it. What would we say we broke?
And see what it says when you turn it over…

I dreamt the little Christmas dome I owned
Slipped my soapy fingers and exploded.
Baby Jesus and the Virgin Mother
twitching on the Lino like dying guppies.
Let’s shake this up and change the weather.

Catch! This marvellous drop, like its own tear,
has leaked for years. The tiny Ferris wheel has surfaced
in an oval bubble where it never snows
and little by little, all is forgotten. Shhh!
Let’s hold the sad toy storms in which we’re held,
let’s hold them gingerly above the bed,
bubbles gulping contentedly, as we rock them to sleep,
flurries aswim by our gentle skill,
their names on the tips of our tongues.

I met Michael Donaghy in the early autumn of 1998. I had been in London for a year by that point. I had come to the capital with impossibly large hope – and far too much arrogance. The reality was a brutal education. I worked my lowly role in the Civil Service, the point of which eludes me to this day and the salary for which inhibited the prospect of a spacious house share and carefree evenings socialising in the cool places I had once imagined for myself. My first Donaghy class coincided with one of the last evenings of my temporary stay with a friend before I moved into my second home in London: a bedsitter in Streatham, where I would live for two bitterly cold winters and oppressive summers, nicknaming my electricity meter ‘The Beast’. Proud, I told everyone I lived in a studio and invited no one to visit.

Being poor and directionless, I decided that bohemianism was the only way forward. Smart decision – only decision. Adult education classes were relatively cheap, amounting to around a tenner per class across a term. As punts go, possible transformation merited the price of living on baked beans and Findus microwaveable lasagne for 10 weeks. I would like to redact the past and shape it to some sort of intent, but the truth is that I had never intended to study poetry and I had never even heard of Michael when I booked his class at Birkbeck. I had, instead, wanted to learn to write fiction, but the administrator on the other end of the phone in the busy office informed me that the course was already full. There was, however, one place – one place! – left on a poetry course that she – and I could tell she was smiling against the receiver – could assure me was wonderful: every student on it talked about the tutor – Michael Donaghy – with rapture. I decided I would give it a try, not least because the name, the name I had never heard of, sent something through my body. What I mean: those apparently ordinary times in life when, inexplicably, you know, actually in the moment, that you are entering something seismic, a shift change in everything. Call it fate-playing or just one of those things, but I owe that woman a great deal.            

Michael ran his classroom in the beautiful, old-fashioned, most effective way possible: one hour given over to the consideration of a sublime poem (well, mostly – sometimes he produced something for us to quibble with, but…) by a leading contemporary poet or a poet of the tradition; one hour to the workshopping relay, as we all hoped (jockeyed?) to impress him with our scribblings and prayed that the time wouldn’t be up before he called on us. Of course, that second hour was so important to me. I wanted, needed the acknowledgement. Within weeks of his class, I had decided that I would be a poet. And, then, I longed for meaning. The sense that I hadn’t thrown away my wild chance – a university education, which had been denied to my parents – for nothing. But, and especially in retrospect, that first hour was something else again: a bit like being winched up in a crane, high above a magical city: a panorama of the beauty, heartbreak, intelligence, and achievement of the world. Elevating and edifying. To those who never experienced it, this will seem like so much hyperbole; those to whom it happened nod, with wonder and sadness. 

People who were taught by Michael or enjoyed his performances always talk about his readings. He had a voice that I might term ‘mellifluous’, despite knowing full well how Michael would, mentally, draw a line through the word. Better to say, then, that his was a voice forged in Catholicism (the auditor in the confessional box, but who is priest and who is penitent?), the lived experience of the Irish diaspora, a hard-knock youth, and the griefs he held close behind the puckish smile. And, then, Michael had that special gift: when he read, he was reading only to you and you were the only person who mattered. That same quality perhaps accounts for the fact that everybody believed themselves to be his best friend. So it was that when he declaimed the greats to you, you could have been fooled into thinking that the poet had written the poem quite intentionally for you – quite particularly you and at this precise point in your life – to hear it, with Michael as some sort of spiritualist vessel for the message. The purpose of the exercise, of course, was to school students in taste and ambition and the sleight-of-hand tricks of the masters: the emulation principle. You have to experience the best to stand a chance of coming into even the remotest vicinity of passable. But there was something about Michael’s voice that often brought something much more – dare I say it? – existential into play.

Michael was no helicopter poetry-parent, though at times our efforts – and our indignation at feeling gravely misunderstood when we presented the latest in a series of sestinas to a politely appalled audience of our peers – must have sorely tested him towards intervention. One evening, he brought Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Writer’ to the class. The poem is, on the surface, about writing, and well, it is that, but of course it is really about the simple, uncompromising truths of good parenting, self-actualisation, and liberty. The poem moved me deeply. I can remember the lump in my throat when he spoke the image of the ‘dazed starling’, desperately trying to escape, as if it were yesterday. Yes, I felt I was that starling. Humped and bloody. As the poem drew to its conclusion – its lesson on the importance of difficulty and the necessary pain in freedom and becoming, about how the most loving parent can’t and shouldn’t help you in that particular work – my eyes met his or, at least, I tell myself they did, with meaning. Michael lingered on the ‘but harder’. His crazy knack again – the voice that sees you. How I miss it, even as it lives in my head.

I am yet to clear the sill of the world – ha! – but I did, eventually, become a published poet, and I escaped the tiny room – my bedsitter – where I once punched out my woeful attempts at poems on a second-hand typewriter my grandmother had bought for me at a car-boot sale. Dreams do somehow, sometimes come true, in their way. Better still, the dreams you would never have entertained can become your life. Poetry! By the end of the spring term of 1999 at Birkbeck, Michael encouraged me and some other students to join his City University Advanced class. Excited at the prospect of further transformation and entirely flattered, I joined and, in the process, met Andrew, who would become my husband (after we finally finished sparring). Our beloved and brilliant daughter, Eleanor, was born exactly two weeks after Michael left us.

When Michael knew me, I was a girl – green, pretty unpromising, and unruly. All the same, he saw something in me, although, looking back, what exactly that was is beyond me. Now I am a 51-year-old woman – older than Michael was when he died. Incongruity. Impossible.

I think of him every day of my life, and praise.      

The Writer by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back, 
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten.  I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.
 

London, City University, early 1990s, Monday night. Michael rushes in — he always rushed in, as if late, or in a hurry, just stopping by— throws off his old tweed coat and swings a battered black briefcase onto a table.

When Maddy asked us to come up with a poem Michael had brought to class, from which we’d maybe learned something, I thought immediately of that briefcase and, as I remembered it, the objects it held. Maddy went hunting for it in the loft. I really didn’t think she’d find anything — who’d hold onto a bunch of random useless objects, never mind a knackered old briefcase, from over 20 years ago? Amazingly, she did — not the case, but the things — and sent me this photo. Straightaway I was back in that classroom, pulling out an old ticket stub, hearing Michael talk about the power of ‘an object you can hold in the palm of your hand’.

Other former students I sent the photo to were struck too: ‘it knocked me for six’, it was ‘a massive start of recognition, like a lightning bolt’.

Things held a real potency for Michael. An object in a poem was more than a symbol – it was, first and foremost, something you held in your hand, an object that might possess a kind of magic if only you, the poet, could become — for the duration of the poem – magician, transform this thing into something alive and ‘reeking with meaning’ – a line he’d often quote from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Crusoe in England’.

