Timothy Donnelly's recent poems seem freshly torn between a love of those poetic privileges maintained by Wallace Stevens and a sense that these are mere escapism, or no escape, an inadequate response to the world we can’t forget we have a hand in ruining

Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation, Wave Books, 2010.

excerpt

"The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence . . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity."—Allen Grossman

Timothy Donnelly's long-awaited second collection is a tour de force, fully invested with an abiding faith in language to illuminate the advances of personal and political contingency.
Timothy Donnelly’s recent poems seem freshly torn between a love of those poetic privileges maintained by Wallace Stevens—to transform the world by metaphor, to retreat from the corporate hustle into the mind, to ruminate perpetually on clouds—and a sense that these are mere escapism, or no escape, an inadequate response to the world we can’t forget we have a hand in ruining. This double bind has turned Donnelly from a gifted poet into a truly moving one: joining the ethos of George Oppen to a lush idiom and ironical sensibility, these poems dream that music and imaginative play can keep us awake in the still-redeemable world, authorizing that dream through its interrogation.
The book opens with the fall from Eden as a movement indoors into “a room without theme,” and most of these poems concern the poet’s relation to the world that room unhappily succeeds, or fails, in keeping at a distance. Donnelly’s speakers address “the world” as an absent deity or lover, often posthumously, desperate to stay speaking—as if it would vanish should they stop. They want to describe what they see (polluted environments, imported fruit, “humanity / in the park’s stonework”), but doing so reminds them of their complicity in creating what they find: “Taking shots of the sunbaked fields of putrefaction // visible from the observation deck. Hoping to capture / what I can point to as the way it feels. Sensing my hand / in what I push away.” For Donnelly, acknowledging the presence of this hand is the condition for both an aesthetics and a politics. -

Representative lines: “The world tries hard to bore me to death, but not hard enough. / Today it made me sit immobile in the bath- / water upwards of an hour, but the fact is, World— / I was totally into it.” - www.believermag.com/issues/201101/?read=review_donnelly

