Today marks twenty years since the poet Michael Donaghy died, and knocked a cannonball-shaped hole out of the UK poetry world.
I’d been in his workshop group at City University for four years at that point, and it was a tight group; we were all friends. His death was sudden — a total shock. No one with that much restless energy, with that much anxiety, no one with that much knowledge packed into their brain, and such intense ideas, no one who lived so completely in their art and in the world, no one with such a repertoire of jokes (complete with sound effects), no one who never stopped moving, who so often paced the city late at nigh going, ‘Oh, I know there’s a place just around the corner here, they’re open till 3’, no one who talked that much, surely, could just up and DIE.
But die he did.
He was one of the most important poets of the time, in the UK certainly (born in Ireland, he had grown up in the US and emigrated over here, where he had this incendiary poetry career). No one — I say no one, but there are a treasured few — could beat him for technical virtuosity, musicality, formal mastery and experimentation, register-jumping, jokes, and sheer frame of reference. I had joined his group unable to believe that it was even possible to do that —just join a group run by the single poet whose work spoke to you the most. Of course, Michael was, like me, straddling two cultures, two poetic traditions. He knew a lot more than I did about US poetry in action, since I’d come over here at the age when most people are just starting university and beginning to engage as a student/practitioner, and I had been cut off. So joining his group was very much — I could feel it from the first day — a home-coming.
Anyway, then he died, of a brain haemorrhage. That lovely brain, just stuffed full of stuff. Michael loved things that were stuffed full of stuff: reliquaries, memory palaces, poems, the world, and his bag of objects… To him, a poem was about a thing. Whether a story or a physical thing or an idea: it was something you were desperate to show someone.
One of the two memorials for Michael to mark this milestone year is a blog that’s been put together by his widow, Maddy Paxman, of essays by his former students on what it was like to be in his workshop. It’s named after his workshop: Wordshop Revisited. We were invited to write about a poem he had taught, and the impression it made on us — but a poem that Michael showed you is never just a poem. Maddy says, ‘His students adored him’, and it’s true: we did. She goes on very accurately to describe Michael ‘dipping into his vast knowledge of the poetry canon and offering them examples by other master- and mistress- practitioners: encouraging students to borrow their tactics and use their ideas as starting points, and always to read as widely as possible in order to find their own path to follow. He introduced his students to many poets and poems they might never otherwise have encountered, particularly those from across the Atlantic.’ (This last is why my contribution is a meditation on the meeting points between Michael and James Merrill, whose work he introduced me to.)
Rebecca O’Connor, in a small essay that is more like a poem in itself, talks about ‘His incantations, effortless gadgetry. This – and this – and this! Poetry magicking things, like love, into existence.’
Greta Stoddart remembers, as I do, so strongly, ‘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…’ (I even put that very ‘alas’ into the poem of mine that she quotes in her essay.)
So it’s twenty years now, officially, today. It’s impossible to totally believe it. As recently as the lockdown, a good friend told me about how, aged 16 or so, he had shoplifted Michael’s collection Errata from a WH Smiths in, I think, Chatham, and taken it to read under some railway arches — contraband in more ways than one — and I instinctively reached for my phone to call Michael and tell him this story, which I knew he’d love.
It’s all right, he’s here, he’s here. He heard the story.
The other memorial that’s happening is tomorrow night, Tuesday 17th September, at Conway Hall in London. In my mind, for now anyway, we’ll all sit there expecting, I don’t know who, and then Michael will walk out onto the stage, strike a natural pose, and begin to speak:
‘Are you awake, my sweet barbarian?
Why, you look as though you’d seen a ghost!’
You can still get a ticket. As Maddy says, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.