I look at the objects in the photo now and notice how many of them have the potential to ‘reek’ of Michael’s own particular search for meaning: a tarot card, a hand-cranked musical box, a wristwatch, a snowglobe … Just invoking these things, I can hear him: ‘Hair oil, boiled sweets, chalk dust, squid’s ink …/Bear with me.  I’m trying to conjure my father’ (‘Caliban’s Books’, Conjure, Picador 2000).

In Paul Farley’s poem ‘Night Class’ he has the briefcase ‘producing sandpipers, egg timers, black silk vests’ — not the real things, of course, but the poems in which these things featured so prominently.  He remembers Michael ‘fishing out photocopies of Bishop or MacNiece or Harrison or whoever. It was often the first time I’d ever seen any of those poems. I thought the answers to the mysteries of poetry were stored in that briefcase.’

Night Class by Paul Farley
 
It’s strange going back
the corridors still shiny and mopped
to a smell and institutional squeak
 
not known to be conducive to poetry.
I can never find the room, and retrace
my steps. They’re starting without me,
 
the teacher opening a briefcase
and producing sandpipers, egg timers,
black silk vests, even a jaguar …
 
And I could so easily have missed it,
the janitor stacking chairs, the teacher
dead going on twenty years.

In Paul’s memory, then, the briefcase held poems, in mine it contained things, and in Paul’s poem the alchemy happens: the case contains the poems that contain the things.  But in the end, as Michael might’ve said, the poem is the thing, the form in which — through which — the magic happens. Right from the start, from the first poem in his first book, Michael was asking us (or rather, his ‘Dearest’) to compare ‘a harpsichord pavane by Purcell/And the racer’s twelve-speed bike’ — two unlikely things from which he conjures a singular love poem of extraordinary truth and beauty.

So we learned from things, from things in poems, from poems. Poems would, in fact, teach us all we needed to know. That was something else I learned from Michael — that the poem is the best teacher.

‘Night Class’ captures the sense we had of Michael pulling things out of a hat. ‘My people were magicians’, the speaker says in ‘The Excuse’, the opening poem of Conjure, acknowledging an uncle’s trick of running a ‘wire beneath the table to/A doorbell’. And in his essay Wallflowers he talks about Tony Harrison performing ‘a kind of magic trick, by sleight of hand’, in his poem ‘Timer’, before inviting us to ‘watch another magician’, Roger Mitchell, at work in his poem ‘The White Cup’. In fact that section (4) of his essay is called When I snap my fingers you will open your eyes… poem as spell, poet as hypnotist or conjurer.

Conjure is, as its title suggests, full of tricks and the illusions he liked to break almost as much as create.  And it’s this third collection that comes to mind while thinking about all this, maybe because of those objects that’ve been lying for so many years up there in that attic, boxed up, forgotten, until now — and here they are again, being photographed, written about, remembered. As he is, by us, in this 20th year since he died. As he’s always there, speaking, whenever we read his poems. 

But what about the briefcase which held the objects? Maddy couldn’t find it. I asked others what they remembered of it — turns out I’ve remembered it all wrong.

Róisín Tierney recalls ‘a red velvet bag with a drawstring and we each had to dip in a hand and take something out. Then ask ourselves questions: what does it look like, what does it feel like, what does it smell like. If it had a voice what would it sound like/what would it say? I seem to remember there was a feather in there, that led on to a whole discussion about your heart being weighed against a feather in the Egyptian book of the dead …’

June Lausch pulled out some Fool’s Gold (also known as iron pyrite) in a little pouch, which inspired her to write a poem about King Midas and a dog-training episode … 

Katy Evans-Bush remembers a doorknob (see the photo!) and being flummoxed by the exercise at the time but, a week after Michael died, she went to visit him in the funeral home, an experience which led to her poem, ‘The Brass Doorknob’, from her first collection Me and the Dead.

The Brass Doorknob by Katie Evans-Bush
 
When (‘alas!’) I held it to the light, and you
asked what I saw, I couldn’t tell. Nobody knew.
 
I can’t help thinking as you meet my hand
of all I’ve put my palm against and not dared ⎯
 
and of all the rooms behind them that I never tried
⎯ the lives unlived and, even more, the deaths un-died.
 
You give a shock. So still and cool you are.
 
But what of those I’ve ventured? (Every door
once opened shows the future ⎯ or the past
the present is the minute the threshold’s crossed.)
 
The light behind me’s on you like a scar.
The scar is like an Alice band, or star
 
or galaxy to light your yellow face
with some cold light, some sickle coup-de-grace
 
reflecting what I hadn’t seen. It is
what I don’t know if you don’t know the words.
 
This yellowness, this silentness ⎯ they lie
across your mystery ⎯ our mystery ⎯ on my
 
familiar hand, placed on this ordinary door
that is your message, word and messenger.

I can’t hold these things — the feather, the Fool’s Gold, the doorknob — in my hand but they’re there now in my mind. ‘Thinking about the past […] through things is always about poetic re-creation. We acknowledge the limits of what we can know with certainty, and must then try to find a different kind of knowing.’ (Neil MacGregor, introduction A History of the World in 100 objects).

So I see Michael, standing in that strip-lit classroom, holding an imaginary skull in his hand, intoning like a kind of third-rate Hamlet, Alas, Poor Yorick … In performances such as these he led us to intimate the mystery inherent in things and how, through our close attention, they might act as a kind of portal to the metaphysical or, as suggests Coleridge — a poet and thinker Michael hugely admired — ‘translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Lay Sermons).

But the hourglass, where’s the hourglass? We all remember the hourglass. That too, it appears, is lost, but you can find it there in Tony Harrison’s ‘Timer’. 

Paul still catches himself talking to his students about ‘an object you can hold in the palm of your hand…’ And I’ll often invoke that old court jester’s skull, though I can’t hope to match the delivery. How did Michael manage to make a moment in that late sad scene so funny? Which makes me think about how he could impart some invaluable point about poetry without seeming to take it too seriously (that sleight of hand again). Never mind telling it slant, Michael was a master of a kind of oblique teaching — through a joke. Before we knew it we were laughing — and learning — about something at the same time.

What I became aware of in that classroom, during those rainy dark evenings — seems it’s not only in my memory those evenings were dark and rainy (or perhaps we’re conflating them with those we found ourselves in in his poems) —yes, maybe the most important thing I discovered was this tension between the temporal and eternal that seemed to be evoked by the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, something he showed us with his bag of tricks. But again, like so much of what I seemed to have learned from Michael, I don’t remember it being explained, but somehow absorbed, through the poems, I suppose, but also from the casual — or hilarious — remarks he’d make, or the little chats we’d have about our lives in the pub afterwards.  Sometimes it doesn’t feel true to say that I was taught by Michael because it never felt like that. Just being in the same room as him you gleaned things. Perhaps he was a kind of magician after all.

Somewhere off to the side of certain poems, hanging in the air above them ‘like a little hovering ghost’, I can still tune into the vibe and atmosphere of the night classes run by Michael Donaghy which I attended thirty years ago. Excitement and anticipation, a vague institutional smell of phenol and floor polish, mixed with paper and toner ink; a bare seminar room; a door slamming somewhere and a big laugh echoing along a corridor.

He had this briefcase, an old leather thing with a brass clasp (thinking back now, I can’t recall ever seeing him with it elsewhere) which he’d click open and produce… poems. But I used to half expect a stethoscope. Or a microscope. Every week we were invited to bring along copies of a poem we’d written—but there was always an encounter with other poems that Michael would bring in for us to look at. Lesson one: other poems were our surest guides. Over that first term, it began to feel like he was pitching up a portable planetarium in Clerkenwell. Anthony Hecht’s ‘A Birthday Poem’ shone brightly in it.  