"Salutations from the all-encompassing / arms of a hammered millionaire!", begins the very funny "Dreams of Arabian Hillbillies" from The Cloud Corporation. Contemporary war poetry, of which this a striking example, is rarely far from the poetry wars, and Timothy Donnelly's book arrives at a moment of high conflict on both fronts. Attacking Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry recently, Helen Vendler noted with dismay that Dove had allocated more than twice as many pages to the Harlem Renaissance poet Melvin B Tolson as she had done to Wallace Stevens. Much of the debate that followed pitted an exclusive version of the canon against the rougher energies of a more pluralist alternative.
As binaries go, this one does not begin to explain the startling pyrotechnics of The Cloud Corporation. Stevens's Harmonium features a poem, "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds", whose gaudy cosmogonies ("Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns …") might be the onlie begetters of Donnelly's ornate, ambitious but deliciously flippant and stylish poems. And if ever there were a slim or not-so-slim volume designed to make the high seriousness we inherit from Stevens look like lashings of fun, it is The Cloud Corporation.
"Writing comes from / our accountants," declares the speaker of "Between the Rivers", which may not sound like fun but comes in the context of a playful creation myth. Donnelly's poems stage shotgun weddings of the arcane and the colloquial, the archetypal and the throwaway. Poems are knocked together from the Patriot Act and the words of a Bruce Springsteen album, Shelley's Defence of Poetry and the 9/11 Commission Report. "Even if there is a Deity, I still like the idea / of a team of little fakes," declares another poem, thumbing through a mail-order catalogue of world mythologies. In Donnelly's neo-animist world, technology has grown a soul of its own; when CCTV cameras get around to writing poems, I expect them to sound like "The Last Dream of Light Released from Seaports".
If there is a rearguard action to be mounted against this brash modernity, Donnelly is not the man for the job. For lyric poetry of such high quality, these poems are remarkably uninterested in defending the privilege of the first-person singular: "in believing oneself to be just one / One made the first mistake." The illusion of transcendence is part of the system, since "to presume immunity / may be a symptom", as we read in "Partial Inventory of Airborne Debris". If that sounds pessimistic, this is a collection with an eye for all manner of contemporary hells, from wars by robot drone to gothic paranoia and the info-chatter that thuds through all our lives. Does Donnelly see poetry as the antidote to this white noise, or just one more form of it? The Cloud Corporation comes with an endorsement from John Ashbery, and Ashbery fans may be reminded of that writer's fondness for poetry as higher muzak. As in Ashbery's "The System", however, beneath the ubiquitous semblance of order the poet is busy probing the limits of reality and social control.
"New obstacles shall be established by the chairman of failure," Donnelly writes, as though the American sublime is being made to sit through a staff meeting at Stevens's Academy of Fine Ideas. Sooner or later the reader begins to suspect that the obstacles Donnelly places in its path are in fact what inspire and mobilise his work, with its urge "to calculate // what resists calculation, (…) to control what refuses / to cooperate". "The fascination of what's difficult / Has dried the sap out of my bones," Yeats complained, but for Donnelly the experience seems to have proved exhilarating, and so it should prove for his readers too. It would be excessive, though, to lumber The Cloud Corporation with Spinoza's injunction that all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare. The unanswered questions of Donnelly's poems come and go like mirages, but the aftertaste of puzzlement they leave is an enduring pleasure. As he writes in the sequence "Globus Hystericus": "That left me feeling in on it, chosen, a real fun-time guy, / albeit somewhat sleep-deprived; detail-oriented, modern, / yes, but also dubious, maudlin, bedridden, speechless."
If he is "speechless", then obviously it's not for very long. The sheer scale of The Cloud Corporation is worth remarking on: it brings to mind Les Murray's joke about not having enough time to write a short poem, so he wrote a long one instead. There can be an element of theme and variations about these poems, but while this extends to his sampling of other authors Donnelly always stays the right side of the current vogue for "uncreative writing", otherwise known as not doing any work of your own.
On the face of it, this book easily outclasses most British and Irish collections in the scale of its ambition, the polish of its rhetoric and its sense of entitlement to the same range of possibilities and rewards as, say, a David Foster Wallace novel. The notion of American confidence versus British or Irish inhibition, however, is an altogether too familiar label to pin on a book as outstanding as The Cloud Corporation. Even at 50 pages this would still be a hugely enjoyable collection, and what we have is almost three times that. Donnelly is a poet everyone should read. - David Wheatley


Poets tend to be either lingerers or barrellers. The problem is passing time, which poems, with their recurring patterns of figure and sound, measure especially sharply. Should a poet try to stop the clock or, like a swimmer caught in a rip current, ride the tide? Some of the most affecting moments in poetry happen when a born barreller stops to linger (as Frank O’Hara does in “The Day Lady Died,” after the death of Billie Holiday halts him in his tracks) or a natural lingerer has to barrel (as John Keats does in “Bright Star,” considered his last complete poem, a plea for steadfastness and rest that takes the form, despite itself, of a fourteen-line frenzied single sentence).
It used to be that contemplatives were all, by nature, lingerers. Yet ours is the age of inner barrellers, poets of ultrafast interiority. Its muse is Adderall mixed with Google. Much of this work is daffy and pointless, as though to be wired were to be inspired. But the best poets writing in this mode know that an unsorted list of data is not a poem. If anything, the current situation gives particular urgency to the task of finding meaning inside the data stream, along with forms of beauty both intellectually credible and ethically palatable. Reasons, that is, to linger.

Timothy Donnelly is the barreller-in-chief of the younger generation of American poets. At forty-one, he teaches at Columbia and has just published his second book of poems, “The Cloud Corporation” (Wave; $16). His style is like a game-show shopping spree: everything is tossed into the cart. He demonstrates why the critical cliché of “mixing high and low” is pushing retirement age. What do those categories mean for an American, born in Rhode Island and living in Brooklyn, who, in a given day, reads some Shelley, gets despondent about the news, spends some time thinking about his childhood (Childcraft books, “The Beverly Hillbillies”), takes care of his infant, and has something stiff to drink? If you have bookshelves and an excellent Internet connection in your home, and you are a poet, you might, that evening, eat lasagna, read Mencken, think about Schopenhauer, worry about species extinction, hear “Born to Run,” be reminded of the Patriot Act: all these things are normal for a certain kind of person, and there is nothing surprising or polemical about work that includes them all, as Donnelly’s does. If Alfred Austin were alive today, his evening would look this way, too.

