I met with David Donnell at the Bar Italia to discuss Dancing in the Dark, his latest collection of poems and stories. He is, politely, not appalled when I pull out a Fisher-Price recorder to tape our discussion (red and white with huge, coloured buttons). I brought this along, emboldened by his sense of the "goddamn cute": in the poem "Mississippians", the speaker runs water over a plastic Tonka dump truck as he does the dishes, before sitting down "to write for the day."
Donnell is a hard-working writer, who has written eight collections of poetry (in addition to songs, fiction, and non-fiction). His reputation spiked in 1983, when Settlements, a book of poems about, among other things, "What Men Have Instead of Skirts", won the Governor General's Award. China Blues, published in 1992 (which won the City of Toronto Book Award), is the collection most like Dancing in the Dark: both books are comprised of poetry and fiction; both tackle music, culture, philosophy, love, literature, and beauty with a daunting lyrical ease.
I have asked him to bring some pictures he finds relevant to our discussion. I am handed a mystifying assortment of magazine advertisements (of men in Hugo Boss trench-coats, a naked woman, and the text for Scarnblad, "that subtle, conventional, yet unconventional look") and photographs of celebrities, including Divine, the Coen brothers, Majek Fashek, Elvis, and George Hamilton. I imagine he is gesturing to the eclecticism of both influence and analogue in his work, and to the randomness of the poetic source. "It's all out there," he writes, in "Dancing, Dancing in the Dark", it is "just fabulous."
Donnell plays the lyrical fabulist in his most recent book, in a series of pieces which are not autobiographical, though they adopt a deeply subjective personal voice. The book was originally entitled Under Thirty, a gesture to his own age (over thirty) and to the ages of his speakers (the "under-thirties"). The eventual title Dancing in the Dark was chosen for being "graphic, romantic," as "all sorts of things happen dancing in the dark." Donnell is not oblivious to the obvious comparisons: Joan Barfoot's novel (in which a housewife, driven mad by vacuuming and Endust fumes, kills her cheating husband), and Springsteen's huge stadium song. The Boss is mentioned once in the poems, but for the most part ignored: Donnell and his cast of characters are either too cool (grunge and punk fans) or too aesthetically refined (jazz and classical music are integral to the work) for the likes of Bruce. Still, his song resonates, as its "gun for hire" lyric is a fitting description of Donnell, who, as a writer, is an astonishing chameleon. Donnell was accused once, by Jill Battson, of not being young enough to read at one of her poetry series, but he exhibits the kind of hipster acumen in his work that most of the spoken-word crew (the author of "Metaphorical Head-Butt" springs to mind) would strike a Faustian bargain to attain.
It is the "dead-on" quality of music that appeals to Donnell, a quality he feels is virtually impossible to replicate in writing. (As for the converse, the book's short story sequence traces the life experiences of a young musician, Tom Garrone, who really wants to be a writer, to write as well as Camus or Marquez.) He is being modest, however, as so much of his work is as dead-on as the music that is cited throughout. The poem "Lester Young" begins with a beautiful slipslide from source to text, without a ripple:

One of Lester Young's most beautiful solos
Is
"I Can't Give You Anything but Love." I can't.
Give
you anything.
But love has a way of lifting up
on the soft currents of a summer wind & behaving
inappropriately
like a red kite...

Similarly, "Sinatra", a chatty poem about Frank's life and times, ends like an aria's cabaletta, incisive and sure: "I like `I've Got the World on a String', the bravura/of the upbeat is like wild ducks flying across Point Pelee, Ont."
It is not only music that Donnell evokes with clarity and grace: the objects of everyday life, which are the staples of the poetry, are rendered here as integral things of beauty. A "mulberry smouldering bombe", "brown/white-flecked & slate bluegrey pigeons", "great gorgeous ball of yellow yarn" tumble through the poems, signalling what is sublime in the ordinary. "Okay, I'm working with simple forms," Donnell states in "Buses", forms that are revered in his work for their simplicity, and wrought for their multiple meanings. In "My Emma Goldman T-Shirt", he writes that he wears this shirt "like a young rock&roll kid/wearing a t-shirt that says NIRVANA," invoking, in this instance, pop-plurality, and the levels of enlightenment manifest and encoded in the common object.
Dancing in the Dark negotiates between high and low (or "raw and cooked") culture without discriminating between the two-Mahler and Patti Smith, Wittgenstein and R. Crumb, Jeff Goldblum and Cesare Pavese are among the book's strange bedfellows. Donnell is not interested in hierarchical distinctions, though he is after what Denise Levertov refers to as ("shadows of") "the authentic!" Her work is often described as a Beat poetry, and Donnell (when pressed) acknowledges the influence of the Beats. Their work, with their confessions grounded in pleasure, anticipates his subjective explorations of the joy found in (un)common places: a selection of coffee beans which "appear like dark oily cherubs" in dreams; in the smell of "fresh pine sawdust, sweat,/fresh laundry." In "I'm 26 Martha, & I'm Tired of Slow Descriptive Fiction", Donnell comes close to stating his poetics: "I am so in love with the tangible things/of this world," he writes, so in love that immediacy takes precedence over the ponderous. (In this case, The Tin Drum as film wins out over the "brilliant" but "too abstract" novel.) "I want to get to the subject," he informs me, to "live in a world of perfect, and perfectly understood phenomena."
He recognizes the impossibility of this desire; this is a conflict that informs his work. The tangible is arrayed in the book as a series of luscious and frustrating metaphors for what can and cannot be devoured in art. (Reading his work, I am reminded of Kenneth Clark's practice of viewing paintings quickly, devouring them, in his words, like citrus fruit.) The "1/2 a fresh musk melon" in "All the Cool Girls have Bib Overalls & Ankle Tattoos" recalls Clark's sensibility. "Life is perfect," Donnell writes in this poem, "in all its modular moments." Dancing in the Dark is, ultimately, a complex modular construction, built with units of sound, touch, and sensation.
Flipping through the stack of magazine tear-outs he has given me, I begin to understand why he has included an article about the chair-maker Frank Gehry. Gehry's chairs, improbable-looking curved strips of maple, function elementally, with each strip supporting the other equally, perfectly. Donnell's book, for all its pastiche, culture-biting, and randomness, is similar; after all, as T. S. Eliot notoriously observed, "When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience." Falling in love, Eliot writes, reading Spinoza, smelling dinner (or "2 small salmon steaks"): all things, to the poet, form "new wholes".
When I listened to the tape of our interview, long after Donnell had wrapped himself up in his grey hat and red coat, depositing me at the Salvation Army, I realized, to my dismay, that I had recorded over my favourite Scott Walker song, where he sings, with his usual godlike genius: "we go like lovers, to replace, the empty space, repeat our dreams to someone new." It seems appropriate, after the fact, to have made a pentimento of Walker's and Donnell's words, to have recorded a poet who is able to replace (in "Winter Books to Read in New York, Corn Chowder, An Empty Room, Chorizo Sausages") a "pool of darkness" with "a river/of infinity," lit by a "slow hot butter soft sun."

Lynn Crosbie's most recent book of poems is Pearl (House of Anansi).