Hecht—who died a few weeks after Michael, in the autumn of 2004—wrote this beautiful poem to his second wife. It opens with three similes for ‘a loose community of midges’ seen swarming in flight on a summer’s day, and alights, twelve stanzas later, on a grace note; the beloved’s face, its features imprinted more deeply and meaningfully for the speaker ‘than any book’. Along the way, it adjusts its focus—in a long, poem-length pull from ‘we’ to ‘I’, together with a shifting from stanza to stanza. Starting with those midges, it moves between perspectives and framings, squinting at art and its illusions, Time (with a big T) and history (through grim battlefield optics), before that face, ‘both as I know it now’ and in a childhood photograph, and the constancy of ‘a gladness without stint’.  

Reading it today I can recognise why Michael held ‘A Birthday Poem’ in such high regard. Its poise and elegance, its formal patterning, light and shade, head and heart, the Wunderkammer it builds out of paintings and snapshots and poetry. Its thinking about art, history, looking, and the time-defeating persistence of love. I even wonder if the poem’s eventual address to its eventual imagined listener—‘O my most dear’—finds a chime with the opening line in Michael’s first collection: ‘Dearest, note how these two are alike…’

I won’t lie, at the time I remember finding the poem challenging, although I had a foothold. Mantegna’s crucifixion scene and Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ I knew from having only recently been—it’s startling for me to think now—an art student; in fact, the Holbein I knew well, having spent hours keeping warm in the National Gallery, always intrigued by that painting you stood to one side of, with its secret skull ‘easter egg’, tilting obliquely towards mortality ‘as if one range slyly obscured the other’. And even I could sense the lineaments of Hecht’s poem, its braid of thought and feeling, its movement from historical, scholarly sweep into a more intimate scale. The pivoting effect of that eighth stanza, the sudden gear shift into the first person, was a ratcheting up that I felt as keenly on first reading as I feel it now. And Michael was showing us how to read in a big circle, in the light of other poems.

This pop-up planetarium displayed many constellations. I remember Tony Harrison’s ‘Timer’ and Tess Gallagher’s ‘Black Silk’ coming into alignment one evening, thematically very similar, brilliant objects (and object poems) taking formally different approaches. Or Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Crusoe in England’, and that passage where Crusoe, marooned at home and bored shitless, looks at the knife on the mantelpiece that once ‘reeked of meaning, like a crucifix’; I recall this being shown to us in conjunction with Borges’ dagger resting in a drawer, ‘dreaming over and over its simple tiger’s dream’. Note how these two are alike.

Some of the poets (if not always the poems) were familiar to me. Browning. Keats. Larkin. Many were not. I can still hear Michael reading one of Paul Muldoon’s astonishing poems from Quoof and filling the little post-poem vacuum with an appreciative ‘wild, isn’t it?’. Reading Sharon Olds for the first time in Michael’s class (‘My Father Snoring’) or C. K. Williams (‘My Mother’s Lips’) was like discovering new worlds. Each week, we got to look at and listen to poems talking to one another across time and space. Solar systems. Lunar influences. Rilke’s panther and Ted Hughes’ jaguar. Eliot’s starless ‘Journey of the Magi’ itself becoming the guide for a poem Michael was writing.

Because every now and then, Michael would bring in something of his own that was being sharpened into focus, finding its feet, coming to life. I found this thrilling. I’m sure we all did. One student who’d been attending longer than I had told me about a brilliant poem he’d shown to the class that had ‘knucklewalked’ its way into her memory (and gone on to become ‘Caliban’s Books’). ‘Exile’s End’. ‘The Excuse’. A short poem about the past falling open anywhere, B minor, an old encyclopaedia, which grew into the magnificent ‘Black Ice and Rain’. I wish I’d kept copies of those drafts. But it was the generosity of his sharing them in the first place that’s proved indelible and durable. It was teaching by a kind of osmosis and example. We were receiving gifts.

Or maybe presents. Circling back to Hecht, ‘A Birthday Poem’ first appeared in Millions of Strange Shadows in 1977 (the book’s title, borrowed from Shakespeare’s sonnet 53, is nested in the penultimate stanza of this poem). The poem is even more precisely time-stamped: June 22, 1976. It’s strange to think how much further away we are now from those evenings in the early 1990s than those evenings were to this poem first seeing the light of day. And further by the second. That confluence ‘that bears all things away’ seems to roar in spate if I think of it like this. But we can also travel towards it, return to it, or at least to what Michael would call the illusion of the poem’s present moment.  

I learned how you never get to the end of some poems. I haven’t ‘finished’ reading ‘A Birthday Poem’. And going back to it again is always in part to read it for the first time, in a world where I hear the scraping of chairs and am part of that loose community of midges again, excited particles meeting in the charged atmosphere of a Monday night at the City University buildings just off St John Street, waiting for the door to swing open and Michael to breeze in carrying a battered briefcase and general air of wit and mischief. It fills me with gratitude. Many happy returns, Chief.

A Birthday Poem by Anthony Hecht

Like a small cloud, like a little hovering ghost
            Without substance or edges,
Like a crowd of numbered dots in a sick child’s puzzle,
      A loose community of midges
Sways in the carven shafts of noon that coast
Down through the summer trees in a golden dazzle.

Intent upon such tiny copter flights,
            The eye adjusts its focus
To those billowing about ten feet away,
      That hazy, woven hocus-pocus
Or shell-game of the air, whose casual sleights
Leave us unable certainly to say

What lies behind it, or what sets it off
            With fine diminishings,
The pale towns Mantegna chose to place
     Beyond the thieves and King of Kings:
Those domes, theatres and temples, clear enough
On that mid-afternoon of our disgrace.

And we know at once it would take an act of will
           Plus a firm, inquiring squint
To ignore those drunken motes and concentrate
     On the blurred, unfathomed background tint
Of deep sea-green Holbein employed to fill
The space behind his ministers of state,

As if one range slyly obscured the other.
           As, in the main, it does.
All of our Flemish distances disclose
      A clarity that never was:
Dwarf pilgrims in the green faubourgs of Mother
And Son, stunted cathedrals, shrunken cows.

It’s the same with Time. Looked at sub specie
            Aeternitatis, from
The snow-line of some Ararat of years,
     Scholars remark those kingdoms come
To nothing, to grief, without the least display
Of anything so underbred as tears,

And with their Zeiss binoculars descry
            Verduns and Waterloos,
The man-made mushroom’s deathly overplus,
      Caesars and heretics and Jews
Gone down in blood, without batting an eye,
As if all history were deciduous.

It’s when we come to shift the gears of tense
            That suddenly we note
A curious excitement of the heart
     And slight catch in the throat: —
When, for example, from the confluence
That bears all things away I set apart

The inexpressible lineaments of your face,
           Both as I know it now,
By heart, by sight, by reverent touch and study,
     And as it once was years ago,
Back in some inaccessible time and place,
Fixed in the vanished camera of somebody. You are four years old here in this photograph,
           You are turned out in style,
In a pair of bright red sneakers, a birthday gift.
     You are looking down at them with a smile

Michael Donaghy’s ‘Wordshop’ took place in the 90s and early 2000s in the brutalism of City’s campus.  But its education in poetry, and in being a writer, often carried on – in the best writers’ workshop tradition –  across  Northampton Square in the Bull. In fact, I remember students laughing about the affectionate portrait Anne Sexton painted of Sylvia Plath, in her poem, The Bar Fly Ought to Sing) ‘oh funny duchess, oh blonde thing.’ I like to think of those two having a laugh – and you can imagine they might have needed one, and a couple of martinis after a class led by Robert Lowell.
 
