Kathryn Gray – Escape Room: The Writer by Richard Wilbur

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.