Michael Donaghy
Michael Donaghy was an influential poet and musician, born in 1954 to Irish Catholic immigrants in New York City. His early life was steeped in traditional Irish music, propelled by the artistic influence of his musician parents, leading him to become an accomplished flautist. After obtaining degrees in English literature from Fordham University and the University of Chicago, he contributed to the Chicago Review and later moved to London, where he lived with his partner, Maddy Paxman, and continued to develop his artistic career. Donaghy's poetry, characterized by its exploration of form and voice, includes notable collections such as *Shibboleth*, *Errata*, and *Conjure*. He skillfully blended traditional poetic forms with innovative techniques, often addressing political themes and the complexities of human expression. While some critics viewed his versatility as a lack of mastery, his work remains significant for its ability to navigate and merge various poetic traditions. Ultimately, Donaghy's unique perspective and creative experimentation have established him as a distinct voice in contemporary poetry.
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Michael Donaghy
Poet
- Born: May 24, 1954
- Birthplace: New York, New York
- Died: September 16, 2004
- Place of death: London, England
Biography
Michael Donaghy was born in 1954 to Irish Catholic parents who had immigrated to the South Bronx in New York City five years before his birth. The family returned to Ireland the following year but came back permanently to the United States three years later. Both parents were musicians and fans of traditional Irish music and his father often recited Welsh and Irish poetry to his son. Donaghy himself became an accomplished flautist and performed and recorded jazz-inflected Irish music with a number of bands.
Donaghy received his B.A. in English literature from Fordham University in 1976 and a M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1977. During his tenure in Chicago he helped edit poetry for the influential magazine Chicago Review. In 1985, he migrated to London where he lived with his partner, Maddy Paxman, for the rest of his life, working as a musician and part-time tutor at a number of universities.
Although a chapbook of his poetry, Slivers, was published by a Chicago publisher in 1985, Donaghy’s subsequent publications—three books of poetry, a collected volume of poetry and a semi-farcical pamphlet and lecture on poetics—were all published in England. Donaghy’s expatriate status, his working-class, anti-academic postures, and his life-long interest in literary hoaxes all combined to make him a singular voice in English-American poetry. His major collections of poetry, Shibboleth (1988), Errata (1993) and Conjure (2000), are concerned with that most traditional literary theme: the poet as maker.
Donaghy was a restless explorer of poetic forms, both traditional and invented. At the same time Donaghy’s political poems, more overt in Shibboleth than in the other two volumes, relate the ways that absolute articulation, “correct” enunciation (and grammar, syntax, etc.) can be used as tools for suppressing those human emotions and desires that constitute the inarticulate. Given this dynamic, the contradictory impulses of giving oneself over to articulation and inarticulation, it is not surprising that Donaghy deploys so many traditional forms—like the sonnet and villanelle and metrical feet like dactyls and iambs—while simultaneously disrupting the forms and meters by inserting free verse procedures and techniques into the poems.
Thus Donaghy is a poet of many “voices.” Not since Robert Browning has a poet used dramatic monologue so effectively. This facility has been both praised and criticized. On one hand, living in England has given him the freedom to explore and use antagonistic developments in American poetry—specifically free verse and New Formalism—without being drawn into the literary wars between their practitioners. On the other hand, his ability to change so many poetic “jackets” has given rise to a sentiment that Donaghy is essentially a jack of all trades and master of none. Still, that Donaghy has written so warmly on some of the effects of New Formalism—particularly the return to a concern with the effects of form, whether traditional or invented—suggests that his heart is with those poets whose work falls squarely within the history of traditional poetics.