You might expect, from contents so miscellaneous, a kind of amorphous blob of a style, phrases splayed across the page. Instead, Donnelly is an acrobatic formalist, albeit one on fast-forward. His heavy, semi-regular stresses keep time, in the manner of a stopwatch. Because he is the kind of writer for whom (as Henry James put it) “relations stop nowhere,” regular stanzas—he often favors the tercets that Wallace Stevens adapted from Dante—act as his firewall, his check on language that otherwise threatens to go utterly haywire. Here is the opening of his long poem “Globus Hystericus”:

A pity the selfsame vehicle that spirits me away from
factories of tedium should likewise serve to drag
me backwards into panic, or that panic should erect

massive factories of its own, their virulent pollutants
havocking loved waterways, frothing all the reed-
fringed margins acid pink and gathering in the shell

and soft tissues of the snails unknowingly in danger
as they inch up stems.

That’s quite a sentence: imagine it printed as prose, and you get some sense of Donnelly’s ingenious way of corralling catch-as-catch-can language within formal intervals. I have heard Donnelly read these lines aloud: the effect is thrilling but also a little scary, like taking a ride inside his metabolism. At this extreme, the temporal discontinuities of poetry, revving and slowing, are as hard to withstand as anything the weirdest visual art does to our sense of space. Donnelly’s style must be withstood before it is enjoyed.
The title poem of “The Cloud Corporation” reimagines the Biblical story of Noah, only with the cogs and wheels of corporate machinery where we would expect a rainbow:

The clouds part revealing the advocates of clouds,
believers in people, ideas and things, the workers
of the united fields of clouds, supporters of the wars

to keep clouds safe, the devotees of heartfelt phrase
and belief you can change with water over time.

The language of faith (“advocates,” “believers,” “supporters,” “devotees”) has been transformed into the slogans of commerce (you can just imagine a company whose logo reads “Believers in people, ideas and things!”). These poems are full of old vocabularies now repurposed for commercial use. The cloud was doing just fine in poetry (in Wordsworth’s “I Wander’d Lonely as a Cloud,” among many other poems) before Donnelly noticed that it could use an update: this new kind of godlike “cloud”—as in “cloud computing”—knows everything, contains everything, stores the entire past, and will outlast us.
As clouds incorporate, corporations take on features previously assigned to people. They have bodies (the word “corporation,” of course, derives from corpus, the Latin word for body; it is the central word of the Latin Eucharist), they have futures, they have identities; the Supreme Court just granted them the right of free expression. How are we to regard this “congregation of bodies / united into one immaterial body, a fictive person / around whom the air is blurred with money”? For Donnelly, corporations even have whims, and moods, and desires, all of which, he suggests, are aimed at us.
Successful books of poetry imagine the world in their terms; but the world of money and power that “The Cloud Corporation” imagines is especially dangerous, because it has already imagined us, our futures and fates. Outside its projection of an abstract “us” whose cravings and loathings it controls, we have no meaning:

Always around me, on my body, in my mouth, I fear them
and their love of money, everything I do without
thinking to help them make it. And if I am felt to be

beside the point, I have wanted that, to live apart
from what depends on killing me a little bit to keep
itself alive, and yet not happily, with all its needs

and comforts met, but fattened so far past that point
I am engrossed, and if I picture myself outside of it
it isn’t me anymore, but a parasite cast out, inviable.

The suggestion here is that the farther one feels from capital the more it saturates our innermost drives, “everything I do without / thinking.” This line break is the instantly eroded moment of restraint, the cancelled “going without” that anyone who gets hungry, or horny, or bored, or restless, and has some money has felt.

