Streetfighting: an Interivew With Daniel DonaghyI recently came across Daniel Donaghy’s debut poetry collection Streetfighting from BkMk Press. I was really taken by this book. These poems are tight and hard, like a roll of quarters in a fist. So I decided to contact Mr. Donaghy, and he was kind enough to give us some time for a talk about Bruce Springstein and growing up in Philadelphia. Also, check out three new poems by Daniel Donaghy in this issue, right here. And check out this amazing recipe for a chocolate martini. Ghoti Magazine: The Philadelphia you describe seems like a tough place. Do you go back ever/often? How have people there responded to the book? Daniel Donaghy: I go back to Philadelphia often––at least a few times a year––but I have not been back to Kensington in several years. Everyone I knew there has either moved away or died and so much of the landscape has changed since I left. Even the playgrounds we escaped to as kids are gone now. There’s really no reason for me to go back other than to kick up ghosts, which I’m sure I’ll do at some point. It’s strange: I feel completely disconnected from that neighborhood in one sense and deeply rooted to it in another. I don’t know when I’ll go back there, but I do know that I think about Kensington every day, that it informs the way I react to the world I live in now in innumerable ways. As to how people there have responded to the book, I don’t know. I haven’t heard a thing. I would bet that there aren’t too many people there who know about it yet, although I’d like to change that by giving some readings in the area. I was hoping the Philadelphia Inquirer would run a review of the book, but unfortunately the Inquirer reviews very few poetry collections. GM: There's a lot of damage in these poems. Many of the characters seem weighed down by life. Would you call these autobiographical poems? Are you working through your own experiences on paper?
DD: My poems are autobiographical in the sense that the settings and
characters arise from my own experiences––either through
something I’ve directly experienced or read about or heard about. Very
few of my poems, however, are completely true in a historical sense.
I don’t feel any particular sense of allegiance to the “true”
story, since so much of what we remember is not in fact what happened.
At least, not exactly as we remember it. How many times, for example,
have you been sure of a memory––the time your brother put
your dog in the dryer, say, and the dog would have died if your mother
didn’t go down to check on the sheets––only to find
out years later you have misremembered the event. It wasn’t the
dog, as it turns out, it was the cat, and it wasn’t the dryer,
it was the freezer, and the only reason the cat survived was because
your dad heard her meowing during dinner. See what I mean? I try to tell a kind of “truth” that can’t be disputed. I want to tell heart truths, hard-earned emotional truths. I try to get something pushing against the heart of people in my poems from the first lines. Then I wrestle with that tension over the course of the poem. About my writing to work through my experiences on paper: I think I did that more frequently early on, especially in terms of my parents’ relationship. They struggled with a lot of things, and I didn’t know what to make of what they were going through for a very long time. So I wrote poems about them––especially about my father––in which we had conversations that we could not have had in real life. In poems, my father talked to me about his Korean War experiences, his parents both dying when he was very young, his first marriage. In poems, he taught me how to fix things and do things. Our personal relationship was strained for several years, and writing poems––as well as reading terrific father poems such as Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and dozens of others––helped me move past judging my father and toward trying to understand him. My father went through a lot in his life––more that just about anyone I’ve ever met––and the poems allowed me to honor those experiences while also helping me to move through some pretty intense emotions I felt toward him at the time. I still write to get through difficult times. A perfect example is my mother’s death. Losing her was the just about the worst possible thing I could imagine happening to me at that time. Her absence is an ache that is always with me, so writing poems about her allows me to maintain a relationship with her in a very real sense. For example, I recently finished a poem called “My Mother in Connecticut” in which she’s walking around where we live now, still in her light blue coat, still with her dog and curlered hair. In that poem, my mother is alive again. She’s calling me outside to come be with her. Such instances make me think of the great line from E.B. White’s great essay “Once More to the Lake,” in which White writes, after seeing a dragonfly that looked just like the ones he saw so often as a boy, “It was as if the years were a mirage and there had been no years.” Of course there had been years, of course time had passed. In that instant, however––that miraculous, imagined instant––time reversed itself. I write often about my mother, and when I do, I feel her close to me. When I get to the end of something I think she’d like, I can hear her saying “That’s a nice one, Danny. That’s beaut-ee-ful.” Writing through one’s experiences can lead a writer to produce some very important work, as long as the writer works hard to show restraint, avoid easy answers, and let the power of the world conjured up in the work speak for itself. Writing about intense situations requires exact language. One of the common pitfalls associated with writing about personal experiences––especially early on in one’s