It
was sad to hear, through Toronto poet Heather Cadsby’s Facebook feed yesterday,
that Toronto poet and fiction writer David Donnell has died. I found an obituary
online, here and here:
Hugh David Alexander
Donnell
Master poet and dedicated teacher, lived and wrote most of his life in the
Annex area of Toronto. He was born in St. Mary's, Ontario in 1939, but after a
few years in Galt (now part of Cambridge), where his family had century-old
roots, he and his parents moved to Toronto, where his literary career began.
David's early years in Toronto saw him involved with the League for Socialist
Action, working along with the NDP. He worked for the City of Toronto
Department of Roads and Traffic, wrote reviews for Canadian Art, and by 1970
his poetry and writings were widely anthologized in Canada and the USA. All
through his life, David played an active role in important Toronto cultural
events and gatherings. The year he published his first book, Poems, 1961, David
also managed Thursday evening readings at the Old Bohemian Embassy, a gathering
place for poets such as Gwendolyn MacEwen, Margaret Atwood and Joe Rosenblatt, some
of David's friends and peers. The Idler Pub on Davenport Road was another
popular venue where David often read his poetry, and his songs were performed
at Toronto bars and at the Music Gallery. For many years David was an active
member of the Canadian League of Poets; he published both poems and reviews in
journals such as Tamarack Review, Exile, Toronto Life, CVII, English Quarterly,
The Montreal Gazette, Maclean's, The Windsor Star, and Books In Canada. Among
his awards were the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1983, for
Settlements; the Today Canadian Comic Poem Award in 1981 (In Praise of
Rutabagas) and the City of Toronto Book Award with China Blues, 1992. As an
instructor at the University of Toronto School for Continuing Studies, York
University, Bishop's University, Humber College and Ryerson University, David
taught, encouraged, and supported his students to write and publish to their
best abilities. In 2010, he donated many of those papers to the U of T's Thomas
Fisher Rare Books Library. He also took poetry on tour as poet-in-residence,
giving readings and workshops across Canada at universities, colleges, high
schools, libraries, and art galleries. In his last years, David struggled with
debilitating illness, yet remained positive in outlook and always passionate
about Canadian poets and poetry. His poetry is accessible, pulsing with the
realities of home, street and working life. And although David was, par
excellence, an urban poet, he also immortalized the characters of his
small-town boyhood. Finally, David makes us laugh when we might least expect
to! His last book, Watermelon Kindness, contains the poem 'Jaffa Oranges Are
Sweet', in which David weaves together his own family memories with a bucket
list, references to contemporary sexual politics, and cultural commentary-all
tinged with the gnawing sense of self-doubt we feel at times. It ends with a
poignant picture of the 'city boy' against a backdrop of urban development:
"…The cranes are flying & I'm eating strawberry cheesecake/at a little
diner called Billy's and I think confidence is just/ a question of what you've
had for breakfast." Chapeaux bas, David Donnell! A million thanks for your
legacy of loving works! David is survived by his great friend Michelle
Jennings, his sister, Nancy Kennedy of Cleveland, OH; three nieces and nephews:
Sarah Gyorki of Cleveland, Matthew Kennedy of Vallejo, CA and Simon Kennedy of
Boston, MA, and by two great-nephews and two great-nieces, one of whom is also
a poet. Please send any donations in memoriam to The Canadian Writers'
Foundation at: www.canadianwritersfoundation.org Online condolences can be made
at www.rosar-morrison.com
Donnell’s
poems were “accessible,” sure, but that wouldn’t be how I would describe them. There
was always something of the breath, and the line, and the rhythm I really
admired about his work, something I could never entirely put my finger on. I loved
his line breaks, and his endings. I was introduced to his work in the mid-1990s
thanks to Nicky Drumbolis publishing the seven poem chapbook crab cakes w/ blueberries (1995), produced for what ended up being the last Toronto small
press fair that Drumbolis exhibited at (or even made an appearance at). The colophon
for the title, produced through Drumbolis’ letters bookshop, wrote “293
copies produced for the occasions of the Toronto smallpress & Antiquarian
bookfairs 27 May 1995” (numbered, mine is #136). I directly attribute this
small collection of poems—specifically “a big yellow moon coming up over michigan”—with
teaching my twentysomething self how poems didn’t need overt beginnings or
endings; poems could simply begin, and they could simply end. Donnell’s poems
suggest that if you want a different kind of narrative, you might just be missing
the point. Yes, these poems are accessible in that they are made of familiar
words and tell stories through a sequence of sentences, but don’t tell a straightforward
story; instead, they float and flow like a river or a long silk scarf.
In Donnell’s poems, it was the meandering
that attracted me, the story casually told and not told, and just as casually interrupted.
A story that isn’t really a story, disguised to keep you from the fact that
it’s a poem, and this is not where stories are necessarily to be found. It
falls, to some, on the fence of the argument about telling stories in poems,
with some poems made out of broken prose. To me, Donnell’s piece (and much of
his other work) sidesteps it entirely, using the loosely-connected story as a
clever disguise over the poem. There is a looseness to these poems, akin to
jazz, but one that also blends a strong storytelling component, holding the
through-line from falling apart completely, but moving in such a way that
connections were made out of just as many disconnections. Oh, and his wonderful
rhythms and line-breaks, of which I could not praise enough.
a big yellow moon coming up over
michigan
‘Every
woman needs a man
sometimes,’
she says
blithely
as
she slips around the dark blue suit who has tried to pat her
on
the ass
& extends one arm black sweater sleeve
rolled up
under
white waitress uniform
a
plate with a wide porkchop, tinned
green
peas,
& mashed potatoes. The potatoes
aren’t home mash,
she
points out good humoredly,
she doesn’t own this place
a
Greek guy does. She has a daughter, Louise, 4½ years old.
