Please Hang Up and Try Again

Michael Prior on the neglected genius of Michael Donaghy

MICHAEL WHO? SADLY, that’s usually the response I receive, a couple drinks in, when I offer the name of one of my favourite contemporary poets. For all the accolades lavished upon him in Britain during his short life, Michael Donaghy’s work hasn’t garnered much attention on this side of the Atlantic, despite the concerted efforts of such august admirers as Don Paterson* and Sean O’Brien (Paterson’s 2014 collection of mini-essays, Smith, is an insightful and eminently readable guide to Donaghy’s oeuvre). There’s no dearth of writing about Donaghy—Google him—or lack of poems available online, but for some reason Donaghy isn’t read as much in Canada and America as he deserves to be.

Donaghy left America in 1985 after dropping out of a PhD program at the University of Chicago. Frustrated with the modishness of theory in the academy (Paul de Man once asked him to leave a lecture) and the lukewarm response to his own writing, Donaghy moved to England, joining his partner, Maddy Paxman, where he remained until dying of a cerebral hemorrhage at only 50 years old. I once believed Donaghy’s North American neglect was due to the fact that his work hasn’t found a North American publisher, but with their growing availability in Internet archives, I’m beginning to think it’s because of his poems. Their polished surfaces, complex balance of sincerity and irony, and abundant metaphysical conceits aren’t exactly the sort of thing to which readers of contemporary Canadian and American poetry are accustomed. In other words, he’s unfashionable. I can only speak to what I’ve sensed firsthand, but it seems to me that, with a few notable exceptions, the sort of trendy contemporary poetry most often admired in recent years veers towards either overwhelming sincerity (usually melancholy and tragedy) or overwhelming irony. Subtlety’s passé: there’s more Whitman than Dickinson, more Glück than Gunn. Perhaps the ultra-melancholic and the ultra-ironic somehow ring more true nowadays, as if in a world of Facebook and YouTube and Twitter—a world of constant distractions and distant tragedies—only the most visible wounds and most outrageous jokes are worth our time.

For me, poems are experiences—I’m reminded of Lowell’s remark that “a poem is an event, not a record of an event"—and if a poem is an experience, the ones that I find most compelling are those that seem truest to the lived moments I’ve found most powerful: moments that are simultaneously sad and joyful, moments that are often confusing in their confluence of irony and sincerity. Donaghy’s work captures and interrogates complimentary contradictions, weighing irony and sincerity, humour and pain, in a way that feels true. Take for example his poem “The Excuse” from Donaghy’s third collection, Conjure—arguably the poet’s most mature collection. Throughout Conjure, Donaghy’s poems, like the metaphysical poets he so admired, work through metaphor and dramatic monologue, but in simpler and more direct language than previous collections. Nonetheless, his poems’ mechanisms remain just as intricate, and his attempts to grapple with ideas of inheritance and loss are nuanced and compelling. “The Excuse” (like “Machines,” the other poem Donaghy is probably best known for) is wired with a striking central conceit: namely, the automated message that plays on most phone lines in England when no number is immediately dialed: “Please hang up and try again.” Here’s Donaghy’s poem in full:

Please hang up. I try again.
‘My father’s sudden death has shocked us all’
Even me, and I’ve just made it up.
Like the puncture, the cheque in the post,
Or my realistic cough. As I’m believed,
I’m off the hook. But something snags and holds.

My people were magicians. Home from school,
I followed a wire beneath a table to
A doorbell. I rang it. My father looked up.

Son when your uncle gets me on the phone
He won’t let go. I had to rig up something.

Midnight. I pick up and there’s no one there,
No one, invoked beyond that drone. But if
I had to rig something up, and I do,
Let my excuse be this, and this is true:
I fear for him and grieve him more than any,
This most deceiving and deceived of men…
Please hang up and try again.

What the reader has to take at face value in the first two lines—a speaker unable to inform others of his father’s death—is suddenly undercut by the clever lineation, and in the third to fifth lines the speaker’s surprising claim is revealed as the latest in a string of white lies. The first two lines, with their colloquial diction and verisimilitude of sincerity, are a jab at the reader: Donaghy counts on most people recognizing the commonplace nature of the lesser excuses, but he knows most would never go so far as fabricating a parent’s death. It’s an unsavory demonstration of the amorally logical end to which white lies might lead. As such, Donaghy’s speaker is caught in a kind of limbo. He’s committed enough to the lie that he can’t walk away from the phone (the “again” signals this isn’t his first attempt to dial the number), but he’s also afraid of the way his words once spoken might remove his father from the world; Donaghy’s speaker is struggling with the consequences of his inventiveness. Furthermore, Donaghy subtly asserts the poem’s sonic qualities as integral to its sense: the playful recurring assonance of the “o” sound in “post” and “cough,” is re-evoked in “hook” and “holds,” aurally connecting the speaker’s excuses to both the lag and loop of the automated voice on the telephone line and barbs of guilt that still “snag” in his mind. After all, the speaker’s excuses are meaningless to the recorded voice, which, like a deceased loved one, is a human voice trapped in time and thus not quite human, unable to listen or reply

After the first stanza, the poem shifts backwards in time. The speaker notes his people “were magicians” and then illustrates this cryptic remark with a humorous anecdote about the time he came “home from school” to see that his father had “rig[ged] up” a wire to the doorbell in order to avoid being caught on the phone with his talkative brother. The poem ends by returning to the speaker and the automated voice on the phone:

Why is the speaker picking up the phone? Does he want to place another call, or does he think he’s just missed one? Is Donaghy worrying about his father who’s still alive, or has he already passed? It’s not entirely clear. The syntax becomes more fragmented and certain phrases are repeated with polyptotonic modulation (“No one’s there / No one;” “Let my excuse be this, and this is true;” “deceiving and deceived”), once again suggesting the lag and echo of voices on a telephone line. The verb “rig,” which was first used to describe an almost whimsical invention devised to avoid speaking with a caller, has been transformed into a metaphor for the motions of grief, the attempted recovery of a voice that is no longer there and a caller who does not or cannot call. In attempting to “rig up” something of his own, the son has, in the course of two stanzas, become his father and grown into an inheritance of deception and disconnection. The “excuse” is no longer a harmless white lie, a gently comic and dramatic irony brokered over the (dis)connection of a telephone line, but rather a way of reaching out to a loved one who is out of reach. The poem’s ending, which recalls its beginning, is structurally neat, but semantically messy: In the first stanza, the phrase “Please hang up and try again” is completed by the insertion of the speaker’s own voice (“Please hang up. I try again,”), but in the poem’s last line, the phrase is completed not by the speaker’s voice, but by the cold, automated voice of the recording.

Such is Donaghy’s brilliance, that by its end, the poem achieves a heightened, elegiac sincerity. It’s a sincerity that wouldn’t ring as true or feel as poignant without being reached by way of the first stanza’s surprising irony or the second and third stanza’s irreverent anecdote about the speaker’s father and the jerry-rigged doorbell. In “The Excuse,” humour and irony are balanced by loss and sincerity: each set of tonal and dramatic devices are dependent on the other for their effect. Donaghy’s speaker moves through a series of strange rhetorical and logical circuits that recall each other like the lag of voices on a long-distance call or the automated recording of a living voice frozen in time, while also subtly shifting across the poem’s modest eighteen lines, transforming the speaker in order to poignantly comment on the strange costs of invention and inheritance.

MICHAEL PRIOR's first collection of poems is forthcoming in 2016 with Signal Editions.

*Correction: This essay originally misspelled Don Paterson's name.