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| Michael Donaghy Photograph by Claire McNamee |
My hero:
Michael Donaghy
by Maggie O'Farrell
His teaching style was an invigorating and mesmerising mix of laid-back chat, practical advice, an astonishing ability to quote from memory, analytical rigour, bad jokes, and an unstinting devotion to poetry, says Maggie O'Farrell
"Hair oil, boiled sweets, chalk dust, squid's ink . . . / Bear with me. I'm trying to conjure my father."
There are many of us out there who would, if we only could, conjure the man who wrote these lines – Michael Donaghy, the Irish-American poet who died in 2004. How might the list go? Tweed overcoat, huge grin, sheaf of papers, flute . . .
I attended his poetry classes at City University in the mid-90s. I'd just moved to London and was navigating my way through the usual damp flats, unfulfilling relationships and the kinds of jobs where you open a lot of envelopes. His teaching style was an invigorating and mesmerising mix of laid-back chat, practical advice, an astonishing ability to quote from memory, analytical rigour, bad jokes, and an unstinting devotion to poetry.
"'No ideas but in things'," he might shout as he walked through the door, often late. "Who said that? William Carlos Williams." Or, slapping a photocopied poem down on our desks: "Some burglars broke into my house last night. They took everything." A pause while he looked around the room, registering our shock. "Then they replaced it with exact replicas, only a little dustier. OK! Who likes Sharon Olds?"
He taught me never to throw away a first draft, that every word must pull its weight, that good things come in threes, never to use abstracts, to cut and cut and cut. Everything I ever needed to know, basically. Plus how to play the bodhran.
I no longer write poetry – or play the bodhran – but who he was forms part of the bedrock of my writing. I often find that, when I'm working, I have conjured him inadvertently. Typing a sentence, I will stop and think, no, he said avoid the construct "the (abstract noun) of a (concrete noun)" – cut it, quick, before anyone sees. The other day, I was stuck and I remembered another piece of advice: go back to the masters, see how they made it work. So I did. I went back to him.
THE GUARDIAN
2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm
2010
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey
022 My hero / John Keats by Helen Dunmore
023 My hero / Edith Wharton by Lionel Shriver
024 My hero / Elizabeth Barrett Browing by Sara Paretsky
025 My hero / Nelson Mandela by Gordon Brown
026 My hero / Billy Wilder by David Nicholls
027 My hero / Samuel Beckett by Nick Clegg
028 My hero / Margaret Atwood by Caroline Lucas
029 My hero / Colette by Helen Simpson
030 My hero / Cyd Charisse by Tony Parsons
031 My hero / Nicolai Medtner by Philip Pullman
032 My hero / Jean Genet by Ahdaf Soueif
033 My hero / Jeri Johnson by Kate Moss
034 My hero / John Maynard Keynes by Joan Bakewell
035 My hero / Patti Smith by Joseph O'Connor
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner
041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson
051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal
2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill
2012
146 My hero / Roald Dahl by Michael Rosen
156 My hero / Barack Obama by Lorrie Moore
176 My hero / Mae West by Kathy Lette
181 My hero / Lydia Davis by Ali Smith
184 My hero / Louise Bourgeois by Tracey Emin
185 My hero / Albert Camus by David Constantine
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer
2015
280 My hero / George Weindelfel by Antonia Fraser
281 My hero / Dmitri Shostakovich by Julian Barnes
282 My hero / Charlotte Brontë by Tracy Chevalier
283 My hero / Margaret Foster by Valerie Grove
284 My hero / David Cesarini by David Herman
285 My hero / Umberto Eco by Jonathan Coe
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