Don Paterson's book on Michael Donaghy continues to be a joy. Donaghy was a poet of rare quality and Paterson is the consummate guide to his work. The book is an essential contribution to contemporary poetry and likely to remain the main place to go for readers of Donaghy for as long as he is read.
There are more compelling poems than Hazard discussed, and there are none that are not worthy of our attention, but Paterson's commentary on Hazard is as much as one needs to know on the subject at issue very succinctly put. Not only that but it condenses so much of what I return here to say about the 'avant garde' from time to time that I may not feel the need to so often in future once I've endorsed all of what it says.
I'm glad to note, firstly, that,
In the ten years since his death, things have become considerably less tribal, mainly owing to the wider influence of a younger generation who just can't see or care what we were all fighting about.
And thank heavens for that. It was the case that the avant garde wanted to flaunt their novelty, revolutionary instincts and unconventional approach and the rest of us who had lost interest. They would write difficult, obtuse and supposedly elitist poems so that only their mates could understand them and then complain when others didn't. I am perfectly happy with such a broad 'mainstream' that everything is included, difficult or easy, rhymed, unrhymed, allusive, literal, lower case, upper case and whether it said 'and' or used the ampersand. Of course there will be innovation or else all poetry in English would still be like Caedmon but this self-regarding little sideshow of puny newfangledness was never going anywhere. As Paterson notes, attributing to Auden, Valery or A.N. Other,
everything changes but the avant garde.
And Donaghy, by no means a conservative poet, provides four stanzas of satire on the subject, elucidated for us quite authoritatively by Paterson.
The first stanza is a retelling of the story of the king's new clothes and that is familiar enough, while acknowledging also that some who consider themselves less deceived by such confidence tricks might not be quite so smart either.
There is then reference to the fable of dancing monkeys who immediately return to their monkey state when thrown some nuts and a favourite avant device of transposing a sentence by replacing every content word with the next word in the OED. Potentially amusing the first time one does it, if you're lucky, but the 'harmless fun' would soon wear off for most of us.
Next, Donaghy takes his text from Acts 2, in which,
and they began to speak with other tongues
in order to confound the multitude.
rather than enlighten them. And the poem finishes with,
Which part of Noh did you not understand?
Poets as distinguished as Geoffrey Hill have said that poetry should not be easy and many of us appreciate all the help we can get with Paul Muldoon, but there is more to them than obscurity or the contrived method being the only point. Such art is necessarily still-born, especially compared to the rich poetry of Donaghy, to which one can return endlessly. As Paterson says,
A flash new suit of novel strategies maybe, but with no poem inside.
All that this sort of poem does is advertise the poet's vanity, their attention-seeking neediness and their hollowness and redundancy. The medium is the message, the message is that there is no other message and it doesn't come any more recondite than that. And so we just should leave them to it, welcome whatever they do that is worthwhile but otherwise there is no need to accept that there is a divide between 'mainstream' and 'other', only between good, bad and indifferent. We are all in a minority of one, no group can usefullly set themselves up as outsiders and then claim outsider status and deride everybody else for not being.
The message of the whole poem, however, is a defiant 'You can keep it.'
It just sounds better coming from Michael Donaghy than it does from me.
And then I seem to remember something and I go and look it up. Yes, here it is. Ahren Warner's poem in the Salt Best British Poetry 2011 was called Hasard. a chance observation, with some random element to it, one might think. Warner's is a highly allusive piece in need of considerable elucidation for most of us. He was presumably aware of Donaghy's poem because he is an erudite and well-read man and so, was he consciously referring to Donaghy, is hazard just such an ultra-modern concept that is a recurrent theme for them or is it 'merely a coincidence'. Well, I don't believe in coincidences and so here we go again.
Or perhaps not. One can have enough of such arcane splendidness.