Oddly, though, for a book so freaked out about our times, “The Cloud Corporation” is always amused—anxiously, restlessly so—and often even elated. Part of that spirit comes from the pace, the native excitement that is the barreller-poet’s birthright. But there is much more to it. In Donnelly’s hands, we feel again that we live in a universe with a god. The god is money: his center is everywhere and his circumference nowhere. He works with contracts rather than with covenants; in place of grace, he sends takeout, Chivas Regal, and surround sound. What a world awaits if we walk in his will! You can poke your nose out into the cool night, and come back with food:

I hear the naked hands of strangers make

my dumplings but experience insists what makes them
mine is money. I open the door and I extend good money
into ancient night, night prosperous with stars, order heavy
in my hand. I’m immortal that way. I lie down and I feed.

Yet one senses that Donnelly doesn’t want things any different: the word “prosperous” meant “according to one’s wishes” long before it meant “rich,” and it has long-standing associations with magic (Shakespeare named his magician Prospero). The money doesn’t invalidate the night; the two facts, stars and dumplings, overlap.
Donnelly’s self-delighting self-disgust is not a new tone in poetry, but it makes him an important poet of American domestic life. We have, from O’Hara and others, great urban poems about going out. Donnelly’s is a rarer kind of city poetry, a poetry of staying in. Eating lasagna, listening to Steely Dan, playing with your brand-new American baby, writing poetry: these fall-of-the-empire activities are pleasures, no matter who profits from them. Which is precisely the rationale for Donnelly’s gluttonous style, a style that in its overfed body controverts an asceticism that the poet sometimes, in the interest of ideological consistency, seems to favor:

We rent ourselves to what force will enjoy us
into oblivion: wind, drink, sleep. We pimp, we whore.
We become like those who seek to destroy us.

We cat-and-mouse, roughhouse, inflatable-toy us
in our heads’ red maze, in its den, on its shore.
We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us.

“The Cloud Corporation” offers no way out of this self-consuming contemporary moment, but it does offer some “Advice to Baboons of the New Kingdom”:

As you rest between ceremonies, watch the outlines
of your votaries interrupt the faint light at the mouth

of the corridor that leads from the temple’s entrance down
to your holy chamber. In this manner, you will pass

months, whole seasons, possibly years, until you are
possessed of a god at last, and this one means business.

 - Dan Chiasson

 review by Willard Spiegelman 

Timothy Donnelly, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit. Grove Press, 2003.

read it at Google Books

Timothy Donnelly's poems have already garnered a following in some of America's best literary journals (The Paris Review, Ploughshares), and the long-awaited publication of his first collection of poetry will make a spectacular new addition to the Grove Press Poetry Series. Donnelly seduces the reader with his ability to summon up just about any topic, sensibility, or thought, with the self-assurance and effortlessness of a skilled master. The title poem is a brilliant expose of an imaginary play that is an allegorical rendering of a single lifetime. Donnelly imagines a stage and populates it with objects that emerge as pictorial and poetic anchors punctuating the enveloping verse. As the poem craftily weaves around these, its energy builds up to a climax that is both a luminous poetic offering and an amatory overture at the reader. In "Accidental Species," he puts forth a remarkable statement about his own efforts as a poet, a humorous ars poetica ("If I only had a crutch I wouldn't wobble / half so much") by way of a heartbreaking lover's complaint ("The terror I inspired I am made to feel"). Acclaimed by Richard Howard as "brilliant and masterful," Timothy Donnelly's premiere work combines an extraordinary gift for rhetorical exuberance and syntactical intricacy with a stunning poetic maturity. For its thoughtfulness and range, for the sheer energy of its rhetoric, and for the audacity of its poetic acumen, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit is a remarkable debut collection from one of our most outstanding and original young poets.

 

review by James Rother

 

Globus Hystericus          

Hymn to Life

Timothy Donnelly on The Cloud Corporation, Romanticism, and “The Historical Sense”