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The Literary Desk · Interview · Issue 1

Michael Donaghy interviewed by Nicholas Cobic, The Wolf issue 1

Michael Donaghy · Nicholas Cobic

Nicholas Cobic interviews the poet Michael Donaghy for the first issue of The Wolf. A brief introduction praises the care Donaghy gives every line, his wit and elegance, and his standing as a poet's poet. The questions are short and range widely, and Donaghy answers some with jokes and others at length.

He begins with the London poetry scene since he came to Britain in 1985, which he sees as changed by the growth of performance poetry, a publisher-made boom in the nineties, more women in print and a revived avant-garde, with London slightly less central. He then explains why he withdrew from the Forward Prize judging panel after allegations of bias. He calls the charge absurd, since five judges vote in confidence and an arts prize should reflect taste, though he grants that prizes keep drawing on the same pool of judges. Asked about promising poets, he prefers promising old ones, and names Peter Porter, Roy Fisher, Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur. He describes how attention gathers around already prominent poets, comparing it to gravity acting on mass.

Several answers are deliberately flippant, among them his advice on the quickest route to success, a joke about carrying a spoon against soup showers. More serious ones follow. He doubts that the unconscious as Freud and Jung described it has scientific support, while granting the irrational, sudden insight and lateral thinking. On Conjure, he says a poem takes on its own momentum once started, that some of its poems took over seven years, and that his collections have each taken five to seven years. He is working on a novel and two Faber anthologies, a Marvell selection and 101 poems about childhood.

The longest answer concerns music. Donaghy, who plays Irish flute, says he avoided Irish themes until his second collection, and lists other musics in poems: African log drumming in 'Footage from the Interior', the blues in 'Down', rembetika in 'Theodora Theodora', jazz in 'The Palm' and Spanish Civil War songs in 'Ramon Fernandez'. He argues that verse and traditional tunes share an oral, mnemonic root, so a sonnet resembles a jig. He distinguishes translations from Pound-style versions, says habit has cured his nerves at readings, thinks the internet distributes poems well but is more game than art, and says that after fifty years frozen he would check whether his books were still around.

Work
Conjure
Author
Michael Donaghy

Poems in this selection

  • Footage from the Interior
  • Down
  • Theodora Theodora
  • The Palm
  • Ramon Fernandez

Always carry a spoon in case it rains soup.

Michael Donaghy, The Wolf, issue 1

In the end all translations are versions of the original.

Michael Donaghy, The Wolf, issue 1
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