Meryl Pugh – Wallflowers: A lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling by Michael Donaghy

Although I was a keen fan of his writing, I only managed to meet Michael once.  A friend who took his classes introduced us after a reading at the Poetry Café on Betterton Street, where he’d recited his work from memory and played jigs and reels with his band.[1]  Folk had been the soundtrack to my childhood and I’d been a very keen teenage flautist, so I was excited to meet him, having been electrified by the evening’s combination of music – flutes!  fiddles!  tunes I recognised! – and a poetry that itself felt so very musical and embodied. He was friendly and cordial and encouraging to me, still very much at the start of my poetry-writing.  Not long after that night, I was stuffing envelopes at the Poetry London headquarters on Jewel Street in Walthamstow when the news reached me that Michael had died.  Even I, on the fringes of his acquaintance, who only really knew him from his writing, was stopped in my tracks by the shock and the loss.  Poetry still misses him.

Much later, I turned to his prose writing when I was casting about for models for my own.  I was by then studying for a PhD, but my research was a mixture of critical and creative work and none of the literary-theoretical writing I encountered seemed to fit the way I thought, with one foot in the Academy, one foot firmly out.  So I fell with relief and delight upon ‘Wallflowers’, the piece Michael wrote after a year as Reader-in-Residence at the Poetry Society.  It had been tucked away on my bookshelf, biding its time: here at last was a thinker very emphatically standing askance from the Academy, but no less critically rigorous for it, alive to the physicality of poetic form and its somatic-emotional embeddedness in our human, fleshy selfhood – and writing with such brio and wit!  Everything I had been looking for.  I could only really aspire to such sparkle (and plumped in the end for a more conventionally academic prose style), but the freedom and playfulness of his writing, combined with its critical seriousness, is still a benchmark for me for what creative-critical writing might do.

It’s an extraordinarily wide-ranging piece, taking in music and dancing (of course), orality, art practice, theories of time, geometry, rhetoric, memnonics, Coleridge and marginalia, British Sign Language poetry, the sonnet’s relation to the Golden Mean, not to mention the unconscious and psychoanalysis, chironomy, neumes, brain physiology – and it’s packed with commentaries on poems, references and quotes, footnotes, diagrams and photos.  And all the while, it’s deeply, intelligently engaged with a theory of poetry and its forms as something deeply and viscerally embedded in the unconscious and the body.  Poetry as the ‘shape of the dance’.[2]  ‘Wallflowers’ itself is a dance, and a virtuoso one, where the steps and the shapes we throw along the way are just as important as where we’re going.[3]

And did I mention the heckling?  Who couldn’t love a piece that bursts with voices: the writer’s own (perhaps, or very like), so scarcely contained by the main body of text that it must break out into a plethora of footnotes, plus several other persons (personae?) who offer their own commentary upon proceedings in the lecture’s copious marginalia.  On the very first page, a plural entity warns us ‘We think Mr Donaghy is about to be extravagant, anecdotal, and self-dramatizing.’ [4] Mr Donaghy is also having his cake and eating it, a bit; striking a pose only to step out and away from the gesture and examine it, poke fun at it a bit.  I love the mischief of it all.

‘Wallflowers’ ends, hauntingly, by quoting in full that most haunting of Keats’s poems, ‘This living hand’; an unfinished fragment strongly saturated in the narrator’s present-absence, absent-presence and powerful in its contemplation of the same.[5]

‘This living hand … I hold it towards you.’ [6]

For all its digressions and feints, the essay’s invitation is a sincere one.  ‘Wallflowers’ holds out a hand – and we take it, take to our feet.  Reading and writing poetry, thinking creatively as well as analytically, letting enjoyment and serious inquiry dance together: for this, thank you, Michael.

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[1] The poet Jemma Borg.

[2]     Donaghy, Michael. ‘Wallflowers: a lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling’ in The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions. edited by Adam O’Riordan and Maddy Paxman, Picador, 2009, pp. 1-41, p. 5.

[3]     I am echoing Paul Valéry’s ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ here: ‘Walking, like prose, has a definite aim […] The dance is quite another matter.  It is, of course, a system of actions; but of actions whose end is in themselves’. (Jackson Mathews, ed., The Art of Poetry, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958, 52-81, pp. 70 – 71).

[4]     Donaghy, Michael. ‘Wallflowers: a lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling’ in The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions. edited by Adam O’Riordan and Maddy Paxman, Picador, 2009, pp. 1-41, p. 3.

[5]     Its placement here, at the end of the piece, sends me back to a similarly haunting and haunted poem, Michael Donaghy’s own ‘Haunts’, written in the last month of last millennium and placed at the end of his collection Conjure (2000, Picador, p. 46).

[6]     Donaghy, Michael. ‘Wallflowers: a lecture on poetry with misplaced notes and additional heckling’ in The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions. edited by Adam O’Riordan and Maddy Paxman, Picador, 2009, pp. 1-41,p. 39.