In my time as a member of the group, it wasn’t exactly barflies, more a quick one for the road… For someone, who as it turned out was so cruelly short on time,  Michael could be far too generous with his own. Sometimes he would briefly join his students. More often after the two hours of the class (which would often run on) he’d want to get home to Maddy and Ruairi… leaving his students to finish the conversations his classes started.
 
Everybody who admired Michael – whether as a student or friend or even a reader – can feel that their time with him was cut short. There never seemed to be enough time.  Like anyone who did this weekly class, I’m sad for the terms I missed (doing finals for instance….) I had planned to return in the autumn of 2004.  Sometimes we wouldn’t get through everyone’s poems in a week though I don’t suppose anyone cares about that now, or much then. As much as tending to the writing of the group, as this collection of writing explores, he was a truly amazing guide to the friends in poetry that he had made along the way.
 
As much as at his readings, Michael brought performance to the classroom too.   His class exploring the Hiroshima hoax poems (which I believe did for a few generations of his students) was like a poetry happening – getting us all reading and responding to a visceral and graphic seeming first-hand account of the tragedy.   It was a brilliant lesson in not letting emotion get in the way of critical judgement but it also has the mischief and intellectual rigour of his interest in forgeries and fakes.   His reading of Keats’ Ode on Melancholy (and his understanding of that poem) deserved a stage, not a badly lit classroom though I am so glad that I had a place in that little theatre.  As other students have explored, he was often drawn to dramatic monologues.
 
And I have Michael to thank for the introduction to Elizabeth Bishop, who became an enduring obsession for me.  Balanced between confessional frankness and wry formal restraint –brimming with feeling, and dark humour – her poems are like little high wire acts.  They’re full of emotion, even heartbreak, but are masterfully controlled.  I remember a class discussion about our feelings and experiences going into our writing.  If it’s any good, ‘at a certain point, the poem takes over’ was Michael’s take, and where I think he found common ground with the artful elegance of Bishop’s writing that sets her so apart from the chaotic honesty the confessional poets of her generation were happy to welcome on to the page. 
 
 I had never heard of her when Michael started a class by  passing around a copy of one of his treasured books with what he termed ‘my favourite photograph of her.’  Till then I hadn’t really thought you could have a favourite photograph of a poet. His favorite poets were always fully real people, not just the name of a writer.  A member of the family or a close friend, was certainly the way he talked about them: like fallible people he knew well. That it itself was a great lesson to writers starting out: to get on these terms with the writers you love, absorbing their judgement and their taste to the extent it can feel like its at your fingertips.  For his part, he was on these kind of ‘talking’ terms with a great list of British and American poets (as testified by the poems that students have chosen to write about here) from Keats, and Yeats, to Auden, Sylvia Plath, James Merrill and James Dickey to August Kleinzahler, Don Paterson, C K Williams  (who really were friends) but to hear his dialogue with any of them,  had the same kind of intimacy and respect.   That dialogue with his personal canon is there so powerfully in his work too – unafraid to be Keatsian or Yeatsian or metaphysical and to keep company with his heroes.
 
In the case of Elizabeth Bishop, I was hooked with one poem, The Shampoo.  One of her best love poems, it was written for Lota de Macedo Soares with whom she made her life, in Brazil in the 1950s.  A wealthy orphan, that time was a fragile island of happiness in a privileged but traumatic life story.  Going back to it now, with its arresting voice, the lovers’ intimacy and direct address, I now know  as Elizabeth Bishop’s style,  but also immediately think there couldn’t have been a more Michael Donaghy choice of poem to get us interested in her.   There’s the quotidian intimacy,  and the feeling of almost overhearing talk between two lovers.  When I hear Bishop’s, ‘dear friend’, I hear, too, his ‘dearest’ in his early poem, Machines.  Like her,  he had the ability to stage a little love scene the reader is allowed to witness, capturing a seeming spontaneity that make the poems jump off the page, across the years, retaining their sense of naturalness and sense of human conversation and connection however well known they become.
 
Like the great metaphysical poets, they could quite literally reach for the moon, too, and manage it.  Michael in his perfect poem The Present, Bishop here with her old tin pail in which she washes her lovers hair: the everyday object taking on a romance, ‘pale and shiny like the moon.’    I once heard Michael describe the ardency of that poem as the work ‘of a very young man’ and a ‘very young poet’ but that poem’s pool,  brimming with feeling as well as ideas,  has endured too, as a classic of contemporary love poetry.  It still sounds as immediate to me as when I first heard it many years ago.
 
That class immediately sent me off to get to know her and her work better.  As a young poet, I immediately liked The Shampoo, but probably wasn’t old enough to really understand its subtly sensual appreciation of a love that endures.  The famous lines, on her lover’s stray grey hairs, which she sees as shooting stars, rushing in ‘bright formation’  where ‘so sudden, where so soon’ were probably a bit lost on me though I do remember Michael savouring their absolute perfection.
 
The photograph of Elizabeth Bishop he loved was this damaged,  somewhat prickly, often lonely figure, in almost ‘cuddly’ form. On her verandah,  in a deckchair, her cat on her lap it’s a study in contentedness and peace, emanating a sense of being ‘at home’ that’s poignantly so very fleeting in her poetry, and in her peripatetic and heart rending life story.  The Shampoo was a poem he loved, and beyond its constraints, I do  remember, too, the huge empathy he had for her: for her tough childhood (which she explored in her writing) and the tragic end of her period of happiness with Lota’s suicide in 1976,  and also his happiness that she got her love story too, even fleetingly.  He would always jokingly groan and make everyone laugh about James Merrill’s trust fund (maybe his poems could have been a little shorter?!)  but he didn’t begrudge Bishop her privilege at all. It had come at such a cost, and she held an adored position in his canon. 
 
Bishop’s poem explores time,  as so many of Michael’s did so arrestingly too.  ‘The still explosions on the rocks/the lichens, grow/by spreading, gray concentric shocks…’ she writes, time passing is both instantaneous and so gradual you miss it unless you look closely for the calcification before your eyes. ‘Time is nothing if not amenable’ as she writes with a perfect sense of it’s silky brutality. That abruptness of loss is something anyone who knew Michael, who was just 50 when he died,  still feels, twenty years on. I flinched  when the Bull pub in was ripped out to be renovated for a brief stint as a fancier bar and restaurant.  I wondered what happened to its old sofas and chairs and glass ringed tables – their ‘still explosions’ on the surface of the city, and the concentric circles of even more gentrification. I hate to think of them being chucked on to the street for someone to claim.      
 
I was in one of the last groups Michael taught – in 2002 and 2003  we didn’t have iphones.  Nobody snapped away documenting every trivial second or glass of wine or coffee or gathering. These days, even Elizabeth Bishop probanly would hae been zooming in on her lichens and the tragicomic naif details of life in Brazil that she loved, making a collection of bad paintings as a file, and revering ‘sign makers’ whose clumsy language sometimes dispensed accidental wisdom. For all that we still feel Michael’s loss, the snatched time that I had as his student was an extraordinary privilege.  I hope I’ve given you a snapshot here of what it was like to be in his classroom. 
 