‘Sometimes,’
I
say, ‘but not always.’ ‘Sometimes,’ she says,
&
she goes on to explain – that being linked is too complicated
a
relationship unless you’re perfectly
matched & even Donald &
Ivana
Trump aren’t perfectly matched. She’s young,
36,
a very good looking woman with dark hair
& just a splash
of
entrancing early grey across one side of her forehead.
I look
back
at that city, Ann Arbour, & I think of her, & think I should have
asked
her out, we could have gone to a film, maybe A Fish
Called Wanda,
& she would have been great in bed, I
guess, or dancing.
But
you know me,
I’m the kind of guy who always like
relationships
which
end happily
with both people feeling
that
there have been no misunderstandings
no distortions
of
the kind you find in amateur photography
where
sometimes it looks as if Jack is trying to pick
up
Carolyn in his arms
but it’s a blurred image
with
a child in the background
&
actually he was just leaning over with a hand on her
shoulder
to say something to her about the photographer
who
used to be his roommate in college.
Only two of the poems in this chapbook appeared
in Donnell’s subsequent full-length collection Sometimes A Great Notion (McClelland & Stewart, 2004), but this
wasn’t one of them. My copy of the collection is signed, which must have
happened the day of that particular Toronto Small Press Book Fair, twenty-five
years ago this month. Donnell wasn’t anyone I really interacted with in person,
although I would see him in Toronto from time to time. Apparently he would sit
in the back corner during most nights of Stan Rogal’s weekly Idler Pub Reading
Series and heckle, and have a few drinks. I never did quite make it over to talk
to him.
Watermelon Kindness
(Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2010) would be his final collection published during
his lifetime, and the collection wrote that he was “a master of the
conversational intellectual poem.” This was certainly true, from the Governor
General’s Award-winning Settlements (Toronto ON: McClelland &
Stewart, 1983) to the breathtaking Dancing in the Dark (Toronto ON:
McClelland & Stewart, 1996) to Sometimes A Great Notion (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2004). I managed
to be in Toronto during the launch of this collection, a small event which
included an opening reading by fiction writer André Alexis. Well after the
launch had ended, and everyone else had gone home, Donnell and Alexis argued
well into the night about concrete and visual poetry, something Donnell didn’t think
“was poetry”; Alexis and I attempted to point out how he didn’t get to arbitrarily
decide a poetic form didn’t exist, simply because he didn’t care for it. I didn’t
understand his insistence on visual work as not being poetry; it was as though
his thoughts on poetry might have existed as a fixed point, instead of
something broader, fluid or ongoing. I would have been interested to continue
that conversation, but never knew how to actually get into contact with him.
As well, I always wondered what had happened to the writer of prose,
author of the folio Hemingway in Toronto: A Post-Modern Tribute (Windsor
ON: Black Moss Press, 1982) or The Blue Ontario Hemingway Boat Race: A Great Lakes Fiction (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1985). Where did he
go? At what point and why did he move away from prose and exclusively into
poetry, appearing every few years out of nowhere with a newly-published collection?
There was always a part of Donnell that seemed to hold strong onto a part of
the previous century, with repeated references to and commentaries on jazz,
Jackson Pollock, American film, St. Mary’s, Ontario, John Coltrane, blue and
moons and oranges and Lake Ontario and Ernest Hemingway. Blended with these, he
was still fully aware of his immediate contemporary, composing poems on the war
in Iraq, Scarlett Johannson and even a suite for the then-new American
President Barack Obama. As a poet, Donnell was a commentarian, presenting
information reworked and reformed, providing his readers an ease and a pause
for essential breath, on just what the world was doing.
Drunken
Horses
I
still haven’t seen Drunken Horses, and now it’s gone.
Naturally.
Everything passes, even as we walk down Yonge
to
get in on the opening night of this little Waldorf Café on Charles,
something
is always passing, something is being lost,
but
the seared scallops with a mustard mayo were good, some
satisfaction.
Did Otis Redding write “Satisfaction”? I think
Mick
& horse-faced Keith Richards wrote it way back in the late ‘60s sitting
out
on the front steps of the American Hotel in Barcelona
waiting
for the roadies & the gear & the equipment van.
The
desire to keep up with everything
I
fall in love with everything, I bounce,
I’ve
got india rubber balls, I don’t look like Fred Astaire,
not
really, not this morning, but it’s summer & you’re ready to go.
We
need some chicken Café Brussel & a bottle of cheap Georges Duboeuf.
This
sounds totally doable. Baby, I can get my head around you.
Baby,
sweet potato, I can get my head around you.
Donnell had poems such as “Did
Blavatsky Even Meet Edward VII” and “North of 60,” and multiple poems
for the then-newly elected American president, composing “Obama’s iPod,” and his
“Obama Poems” quintet. Would someone, years from now, be aware of North of
60? Might his Barack Obama poems appear dated, placing him back in that
previous time, or was this an ongoing part of his strength, after Gertrude
Stein warned artists of all stripes to write of the times of which they lived? I
am sad to hear that he has died, and just hope that someone takes it upon
themselves to put together a worthy selected, or even collected, of his work,
with a hefty critical introduction. He deserved that much, at least.
Some Shocks Are Delicious
When you meet someone & you feel immediate love
a delicious shock of recognition
you look into their face & say, I love your eyes
& your mouth, whatever you’ve got under those
clothes
I want it.