Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1995 20:11:07 -0400 From: Mark Scroggins Subject: Re: Donald Davie 1922-1995 My thanks as well to Ira for the Davie obituary. I remember a pleasant hour spent with him in his office at Vanderbilt University, watching him continually relight his pipe and counsel me, a prospective graduate student, that I would be better off pursuing my honors thesis on Bunting than on Robert Duncan. When I told him how fascinated I was by the eclecticism of Duncan's influences, he shook his head slowly: "Eclectic indeed--rather an eclectic _fudge_, I should say." That was my introduction to Bunting's work. Later, he would send me a syllabus for a graduate seminar he had taught on the Objectivists, from which Zukofsky was unaccountably absent(!); "He would have taken up far too much of the semester, with too little reward," was Davie's explanation. I was inclined to dismiss him as an old fart at the time, an impression further strengthened by his scathing review of Williams's collected poems a couple of years later, and his casual dropping (somewhere) of the opinion that Niedecker was on a par with Dickinson--both "minor female poets." But if Davie was never quite vanguard enough for my tastes, he always remained a staunch advocate of a Poundian poetics--not a popular position in England, nor in America, where Helen Vendler takes every opportunity to berate Davie for his "unaccountable" appreciation of Pound. [Speaking of which, does anyone have a citation for the Ashbery interview where he says that Vendler told him (Ashbery) in conversation, "Of course you don't like The Cantos. You have to be a fascist to like The Cantos"?] He was always a graceful writer--not a skill valued by many American academics, nor, unfortunately, by many of those who write about poetry in America--and he was never afraid to hold unpopular opinions. His Pound books remain useful. His _Under Briggflatts_,while highly spotty, is consistently entertaining. My personal favorite of his books is _A Gathered Church: the Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930_, a lovely and eclectic piece of historical scholarship and criticism. Mark Scroggins Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1995 14:44:32 -0700 From: George Bowering Subject: Re: Donald Davie 1922-1995 I think that Lightman's encomium for Davie is apt and shd surely be welcomed. Davie , despite his crankiness in some areas, at least announced to the stiff-necked English p[oetry crowd that there was something happening elsewhere. His poetry sounds a little 19thC English to North American ears, but it sounds a lot more beautiful than the stuff you usually see printed in the establishment papers over there. I think that North Americans always wonder how the hell the Brits ever thought that Larkin was more than a light poet. But Davie rests somewhere between the tight collar and proper vest, and Mr Bunting, say. Maybe closest to someone like Tomlinson, who also had an ear cocked westward. Only time I had a real serious talk with Davie, though, was once when I visited Essex with a view to doing a PhD on Bunting in 1966, and Davie sais not a chance, he was saving him for himself. Better than the prof at Sussex who told me not a chance, he had heard that this Bunting fellow was still alive. Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1995 08:57:51 BST From: "I.LIGHTMAN" Subject: Donald Davie 1922-1995 I'm taking time out from unexpectedly heavy grieving to note the loss of a great British poet, Donald Davie. He and I corresponded and met and, like at least some of the obituary writers on him in recent days, fell out; I wish now, like some of them I suspect, that I had sorted this out, but there always seemed more time to come. I only found out that he'd died when I moved into a new flat and his face was peering out of the obituary page of a newspaper in the bin in the empty room. He was always used as a whipping boy, an establishment figure to rebel against, and rarely thanked for his critical work recommending not just British poets but British poetry - as a poetry that should be international and should make serious work with language, and let language work on the poet. He was attacked jealously by many who wanted his position of eminence (he could always get an article in the TLS much better than any others there) but who would never do the labour, of writing well at length and dealing with institutions, that Davie did to *achieve* this eminence. It was always assumed that this eminence was somehow given to him, as privilege, and always assumed that he reacted out of fear and stupidity to certain areas of the avant-garde that he didn't favour as much as he favoured Pound. For me, however, his *criticisms* based on *reading* (rather than *assent*) of the British avant-garde stick. See Barry and Hampson eds. _The Scope of The Possible_, Manchester University Press, 1994, for a fine example of such Davie-bashing. If his criticism was begrudged, his poetry was ignored; yet, its emphasis on language, its sometimes entirely abstract pleasure with difficult syntax and vocabulary, and its constant self-questioning and interest in ideas and epistemology, certainly helped me, as a schoolboy knowing only Philip Larkin, to bridge to Pound and, indeed, the Language Writers - to whom he is much closer in energy and labour and *vanguardism* (ie the desire to bring the future in, from the margin, not stay in the margin) than any other post-war British poet. If I were to compare him to a painter, I would say no other had such a fine grasp of one aspect of her or his (colour/pigment/mixing/framing/brushwork) art - for none has the skill below with vocabulary, with verbs, with a form that is both syntactically spacious and *not* spare and stripped-down in vocabulary; he is somewhere between Creeley/Neidecker and Yeats, and that amazes me as a feat: OX-BOW The time is at an end. The river swirled Into an ox-box bend, but now It shudders and re-unites: Adversary! Friend! Adverse currents drove This pair apart. A twin tormented throe embraced, Enisled between them, one Quadrant of earth, one grove. Now for each other they yearn Across the eyot That the particular flow of each Carved out, determined. Now, Now to each other they turn. And it is past belief That once they forked; Or that, upstream and bypassed, trees Mirrored in mid-reach still Break into annual leaf. DONALD DAVIE Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 10:24:20 +0100 From: R I Caddel Subject: Donald Davie Good to read so many positive