Before the time we all photographed everything, I don’t think I have a single photograph of a time I treasure. I became a writer then, getting my first success as a poet (winning the Eric Gregory award in 2003 for many poems I’d brought to his class) I still use his extraordinary lessons all the time. And as he taught, I learnt to talk to my favourite writers too – as a journalist in my work interviewing writers, but also, as he did, in my imagination with poets and writers centuries or decades away from me, never expecting Michael to be one of the ones with whom you can only imagine a conversation.  The favourite photograph I’ve come across of Michael Donaghy,  I stumbled across more recently.   Snapped reading (a performance  of his own poetry that he turned into an electrifying art form) in a happy accident he was photographed  under a sign reading ‘welcome to the party.’ As I’ve said, far from dusty figures, Michael Donaghy’s favourite poets were like old friends that he just had to introduce you to… I can’t think of a more perfect juxtaposition.  Michael, thank you for welcoming me to the party.  As much as all those other guests you wanted us all to meet, twenty years on, you’re still here too. And they’re in great company.

The Shampoo by Elizabeth Bishop

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
–Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

 

My memory is rather disappointing. I have vague images from those years in the late nineties/early two thousands. They are more impressions than anything else. No full conversations come back to me and I don’t completely trust what I do remember. I don’t know when I first met Michael but I had certainly heard of him before I met him or saw him read. 

I moved back to London in 1997 after I graduated from university in Scotland with my then boyfriend, the poet Roddy Lumsden. We moved into a flat in Stoke Newington above a chicken shop. 
Roddy was out at readings and poetry events most evenings. I worked for a charity at that time and was usually too tired or skint to go out except on weekends. He would come home from nights out and regale me with the brilliant people he had been with at the Poetry Society or seen read. Over time, I got to meet them in person, one of them being the lovely Michael Donaghy. 

Michael would appear for fleeting visits, like film cameos, at the parties we attended and some of my friends were in his writing group at City Lit a few years before me: Andrew Neilson and Kathryn Gray. I think before I attended his class, I babysat for his young son, Ruairi, a couple of times in his house off Green Lanes. 

Back in those days, I didn’t drive and one of the times I babysat, perhaps it was the first time, Michael kindly collected me in his Saab. He was driving along talking and I remember him suddenly pulling over on Stoke Newington Church Street and saying that he wanted to show me something. He got out of the car and I, not quite sure what to do next, followed him across the road into the churchyard next to Clissold Park. I remember walking up a leafy, shaded path and crouching down to peer through railings at an old tomb in dappled shadow. On the side of the tomb, was an inscription about a girl who had died when her clothes caught fire aged 23 and Michael told me that on the other side it said that her brother had been killed by pirates. I can’t have been much older than 23 at the time myself. It stuck with me. 

Remembering this yesterday, I wondered whether I had this memory right but looking up on the internet I found details about Elizabeth Pickett who died Dec 11 1781 “in consequence of her clothes taking fire the preceding evening”. This kind of glittering treasure was typical Michael fare. I always came away from a conversation with him having learnt something new. This morning, I was looking through Michael’s Collected Poems for a poem of his that I remembered him reading to the class at City Lit, and came across ‘Habit’ which is clearly inspired by this tomb. Amazing. I don’t remember him mentioning that he had written a poem about it when he showed it to me at all or having read that poem since. 

The City Lit evening class met weekly in an otherwise empty building, it was up a few flights of stairs in a rather barren strip-lit room with a wall of curtainless windows. The mismatched school desks were all different levels and sizes and had been pushed together to make one huge table. There must have been 15 or 20 people every time I went- like a huge dinner party without any food. Michael would stand at one end of the table and distribute poems to us by poets I’d never heard of. He was full of enthusiasm. Wizard-like. We would read the poem and discuss it and the mechanics and the message would gradually reveal itself through the discussion. 

Michael would share with us how the poem had inspired him, structurally or conceptually to write one his own poems which he would more often than not then read. This reveal, this seeing behind the curtain of his creative process was probably my favourite part of the class. Like the chat between poems at a poetry reading, you’d get a glimpse of his life and thoughts. 

I don’t remember actually writing in class but we must have done. The second half of the evening, there was an opportunity for everyone to read and have critiqued a poem they had brought that they were working on. However ropey the poems were, and they often were pretty long-winded or clunky, Michael was always kind and generous in his comments. He encouraged everyone there to keep going, to make their work better. When the class finished we would adjourn to the pub on the corner. Sometimes Michael joined us for a pint, often times he didn’t.

I don’t remember much about the night he brought ‘The White Cup’ by Roger Mitchell, but this poem has stayed with me ever since and is one of my all time favourites. I’ve been an English secondary school teacher for the past twenty years and I have shared this poem with classes as a stimulus for a creative writing activity almost every year of those two decades. All thanks to Michael. 

The poem really does all the work for you as a stimulus. It is a lesson in how a simple object carries a story – literally and figuratively. It is an exemplar of the advice given to poets ‘to show, don’t tell’. We know this is a poem about a Holocaust survivor without being directly told as much.  The reader pieces together the story of ‘The White Cup’ from the small details: how ’those could not have been exactly the words’; the significance of ‘the guard’ who doesn’t give ‘a cigarette’: the black inside’ of the ‘box cars’. 

Also strange and compelling is the lack of certainty; there is a hearsay quality to the account. The narrator stresses that we can’t trust this version of events and implies that he has told different versions of the story in the past. He undercuts the reliability of the story, the truth of it and the symbolic significance of the cup both before and while he is telling us about it. But instead of undermining the story, this makes the cup’s symbolic importance all the greater for me. I also love the ending of this poem. The way it offers both a completeness and incompleteness at the same time with the deft image of the girl sipping and swallowing the water and our ignorance of what happens to her next.    

The Story of the White Cup by Roger Mitchell

I am not sure why I want to tell it,
since the cup was not mine, and I was not there,
and it may not have been white, after all.
When I tell it, though, it is white, and the girl
to whom it has been given, by her mother,
is eight. She is holding a white cup to her breast,
and her mother has just said goodbye, though those
could not have been, exactly, the words. No one knows
what her father has said, but when I tell it,
he is either helping someone very old with a bag
or asking a guard for a cigarette. There is, of course,
no cigarette. The box cars stand with their doors
slid back. They are black inside, and the girl
who has just been given a cup and told to walk
in a straight line and to look like she wants
a drink of water, who cried in the truck
all the way to the station, who knew, at eight,
where she was going, is holding a cup to her breast
and walking away, going nowhere, for water.
She does not turn, but when she has found water,
which she does, in all versions of the story, everywhere,
she takes a small sip of it and swallows.

I remember Michael taking us through Keats’s ‘Ode on Melancholy’ in class. He was never afraid to make it clear when he really loved a poem. For Michael, pleasure – the ‘Do you like it?’ principle – was a vital test of a poem, as important as the appreciation of any technical artistry or intellectual daring (both of which he valued highly). ‘Melancholy’ was one of those poems he enjoyed reciting by heart, often doing so at the beginning of a live reading, before launching into ‘Black Ice and Rain’, or ‘The Present’, or one of his other greatest hits.

Never afraid to inspire reverence for a favourite poem, with ‘Melancholy’, Michael took us through an account of Keats’s short life, and marvelled with us at the young man’s amazing poetic achievement in those last few years.  He impressed on us the difference between melancholy and depression: the former heightens the senses, the latter dulls them. He thoroughly shook outthis beautiful, complex poem, which many of us had enjoyed at school, and brought it alive for us again. 

