My Report Card
1 "... a fidgety affectation of style after style which suggests that unlike more mature poets of his generation, Donaghy has not yet found his voice." F. Olsen, "Noted in Brief", Hierophant, Spring 1993.
2 Thales teaches that all things are full of gods. Anaximenes teaches that every stone on the beach has a soul. I'd certainly credit a page of poetry with a mind of its own. In our desire to locate the presence of the poet behind the frame of the words, we tend to animate the poem — the organic analogy — so it seems to be returning our attention, or we breathe life into its inanimate imagery — a marble torso of Apollo, London's mighty heart, a wafer lifted and consecrated.
3 Proust recalls his mother at Combray, how gracefully she'd turn a social blunder to her advantage "like good poets whom the tyranny of rhyme forces into the discovery of their finest lines." I'm in it for the discovery. If writing poems were merely a matter of bulldozing ahead with what you'd already made up your mind to say I'd have long ago given it up for something more dignified.
4 Must get round to reading "The Feeling of A Presence and Verbal Meaningfulness in Context of Temporal Lobe Function: Factor Analytic Verification of the Muses?" Persinger, Michael A.; Makarec, Katherine, Brain and Cognition , 1992, November, Vol. 20(2): 217-226. Persinger and Makrark (to quote from the abstract) hypothesize that the profound sensation of a presence, particularly during periods of profound verbal creativity in reading or writing prose or poetry, is an endemic cognitive phenomenon. Factor analyses of 12 clusters of phenomenological experiences from 348 men and 520 women (aged18-65 years), who enrolled in undergraduate psychology courses over a 10-year period, supported the hypothesis. The authors conclude that periods of intense meaningfulness (a likely correlate of enhanced burst-firing in the left hippocampal-amygdaloid complex and temporal lobe) allow access to nonverbal representations that are the right hemispheric equivalents of the sense of self; they are perceived as a presence.
5 One morning in the Sixties when I was queuing outside the confessional in church it impressed my adolescent soul that the adults milling about me were guilty of an original sin of arrogance, of assuming it was they and not the massed total of their experience that had sinned. One way to cope with such moments of vertigo is to experiment with different signatures, other voices. (See under "poetry" and "confessional", separate entries).
6 Must look into forming some kind of movement and draughting a manifesto. Also, must try to be more direct. Poetry's a way of thinking, a clarity between the truth of music and the truth. See? No sooner are the words out but they turn to lead. It's embarrassing to talk about one's own poetry in prose, which may be why we have to endure so many poems about poetry.
7 Whenever I get the urge to write a poem about poetry I take a cold shower.
8 Which reminds me, MANIFESTOS ARE RIDICULOUS. Key scene: The mountainous silhouette of Charles Foster Kane emerging from behind the editor's desk waving his "Declaration of Principles" and Jedidiah requesting the draft for a souvenir: "I have a feeling it's going to be worth something one day" he grins, "like my first report card."
9 "the horror of the forest, or the silent thunder afloat in the leaves, not the intricate dense wood of the trees" (Mallarme), "a wind with a smell of children's spittle, crushed grass, and a jellyfish veil which announces the constant baptism of newly created things" (Lorca).
10 Must try harder at sport.
Michael Donaghy
Taken from Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Bloodaxe, 2000)