writing career––is that the writer may be more committed to expressing emotions than relating to readers. There are plenty of things we write that we may never show to anyone else, and in those pieces, we can be as vague and sloppy as we wish, I suppose. If we want readers to relate to our work, however, we can’t be vague or sloppy or imprecise or obscure or exclusive. We must be precise. Without at least some vague sense of audience outside of ourselves, our writing can slip into something resembling a diary or blog entry, which may make us feel better––at least while we’re writing it––but isn’t probably going to hold up to the rigors of revision and isn’t going to do much for anyone else. GM: You write about a working class that seems to have been abandoned in many instances – the railroad that plays such a pivotal part in these poems is dying or dead, factories close down and move overseas. What is it about these people's stories that appeals to you? DD: The stories of the people in my poems are my stories. They are what I know most intimately about the way people interact with each other and wrestle with the forces of the world. They are sources of endless inspiration and endless mystery. As you mentioned, a lot of the people and places in my work are dying or dead. Writing about them is my attempt to keep them from fading into oblivion. Writing about them also gives me the chance to live my life twice, in a way, and maybe figure some things out that I didn’t get the first time. GM: You handle very emotional situations without being distracted by sentimentality. Is it difficult for you to write about such powerful experiences without projecting an agenda – like self-pity or anger? DD: Thanks for that compliment. Sentiment is something that is at the heart of my work, so sentimentality––that undeserved request for the reader’s emotions––is always lurking. It’s not hard to steer clear of, though––as long as one honestly tries to live up to the demands to the work. I have no agenda when I write, and I wouldn’t really be interested in writing with one. I’ve come a long way since I left Kensington, so self-pity will not, I hope, find its way into my work. Anger often does, though. I don’t know what is going to be at the heart of the poems when I start them. I don’t set out to write an angry poem, but if the poem calls for anger (or fear or regret or some other powerful emotion), then I do my best to develop that mood as fully as I can. As I mentioned earlier, I am attracted to the mysteries surrounding people and places. When I write, I want to see if I can get into the heart of those mysteries and learn something I didn’t know already, or recognize something that I didn’t know I knew. GM: You reference Bruce Springsteen at one point. Would you consider him an influence? DD: I refer to Bruce Springsteen several times in Streetfighting. I quote from him in the book’s epigraph and refer to him in several poems. I’m sure I’ll refer to him again in work down the road because his music was so central to my adolescence. The lyrics in his songs led me to think bigger thoughts and seek out others who do or did the same. Like other great works of art––and like the work of very few songwriters––Springsteen’s best songs call audiences back again and again because they are urgent and familiar and surrounded by mystery. Springsteen’s method of storytelling, along with the work of many others, has taught me to be attentive not only to the world within a poem, but also the world surrounding it––the pressures and questions pressing in on it that give the poem its shape and accentuate its tensions. At the end of many of his songs, Springsteen offers that “clarification of life” that Frost talks about in “The Figure a Poem Makes.” I’m not saying that all song lyrics are poems, but I think that Frost’s points are applicable in this context. Frost says that a poem’s ending need not offer “a great clarification, such as cults or sects are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. [The ending] has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood––and indeed from the very mood.” Or, in Springsteen’s case, from the opening notes. GM: These poems by and large seem to be about growing up in an urban setting. What are you writing about now? DD: I am currently working on Start with the Trouble, a manuscript of poems that picks up in many ways where Streetfighting leaves off. With Streetfighting, I wanted to write a book that focused on growing up in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, a working-class neighborhood that had a lot going for it at the turn of the twentieth century––several booming rug mills, jobs along the docks of the Delaware River and on the railroad––but that was pretty much dead by the end of that century. I grew up in the shadows of those mills, long abandoned, and in the shadow and clack-clacking of the Market-Frankford El. I wanted to write a book that told in some way the essential stories of that place as I came to know it. The poems in Streetfighting were not the only poems I was writing during the time of that book’s composition, however. I was also writing poems inspired by more recent experiences, such as life with my wife, my daughter’s birth, the death of my parents, my move away from Philadelphia, and the shifts in sensibilities that came with all of that. So as I was putting the manuscript for Streetfighting together, I was also beginning to see how the next manuscript would take shape. There will be a lot of new Philadelphia poems in the next book, but there will also be a lot of poems inspired by my experiences after Philadelphia. I hope to have Start with the Trouble completed within the next year. GM: How has your experience been with BkMk Press? How did you come to work with them?
