Simon Barraclough – Our Life Stories by Michael Donaghy

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.