Olivia Cole – The Shampoo by Elizabeth Bishop

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.