Joseph Donahue is one of my teachers, though I never took a class with him; one of my influences, though I write nothing like him. I count myself lucky to have crossed paths with Joe and his work at a time in my development — as a poet and scholar of poetics — when I was most consciously and openly trying to figure out what to value, what to attempt, and how to grow. He arrived at Duke while I was there as a graduate student and began, in his characteristically unassuming way, to expand the conversation about poetry and poetics within the English department.
Let’s begin by making a distinction between “myth” and “mythology,” in which the latter term refers to a big coffee table book that espouses a belief in systems while claiming to catalogue all sorts of mythic material as it arose from some particular zone of the planet. Let’s say that the term “myth” is one that escapes mythology, because it is still in process, or at least that some myths have a chance of escaping the logos because they are still in process, and that these are the important ones for a live poetry.
To live with a poet’s work for a long time is to change and find that the work opens itself to future selves. One hopes but never knows whether the work will continue to disclose its layers over time, that it will continue to unfold. I’ve lived with Joseph Donahue’s poems for years, each time coming back to them a slightly different person, each time apprehending different layers of their baroque density, their teeming referentiality.
[From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate is an ongoing series of letters written by composer/multi-instrumentalist N., founding member of a band known as the Molimo m’Atet based in Los Angeles.]
Reading Joseph Donahue’s Before Creation in reverse order, the short biographical statement at the back of the book serves as a kind of accidental preface for the poet’s first collection. Not only does it tell of his birth in Texas, his adolescence in Massachusetts, and his current life in New York City, it also sets the tone for the text that is to come. With its references to Donahue’s many hometowns, the short, no-frills note keys us into the poet’s love of populated landscapes, his fondness for luxuriating in the minutia of Cold War cul-de-sacs and Reagan-era rooftops.
2014 by Star Black40.jpg "Joseph Donahue, 2014 (photo by Star Black).")
2014 by Star Black42.jpg "Joseph Donahue, 2014 (photo by Star Black).")
2014 by Star Black65.jpg "Joseph Donahue, 2014 (photo by Star Black).")
2014 by Star Black70.jpg "Joseph Donahue, 2014 (photo by Star Black).")
2014 by Star Black38.jpg "Joseph Donahue, 2014 (photo by Star Black).")