fame and the poet

As I may have mentioned before, I’m currently reading the new collected prose of Michael Donaghy, The Shape of the Dance. It’s out in a few days. What with that arresting picture of him on the front – see above – I’ve noticed the books gets the attention of my fellow passengers when they see me reading it, whether or not any of them will ever go buy a copy.

By the way, there is an event at the Southbank Centre to celebrate the launch of both this and the Collected Poems. It’s on March 14, in the afternoon – a discussion between Jo Shapcott, Paul Farley, and my friend Adam O’Riordan (who co-edited the prose). It should be really interesting, & I’ll be there.

Well, this morning on the way to work I had a funny experience. I was reading the interview Michael did with John Stammers  – a very interesting interview, maybe because they were such good friends; it goes very deep into some extremely Donaghian territory… It was after the part about Derrida’s rejection of Husserl’s being-as-essence based on the proximity of voice to body, his “ontology of presence and acquisitive self-presence”; Michael talks at great length about his interesting youthful experiences of  what are called “untrained-sensate episodes” – “spontaneous exultation accompanied by intense synaesthesia.”

This is in context of a question about religion or spirituality. Donaghy describes how these episodes conform to classic accounts of the “mystical” experience. He talks about academic medical research: Deikman, Gill and Brennan, who developed a theory of “de-automatization,” based on analysis of automatization of motor behaviour. Apparently efficient organisims automate their somatic systems… and, to cut a long story short, this can also apply to thinking and perception.  Modes of consciousness, alpha and theta waves, and a line from Dante: Trasumanar significar per verba/ non si poria.

According to Michael “the ‘transhuman’ state of grace may not be reduced to words.”

This is very deep Donaghy, the sort of stuff you got in the pub near the end of the evening – you’d be getting the quotes from Dante along with the rest of it. It’s the typical Mexican-bean-jumping, cross-discipline-hopping, erudite-song-&-dance-man stuff.

So I got to the counter at Pret and put my book down to rummage for my purse. As I handed the money to the girl, she looked craningly at the cover and said: “Oooooh, is that George Clooney?”

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