Enough of reverence: Michael could be funny too. He made us all laugh when he pointed out how maddening it would actually be to be married to a man who, when you are furious with him, thinks this an appropriate response:

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

Michael died in the autumn, and on Raleigh Street my neighbours’ vine spilled over their garden wall, laden with dark clusters. I thought of the lines below, and found comfort in their repetition:

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine…

And later that year, in Lyme Regis, I found myself reciting ‘Ode on Melancholy’ to the sea:

His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Ode on Melancholy by John Keats

I. No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

II. But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

III. She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to Poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

I am afraid I cannot remember much about how Michael taught us to understand and then to write poetry. I had written for years, without learning very much, before I attended Michael’s class at City University. After a prolific youth, and publication in some magazines, I gave up on poetry in the 1980s as seeming too male and white and narrow in perspective. Of course there were exceptions to this general rule (Bloodaxe had started to throw the net more widely by that time), but I found that many poets were not addressing subjects with which I identified. Nor were their styles sympathetic to my desire for studied informality in my work.

I was managing a young people’s counselling service in Hackney seeing young people not much younger than I was then who were highly distressed and had a lamentably long history of mistreatment and abuse. They often had experience of self harm, mental health problems and sexual abuse was frequently a causative contributor to their mental distress. When I came out as a poet there and started asking the young people for poems to place in our annual report, one young woman who I knew wrote poetry suggested I try Michael’s class. I read his work (Michael’s first book, Shibboleth was published at that time) and agreed with her. It took a suicidal young person to give me guidance in those days and so I signed up for his class at City University.

Michael was not at all the sort of person who I thought wrote poetry. He was young, (about my age), quick-witted, unstuffy, hard to pin down, curiously like quicksilver in his manner and jump-cuts of conversation. He also knew so much about poetry I did not know, but wanted to learn. One of the best things about him was his distance from academia. Recent developments in poetry have muddled this issue and I am greatly relieved (as someone who had the misfortune to study English Language and Literature at Oxford) not to have had the dead weight of the Academy fall on my poetry or halt my inspiration. I decided I would to undertake what I thought of as an apprenticeship with him and that is how I found myself in his City University class, repeating a single module 11 times.

The formula was simple and so elegant. We would show up just before 7.30 and sit on an extremely uncomfortable plastic chair for a couple of hours. I am an introvert, but even I was able to open up and express my views on what worked or didn’t work in a poem. At school and university we had been taught to appreciate poetry but Michael asked a different question: does this poem work and if so, can you tell me how? This opened up so many possibilities for me. After a short break Michael would ask us to write a poem which we then had to read out to the class. It was a much more practical and hands-on approach, and one I found I could live with and learn from.

The format was: the first half of the class involved a task, writing a poem or reading one. The poem I have chosen to write about is Tony Harrison’s Timer. The young poet writes about his mother’s cremation. His Dad says she has to wear her ring and there follows a moving metaphor of how the egg-timer she used to let him play with becomes a way of talking about the grief he feels.

He’d read the poem, always, give it a good hearing, make sure we could get the tensions, the nuances of speech, the hesitations, here which sound like grief, the break in the stanza structure so like a breaking voice, how the structure of the poem helps contain the emotion felt by the poet and makes those feeling accessible to the reader. He also showed us the extra bits: how this poem uses the nothing, the “O” of the ring, as a space for the ashes to fall through like in the timer. This made metaphor feel real.

One of the things about Michael, much appreciated by his students, was his ability to hear and appreciate the worth of different kinds of voice. It made the group of poets who came through his classes wonderfully varied and really not a unified group as such.

One day he brought in a poem by WR Rodgers, Stormy Day. The best thing about this poem, for me, was way he made the language reflect the stormy weather:

“knuckles of the lurching cherry tree/
Heap and hug, elbow and part, this wild day.”

The use of rhyme and alliteration enrich the sense of the sentences:

“And at jetty’s jut, ripe and roped for hire,
The yellow boats lie yielding and lolling
Jilted and jolted like jellies.”

Even the use of exclamation marks contributes to the staccato and broken-up syntax. The way the language mimics the ecstatic behaviour of the windy environment is part of the reason why the poem succeeds.

I took this poem as an opportunity to try out using language to add ornament and music to my work. In some ways, I already had developed a musical facility. I was aware of rhythm, the iambic and other patterns that poetry used as part of its repertoire in conveying the sense of what it needed to communicate. In truth there were countless ways in which Michael challenged and stretched us and I for one went on learning from him and benefiting from his generosity and kindness.

I doubt it was an accident how many of the students in his classes went on to become “successful” writers, by which I probably mean “published”. He was simply that good a teacher, who never told you what to do, but none of this really touches how much Michael gave or how deeply he impacted on us and our work. We loved him fiercely and I am sure that is something no one can measure. All those candid times in the pub after the class, from 9.30 until after closing time, all those intimate conversations in the car on the way home. What a picture of a person and a poet we were fortunate enough to receive. The imprint rubbed off on us, and there is still an affinity felt for each other by those of us who came through his class. 

After my 11 terms some of us went off and started meeting on our own, giving each other feedback on our work. Sometimes, not infrequently, he would come to those meetings too and sometimes he would read us drafts of his work like any other member of the group. What better way to bring us through and usher us into the world of poetry, adult poets who had served their full apprenticeship.

Stormy Day by WR Rodgers
 
O look how the loops and balloons of bloom
Bobbing on long strings from the finger-ends
And knuckles of the lurching cherry tree
Heap and hug, elbow and part, this wild day,
Like a careless carillion cavorting;
And the beaded whips of the beeches splay
And dip like an anchored weed around a drowned rock;
And hovering endlessly the rooks
Hang on the wind’s effrontery as if
On hooks, then loose their hold and slide away
Like sleet sidewards down the warm swimming sleep
Of wind. O its is a lovely time when
Out of the sunk and rigid sumps of thought
Our hearts rise and race with new sounds and sights
And signs, tingling delightedly at the sting
And crunch of springless carts on gritty roads,
The kite caught dangling in the skinny wires,
The swipe of the swallow across your eyes,
Striped awnings stretched on lawns. New things surprise
And stop us everywhere. In the parks
The fountains scoop and flower like rockets
Over the oval pond whose even skin
Is pocked and goose-fleshed by their niggling rain
That frocks a naked core of statuary.
And at jetty’s jut, ripe and roped for hire,
The yellow boats lie yielding and lolling,
Jilted and jolted like jellies. But look!
There! Do you see, crucified on palings
Motionless newsposters announcing
That now the frozen armies melt and meet
And smash! Go home now, for, try as you may,
You will not shake off that fact today.
Behind you limps that dog with tarry paw
As behind him, perfectly timed, follows
The dumb shadow that mimes him all the way.
 

I don’t think I knew, when I joined, that this workshop was a legendary alchemy laboratory; I just knew that he was a poet who spoke to me like no other, and I couldn’t believe my luck when I discovered he ran a class. And the minute he walked into the room on the first evening of term, late, talking a mile to the dozen, I knew Michael Donaghy’s City University class was my new home.

One of the best things Michael ever did for me, one of the many things he did — the community I slotted into, the way of being in the world he offered, the quiet but trenchant knockdowns of my most lumpy experiments (“If you just had better quality control”)and his nonetheless unwavering faith in my work — one real lifetime gift, aside from the jokes, the great conversations, the friendship, was James Merrill.

It was Merrill’s long poem, “The Broken Home”. A series of seven sonnets, the poem looks back over a fractured childhood, the long shadow cast by his father, and the remnants of feeling that remain. Thinking about that session now, sitting around that table with a photocopy in front of me, I can’t remember a single thing Michael said about the poem. I was too busy being overwhelmed by it. What I was thinking was, I didn’t even know you could do this with a poem. What was it I didn’t know you could do? I have no idea. But the sheer scale of the emotion, which flowed into and through the sections of the poem in a series of gentle yet highly controlled lines, whose images changed shape like clouds until coming to rest in the final line, knocked me sideways.

