Haunting Me: Michael Donaghy's Elegies
A University of Exeter Poetry and Poetics event
Professor Jonathan Ellis (University of Sheffield), will be delivering a paper on Michael Donaghy’s third collection, Conjure (2000), in particular the poems that open and close the book in which Donaghy conducts an imaginary conversation with first, his dead father, and later, his grown-up son, himself just a child when the poem was written.
| An English and Creative Writing seminar | |
|---|---|
| Date | 18 May 2016 |
| Time | 17:30 |
| Place | Queens Building MR2 |
Event details
The first poem in the book, “The Excuse,” is a response to of one of the twentieth century’s most famous poems on fatherhood, Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” while the last poem, “Haunts,” is in explicit dialogue with Shakespeare’ s Hamlet. Donaghy’s ghosts are not just literary, of course, but also personal. The paper reflects on the place of intimacy not only in Donaghy’s elegies but in contemporary poetry more generally. What is the relationship between elegy and self-elegy? Who is conjuring who from the dead?
Jonathan Ellis is Reader in American Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the author of Art and Memory in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, and editor of Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop. The latter is appearing in a new paperback edition this August. He is currently editing a new book of essays based on the conference on Bishop's Questions of Travel he organised in Sheffield last year. The provisional title is Travelling Elsewhere: New Readings of Elizabeth Bishop. He also publishes on contemporary film and reviews fiction and poetry for Poetry Ireland Review and the Times Literary Supplement. Last year he commissioned a new poemfilm on Bishop's "Questions of Travel" by artist Charlotte Hodes and poet Deryn Rees-Jones; it was shortlisted for an AHRC Research in Film Award.
Location:
Queens Building MR2