testimonials to Donald Davie. Like many I grew up with his criticism around me, particularly the Pound work, and I'll miss him, grumpiness and all. It seemed to fall on me to disagree with him in public quite a lot - such as (a) when he suggested that the Native North Americans are absent from Lorine Niedecker's Lake Superior, (b) when he argued that Bunting was a poet of religious orthodoxy and (c) when he asserted that Zukofsky wasn't worth talking about. So that when we met we were both a little surprised to find that the other wasn't as fierce as we'd expected. The remarkable thing was that he did generally continue talking about such people when most UK "establishment" critics didn't. In his south-yorkshire bloody-mindedness ("the Geoff Boycott of literature" someone said) Davie was very like the late Eric Mottram - a comparison which would make both of them grumble a lot. But where Davie came to assert tradition and authority, Mottram remained committed to everything radical. With mentors like these, what shall we do but go schizophrenic? And miss them both, in their various ways. Date: Tue, 26 Sep 1995 23:42:31 -0700 From: Marjorie Perloff Subject: Re: Donald Davie I too mourn the loss of Donald Davie! I first met Donald at one of those Pound conferences at Orono and he was feisty and terrific: I like his first Pound book very much, ARTICULATE ENERGY even better. But he was a very difficult and self-destructive person. When I published my Frank O'Hara book, he wrote me a letter scolding me for writing about such a terrible person and objected vehemently to Frank's being gay. "The Muse," he told me, "is female!" and so GAYS CAN'T WRITE POETRY! An amazing, absurd letter. He took the line, "I drink to keep from getting bored," and said "If he's so bored let him leave poetry to those of us who are not bored!" etc etc. At some point in the 70s, he seemed to derail somewhat. Having been such a passionate fighter for the new, he left Stanford first for Vanderbilt (which he sadly and mistakenly took for the "Old South") and then back to England and became increasingly pugnacious and defensive. I suspect it was because he felt his poetry wasn't getting its due--and it's true (to my mind) that DD was much better critic than poet. But he did write some wonderful reviews (collected in Barry Alpert's book) and essays on Pound. One of the best is the one about a walking tour in Provence and how geography works in poetry. He wrote brilliantly about syntax: the difference a shift to the past tense could make. But his politics became increasingly problematic as did his social/cultural attitudes--and so it was a sad last few years. It's interesting to me that Ira is so keen on the poetry--makes me want to go back and reread. Marjorie Perloff Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 09:07:33 CST6CDT From: Hank Lazer Subject: Re: Donald Davie My one vivid recollection of Donald Davie comes from the late 1960s, at Stanford. Bruce Franklin, who was organizing an armed militia (The Venceremos Brigade), would challenge fellow faculty members to political debates. Franklin was quite popular with the students; he was also a quick thinker. Nearly all of the faculty refused the offer of a public debate. (Bear in mind, these teach-ins took place during a series of three successive springs when we shut down the campus.) Davie was the only one who took up Franklin's offer. The position that Davie took, which befuddled nearly everyone, was an advocacy of the value of irony, a position which he articulated based in part on some writings by Thomas Mann.... Hank Lazer Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 10:06:12 GMT+1200 From: Tony Green Subject: Re: Donald Davie south-yorkshire bloody-mindedness is maybe one mode of survival in a culture that bludgeons regularly any but sanctioned positions isn't Boycott altogether milder and more amenable, after all he does still get work as a TV commentator? Tony Green, Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 09:12:26 EST From: "H. T. KIRBY-SMITH" Subject: Donald Davie I guess the closest I came to Donald Davie was Alan Shapiro, who was a colleague for some years; Davie claimed that before publishing any poem he first showed it to someone who was older than he was and someone who was younger, and that the younger person was Shapiro. It seemed to me that Davie was following some sort of reactionary spoor in the United States. He wrote admiringly of Yvor Winters, and then went to Stanford; then he went to Vanderbilt where I suppose there was still a lingering odor of the Fugitives, who in their reincarnation as Agrarians were --well, let's say, as Jeffersonian as Pound. Donald Davidson, and I mean Davidson, the Fugitive and the Agrarian of the 1920s and 30s who went on living for decades--was such a fascist that when admiring his poems one has that awful feeling as if one were admiring Hitler's water colors. None of this is applicable to Davie, of course, but his American wanderings had a very odd pattern to them. I was very put off by a piece that Davie wrote about Larkin some ten years or so ago, in which he found fault with Larkin for not being a romantic. It seemed to me it was like faulting Eeyore for not being Winnie-the-Pooh. Tom Kirby-Smith Date: Wed, 27 Sep 1995 22:53:23 -0500 From: Charles Alexander Subject: Re: Donald Davie Nice to hear all the words about Donald Davie. He was, when I was an undergraduate at Stanford (mid-70's), the most influential teacher I had. I generally found him warm and kind, rather than difficult and self-destructive, although I agree with Marjorie that it seemed as if he became more difficult later. He taught me to hear poetry in a way no one had (nor has since), as he had an ear which could encompass the music of Pound and that of Tennyson (at his best, in some poems in the middle of In Memoriam). He gave me an abiding love of the works and spirit of Christopher Smart. Those may sound to some here like small gifts, but they weren't, because they were, in part, a permission to hear and think idiosyncratically, and with mind, ear, and heart. He also was the first to lead me to read Edward Dorn, who in turn led me to Duncan, Olson, and Creeley, and indirectly to much of my work since. I rather think he didn't approve of places I eventually got to in reading and writing, but I know that in a way he helped me get there. He certainly had his blind spots, and some found him arrogant, but mostly I found him challenging in a rather fine way. He gave quite a lot of himself to students who were curious.