A little about the poet. James Merrill’s father Charles was the Merrill half of the mega-finance group Merrill Lynch; little James was born, in 1926, very seriously rich. He was so rich that when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped in 1932 it seemed plausible that he could be next, so his parents sent him away to Arizona. Brought up in unimaginable luxury, he was also the son who didn’t quite fit the bill. He was dreamy. He was artistic. He didn’t particularly care about money. And he was unavoidably homosexual. As a result of this last, he spent much of his adult life in Europe, mainly Greece, where he could be himself and not have to face down the purse-lipped disapproval of his mother and the establishment. He lived simply for someone of his wealth, and in the 1950s he started a foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, for the purpose of helping writers and artists. This foundation continued until 1996 — the year after he died, aged 68, from AIDS.

“The Broken Home” is one of two long major poems that seem to exorcise the traumas — the emotional deprivations — of his childhood. The other one, “Lost in Translation”, recounts the search for a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle put together over a summer with his governess, while his parents were away getting divorced. “The Broken Home” is shorter, but takes a longer, backward look at the brokenness. The poem has a filmic quality, with bold images of specific incidents that accrue, each sonnet operating like a scene.

Just to digress for a moment, James Merrill’s greatest work is a long, audaciously eccentric and astonishingly beautiful book-length poem he spent twenty years writing, based on sessions at the Ouija board with his then partner David Jackson, called The Changing Light at Sandover. So it’s nice to see “The Broken Home” opening with a seance-like passage. This is Merrill’s manner of settling into a poem, and in adopting this customary mode he also gives us a chance to begin the poem slightly hypnotised by the flickering flame of the candle. This is a device Michael Donaghy loved. He was always talking about hypnotism, holding up a hand with the thumb and first two fingers joined, as if it were holding the hypnotist’s watch. His own poems are littered with talismans, clocks, Claude glasses, little transfixing objects. Once, in class, he handed round a bag of objects and each of us was invited to choose one to write about. I chose a brass doorknob — a little flamelike, in its globey way.

Here, then, is Merrill:

…a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what’s left of my life.
 
I have thrown out yesterday’s milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.
 
Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.
 

Having effectively turned himself into a ghost, the narrator proceeds to haunt his own childhood, and the emotional chill cast by his financier father:

Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze […]
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit — rings, cars, permanent waves.

We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.
He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

Michael’s debt to Merrill was immense. The effortless-looking elegance of his flawlessly conversational iambic pentameter, to start with. His joy in offbeat subject matter, in shaggy dog stories and poker-faced jokes — these are qualities of brilliance he shared with Merrill. And the rhetorical device Merrill uses in this stanza — the clincher — is one of the Donaghy favourites, the chiasmus. He used to talk about the chiasmus a lot in class. A trick for clicking an image into place, using a conceit of exchange to seal something in the reader’s memory; or, as he put it in his monograph, Wallflowers, “The familiar shape of ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ like a dance step in which two couples change partners.”

The chiasmus is of course the device with which Michael made his own name as a modern Metaphysical, in his poem “Machines,” about music and bicycles,

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

In this poem he writes, “The machinery of grace is never simple,” but we all know simple is much harder than easy.

This chiasmic dynamic is present in Merrill’s poem “Mirror”, which Michael also loved to teach. In this poem an ancient mirror hangs on a parlour wall, where it has hung for decades. The mirror recounts its heyday of importance, and the changes as the children grew up, and gradually everybody went away. The mirror describes the disappearance of its silvering:

…as if a fish
Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,
I have lapses. I suspect
Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes
Through the blind flaws of my mind.

Only as the poem progresses does it become clear that the “you” it addresses, with some bitterness, is the other half of its chiasmus: the window. What sees, what is seen. And it’s a real shock.

The next few lines of “The Broken Home,” with their finely calibrated tonal shifts, could almost have been written by Michael:

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack

No matter whom—Al Smith or José María Sert
Or Clemenceau—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.

The familiar scene, as from a newsreel, or a silent comedy, could almost be Donaghy describing the Bronx of his childhood, or

… The Palm Casino, 1942.

Although he thinks she’s buying out the town
the critic’s wife sits on an unmade bed
in room 6, naked, as her palm is read
by a guitarist in a dressing gown.
He reels off lines in the forgotten script
that maps her palm: Here is your first affair…

            (“The Palm”, Conjure, 2000)

“Always that same old story,” as Merrill goes on — the woman veiled, rich, her car the same colour as Homer’s sea: “wine-dark.” A classical colour, a heroic colour. But the rhyme for that car, on the very next line, is “the Ritz Bar.” The Senate may be important, and also ancient, but it’s boring as hell. Time is moving forward, women must be emancipated, it’s the Jazz Age.

Charles Merrill, according to this and other accounts, tended to hobble everyone around him. The woman is hobbled by not being taken seriously, by her skirt, by the police, by the lack of a vote, by the whole system.

Merrill tells us all this without having to say it. His skill in rhyme pairs does half the work for him. “Rhyme, for us, is a verb,” wrote Michael’s friend, editor and literary executor Don Paterson in his essay “The Dark Art of Poetry” (2004). Michael used to talk about rhyming as being like walking onto a stage on stilts. He said this on Day One of the first class of his I attended, which was the beginners’ class, because it met on the one night of the week when I never needed childcare. He said, “You’d better make sure you do it well, otherwise you’ll fall on your face, they’ll be looking at you instead of the effect you wanted to create, and your magic trick will have failed.” In Wallflowers he writes:

“Les Murray has said that rhyme functions with the symmetry of logic. The terrifying truth is that form substitutes for logic. This is the poet’s unique power, to address the passions in their own language, the very power that got us barred from the Republic.”

Meanwhile, Merrill is still just warming up for his magic trick.

Here comes the dog:

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside…

The spirit guide! Michael, the dog — not any of the absent adults, the father in his office, the mother banished, the governess busy — has stayed with the boy. Inside, then, “Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,” presumably the next wife.

…was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.

It’s an Orson Welles movie.

Next we see the boy in his nursery, shapeshifting again:

A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.

But it’s the sort of pliable that has led the poet to ask at the very outset if he’s really real. There are things he can’t do; the lead soldier wasn’t able to protect him to that extent. And by virtue of his position, outside the he-man, heterosexual norm, Merrill denies himself even the rights claimed by the newsreel woman:

I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.

This is only the whistlestop tour I’m giving you! But here, contemplating the adjustments he has made in his own life, the self-knowledge he’s gained, there is a kind of acceptance:

Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,

When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth’s no less.

What does it mean, to be earth’s? It means you’re part of the cycle, no matter what happens to your gilt, your guilt, your “evening’s mild gold leaf” as Stanza 1 has it. This passage always makes me think of the old American TV commercial — talk about bathos! — a commercial Merrill will have known, if he ever watched any television at all (moot, I know), for a brand of margarine. In it, a woman the producers clearly wished was Agnes Moorhead thinks this is butter; the strapline is ‘It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature!’ Cue lightning bolt. That same old story, right? “Father Time and Mother Earth/ A marriage on the rocks.” But Jimmy is earth’s no less.

A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound…

The final sonnet begins here, “halts” before his childhood bedroom with its vividly evoked period wallpaper, nightmares, and bad memories — and then swoops, like a crane shot, into the present. Suddenly the spell is broken, and as soon as it is, it casts itself again.

The real house became a boarding school.
Under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.