DD: My experiences with BkMk Press have been terrific. Ben Furnish,
the Managing Editor, has been very supportive and helpful from the start,
and everyone else I’ve interacted with has been great. GM: Did you enter a contest at BkMk Press, or query them directly? DD: I queried them directly. I liked their books, hoped they’d like mine, and sent them my manuscript during their reading period. GM: Are you finding it difficult to get mainstream publications to review the book? DD: Sure, but I kind of expected that to be the case. I’ve heard other poets say that we work hard on our books, we do the best we can to make them great, and when they’re published it’s like they’ve been thrown off a cliff. There’s little or no mention of poetry collections in major newspapers or magazines. A lot of it has to do with supply and demand, of course. There is simply not a huge market for poetry. Poets, more than any other kind of writer, need to write for the love of writing. If reviews and recognition come, terrific. If they don’t, then that has to be okay. That said, I think more could be done to spread the word about exciting new books of poetry. Thanks to the proliferation of writing programs over the past thirty years or so, our country has more people than ever before who are theoretically qualified to write thoughtful critiques of new books. Some of the blame, then, needs to lie with poets themselves. If each of us reviewed only a book or two a year, then there’s a better chance that more people would hear about new books of poetry. GM: What are you reading or listening to lately for inspiration? DD: In the past month or so, I’ve recently read several books of poems, including Kim Addonizio’s What Is This Thing Called Love, Bruce Weigl’s Declension in The Village of Chung Luong, Luis J. Rodriquez’s My Nature is Hunger, Robert Pinsky’s The Figured Wheel, Dorianne Laux’s The Facts About the Moon, and Stephen Dunn’s The Insistence of Beauty. And I have a bunch of novels I want to slip into now that summer has arrived. My musical tastes are all over the place. I’m a big Lucinda Williams fan. Her song “I Envy the Wind,” for example, is the hottest and most heartbreaking song I’ve heard in a long time––maybe ever. And some of her other songs––“Minneapolis,” “Jackson,” Metal Firecracker” and a bunch of others––keep calling me back again and again, and they kick me in the gut every time. There are a lot of other people I turn to, though, depending on my mood. Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Radiohead, Everclear, Hank Williams, early Counting Crows, etc. And Springsteen, of course. Give me a strong narrative and music with an edge and I’m usually good to go. Any suggestions? GM: Check out Lucero, out of Memphis by way of Little Rock, if you haven't already. Their first, self-titled album was full-on alt-country. They’ve sped things up a bit since, but there’s something about that first album that still blows me away. Of course, all their albums blow me away. So, any closing thoughts? DD: Not really, other than I appreciate your taking the time to put this together. And good luck with your own work––I’m a fan. I’m looking forward to reading ANTHEM when it comes out next year. -CL Bledsoe |