John Somerville | Courtesy
“Kind friends and companions, come join me in rhyme
Come lift up your voices in chorus with mine
Come lift up your voices, all grief to refrain
For we may or might never all meet here again.”
The opening verse of “Here’s a Health to the Company” began each folk song session ending Poetry Fridays at “the Donnybrook” in its heyday. It holds a certain poignancy now, as the Park St. house, set left behind Simpson, is no longer synonymous in campus culture with voices lifted in Irish drinking songs, with poetry read among friends, with companionable times between students and visiting writers. Last year, the college purchased the house, and its future is uncertain.
“It’s difficult to believe there are now students who don’t know that the Donnybrook was the epicenter of literary culture on campus and everything we do in that vein now is in honor of the Donnybrook in some way,” senior Forester McClatchey said.
Originally the name of a fair outside Dublin notorious for its drunken brawls, the word “donnybrook” is now shorthand for public fighting. The house on Park St. was christened nearly a decade ago when, prompted by Jonathan Brewer ’09 and his phone’s word-of-the-day app, Ian Faley ’10 flung a champagne bottle from the roof onto the house’s walk and declared it so.
Over the years, the men of the house began some traditions and inherited others. Earlier houses hosted Friday-night poetry readings. Visiting writers sometimes visited other houses. But a tradition of folk music, of Irish drinking songs and ballads, of bluegrass and country classics, made a home for itself in the Donnybrook.
“There was a group of nine guys that lived there before and they were good guys — faithful, manly men,” said Daniel Spiotta ’13, who for many current upperclassmen defined the Donnybrook and campus literary culture. “I really loved them and wanted to keep a lot of their traditions alive. The song tradition, the tradition of singing folk songs together in a big group, that was the biggest thing we inherited.”
Friday nights at the Donnybrook had their own liturgy. The first weekend of a new academic year was marked by the recitation of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur.” An evening of poetry turned into singing at 10 p.m., a holdover from when the Blue House on College St. hosted and the hosts marched up the hill to pray the rosary. The approach of Christmas meant Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” The end of the year called for Chesterton’s “The Ballad of the White Horse.” And each of those nights of singing began with “Here’s a Health to the Company” and closed with “The Parting Glass.”
The poets changed week to week, and once a semester, the poems read on Friday in the living room were read again on Monday in Dow Rooms A and B by the poet himself. B.H. Fairchild, Paul Mariani, and David Middleton were all visiting writers and regular additions to the Poetry Friday lineup. Their signatures, along with other celebrated poets and writers, still grace the living room wall.
The tradition of inviting the visiting writers over to The Donnybrook after their reading for a time of companionship with students began with the poet Wilmer Mills in 2010.
Professor of English John Somerville, director of the
Visiting Writers Program, coordinated the Donnybrook’s invitation to Mills.
“I know that they helped create a culture that was very amenable to this kind of event,” he said. “So I said to Will Mills, ‘These students, they might want to ask you to come over — would you be interested in that? They might sing.’ And he had written some songs, some of them poems by Yeats and Frost that he had set to music, and so he said, ‘If they could just get a guitar and a capo, I can sing some.’ I think he recited some poetry.”
Somerville didn’t attend that visit, and he still doesn’t attend such gatherings.
“I wanted it to be the students and the visitor; and Will loved it,” he said.
Mills’ visit, and the subsequent visits of other writers, were opportunities for students to demystify the name on a book jacket and meet the person. It was the chance for conversation beyond the tired questions and answers of public readings.
“It was just very lovely, because there was unity of soul and purpose,” Spiotta said. “He just really loved what we were doing, mainly that folk culture that we were trying to keep up. It was very lovely to have a mature grown man, a real artist, validate and participate in our activities.”
Mills corresponded with a number of students after his visit, including Josh Rice ’14, who lived in the Donnybrook and led Poetry Fridays after Spiotta graduated.
“I still have his letter because I stuck it in a book of his poetry,” Rice said. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, that was a great night of stomping and singing’ — because eventually we gathered him in and we all sang ‘Wagon Wheel’ and stuff — ‘I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.’”
Mills’ visit set the standard for the interactions between students and visiting writers. His evening at the Donnybrook left its own legacy — one made all the more moving by his passing the following summer.
“The fact that he died immediately afterwards is not unimportant, but it doesn’t characterize any of it,” Rice said of the mark Mills made on the house and its traditions. “What characterizes it is that he was a good dude and that we loved each other.”
With the future of the Donnybrook in question, and with the visiting writers and Poetry Fridays now hosted in other houses, the temptation to pure nostalgia is one Rice recognizes in himself and his friends.
“The fact is that ‘the Donnybrook’ as a term has really come to symbolize something bigger than itself, which is good,” Rice said. “As a term it has always been something bigger than itself. But what I’ve seen is a whole lot of people, either at school, or especially after school, whether people out here in Seattle or all my friends who are now spread all over the country, speaking derisively or nostalgically about the Donnybrook in terms of ‘all you want is to get the Donnybrook back,’ or ‘all we want is to get the Donnybrook back,’ which frustrates me.”
Rice said that in those moments he likes to remember that the Donnybrook inherited its traditions from now unknown establishments: the Blue House, and the Wake, and St. Lucy. And its real legacy, he knows, lives on. Through students like McClatchey and senior Tomas Valle, the hosting of visiting writers and Poetry Friday continues. The men living in the house now keep it ringing with folk music.
“When people come out here to Seattle, and we still have poetry night out here, people are like, ‘that was a real Donnybrook of a night,’” Rice said. “I’m like, ‘No, that’s called being friends, and loving people.’ We’re not trying to get the Donnybrook back. The Donnybrook was great. It was a particular place where some really good stuff happened, and I love it for that. But I’m not sad that it’s not happening there anymore because what was good about the Donnybrook is always going to go on.”
Whether or not this year or the next or the year after is the house’s “Parting Glass,” and whether or not the administration eventually tears it down to make room for the college’s growth, the Donnybrook will always be found at Hillsdale in the shape of campus literary culture.
“So fill to me the parting glass
And drink a health whate’er befalls;
Then gently rise and softly call
‘Good night and joy be to you all.’”