The bad memories I glided over a minute ago were of little Jimmy being bedridden with flu, and writing this now I can’t help thinking of the Donaghy poem, “My Flu”, in which time slips back — first, to June 1962:

Oswald’s back from Minsk. U2s glide over Cuba.
My cousin’s in Saigon. My father’s in bed
with my mother. I’m eight and in bed with my flu.
I’d swear, but I can’t be recalling this sharp reek of Vicks,
the bedroom’s fevered wallpaper, the neighbour’s TV,
the rain, the tyres’ hiss through rain, the rain smell…

— and then further, to:

…the pit in the woods
– snow filling the broken suitcases, a boy curled up,
like me, as if asleep, except he has no eyes.
One of my father’s stories from the war
has got behind my face and filmed itself:
[…] Now all the birds fly up at once.

Merrill wrote so extraordinarily well about being a child, because — obviously — he could still feel it. At university, a thin, bookish, boyish-looking aesthete in round wire glasses, he made friends with a young woman a couple of years below him. They got along so well they even toyed with having an affair, which failed because they were both gay. She was Louise Fitzhugh, and she would go on to write — a few years before “The Broken Home” was written — a novel about a lonely little girl raised in privilege and wealth, more attached to her nanny than to anyone else, and more attached to her notebook than to any of them. Harriet the Spy is one of the greatest novels ever written about trying to grow up as a certain kind of kid. Fitzhugh still felt it too. The two of them remained friends for the rest of her too-short life.

Merrill has a reputation for being patrician, mandarin, effete, overly concerned with surfaces. He “received his first negative review when he was 16,” writes Calista McCrea in the Los Angeles Times. It was in the high school newspaper, of all places.

“Although appreciative of Merrill’s verse, the teacher had misgivings about certain elements… Merrill, he wrote, ‘sometimes drags in color by the ears, seems like a finical interior decorator fussing over the right shade of topaz, vermillion, or mauve’.”

Certainly, in the years I was hanging out with my Donaghy crew I was teased for loving him so much — though I noticed nobody ever teased Michael for the same thing.

This facility for magic, which Michael discusses at length in his monograph Wallflowers, is of course also everywhere present in his own work, in his dizzying metaphysical conceits, his voices, his huge frame of reference, and his formal and linguistic games. And where Merrill can recreate a lonely, gilded childhood in the wealthy 1930s, Donaghy’s eye for the twin details of observation and language can create a journey of the magi in the form of a drug run, a perfume contest in medieval Japan, and backroom scenes in Chicago where lost and lonely men play the Irish music of their youth.

And The Changing Light at Sandover! What treasure. I can’t think of another poet I could have studied with but Michael Donaghy, who would have given me this.

And speaking of poets who bring each other gifts, one of the last things Merrill did in his life, as Donaghy describes in an interview with Conor O’Callaghan in 1997 (The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions, 2009) was to give him a gift:

“Someone delivered a letter from America in the middle of the night that had gone to my old address. I heard it come through my letterbox just as I was walking down the stairs in a blindpanic about money. I opened it up and it was a cheque for, well, a small fortune from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. It was almost the last thing that James Merrill did before he died, to send me a small fortune.”

The Broken Home by James Merrill

Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening’s mild gold leaf.

In a room on the floor below,
Sunless, cooler—a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what’s left of my life.

I have thrown out yesterday’s milk
And opened a book of maxims.
The flame quickens. The word stirs.

Tell me, tongue of fire,
That you and I are as real
At least as the people upstairs.

My father, who had flown in World War I,
Might have continued to invest his life
In cloud banks well above Wall Street and wife.
But the race was run below, and the point was to win.

Too late now, I make out in his blue gaze
(Through the smoked glass of being thirty-six)
The soul eclipsed by twin black pupils, sex
And business; time was money in those days.

Each thirteenth year he married. When he died
There were already several chilled wives
In sable orbit—rings, cars, permanent waves.
We’d felt him warming up for a green bride.

He could afford it. He was “in his prime”
At three score ten. But money was not time.

When my parents were younger this was a popular act:
A veiled woman would leap from an electric, wine-dark car
To the steps of no matter what—the Senate or the Ritz Bar—
And bodily, at newsreel speed, attack

No matter whom—Al Smith or José María Sert
Or Clemenceau—veins standing out on her throat
As she yelled War mongerer! Pig! Give us the vote!,
And would have to be hauled away in her hobble skirt.

What had the man done? Oh, made history.
Her business (he had implied) was giving birth,
Tending the house, mending the socks.

Always that same old story—
Father Time and Mother Earth,
A marriage on the rocks.

One afternoon, red, satyr-thighed
Michael, the Irish setter, head
Passionately lowered, led
The child I was to a shut door. Inside,

Blinds beat sun from the bed.
The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise.
Under a sheet, clad in taboos
Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread,

And of a blackness found, if ever now, in old
Engravings where the acid bit.
I must have needed to touch it
Or the whiteness—was she dead?
Her eyes flew open, startled strange and cold.
The dog slumped to the floor. She reached for me. I fled.

Tonight they have stepped out onto the gravel.
The party is over. It’s the fall
Of 1931. They love each other still.
She: Charlie, I can’t stand the pace.
He: Come on, honey—why, you’ll bury us all!

A lead soldier guards my windowsill:
Khaki rifle, uniform, and face.
Something in me grows heavy, silvery, pliable.

How intensely people used to feel!
Like metal poured at the close of a proletarian novel,
Refined and glowing from the crucible,
I see those two hearts, I’m afraid,
Still. Cool here in the graveyard of good and evil,
They are even so to be honored and obeyed.

. . . Obeyed, at least, inversely. Thus
I rarely buy a newspaper, or vote.
To do so, I have learned, is to invite
The tread of a stone guest within my house.

Shooting this rusted bolt, though, against him,
I trust I am no less time’s child than some
Who on the heath impersonate Poor Tom
Or on the barricades risk life and limb.

Nor do I try to keep a garden, only
An avocado in a glass of water—
Roots pallid, gemmed with air. And later,

When the small gilt leaves have grown
Fleshy and green, I let them die, yes, yes,
And start another. I am earth’s no less.

A child, a red dog roam the corridors,
Still, of the broken home. No sound. The brilliant
Rag runners halt before wide-open doors.
My old room! Its wallpaper—cream, medallioned
With pink and brown—brings back the first nightmares,
Long summer colds, and Emma, sepia-faced,
Perspiring over broth carried upstairs
Aswim with golden fats I could not taste.

The real house became a boarding school.
Under the ballroom ceiling’s allegory
Someone at last may actually be allowed
To learn something; or, from my window, cool
With the unstiflement of the entire story,
Watch a red setter stretch and sink in cloud.

Breugel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus up on the white board, bright strips of classroom light reflected in the dark windows, our flickering pens. Michael reading Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, where the dogs go on with their doggy life as Icarus falls.

His incantations, effortless gadgetry. This – and this – and this! Poetry magicking things, like love, into existence.

I came to the class with just one notion: to write something about a snow globe. That’s all I can recall now. I could write nothing good for as long as I was in his class, or for ages afterwards. I needed to let it percolate, find what it was I wanted to say.

Then the news of his passing, the grave silence that followed …

Yesterday, while a baby was baptised in the waves, and two children filled their buckets with sand, a refugee drowned just metres from the shore.

I thought of Icarus, splashing into the sea like a spent teabag while a fisherman’s line tautens, a shepherd looks for signs of rain, a farmer daintily ploughs on, of how Michael distilled all life into those classroom nights – our future, from which we turned to look at him, swirling around us in great arcs of fake glittering snow.

Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H.Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.