POETRY IN REVIEW: TIMOTHY DONNELLY
2012; Wiley; Volume: 100; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2012.0006
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
Resumo1 5 5 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W W I L L A R D S P I E G E L M A N I feel like Keats’s watcher of the skies: a new planet has swum into my ken. I had heard of the expanse known as Timothy Donnelly previously, but I never really ‘‘breath’d its pure serene’’ until I sat down with The Cloud Corporation. I inhaled, that is, I read. Then the feeling overtook me that all lovers of any art form will recognize : a combination of gratitude, wonder, appreciation, questioning , and a desire to go more deeply, to repeat and augment an initial experience. Wallace Stevens (about whom more later) said that ‘‘the poem must resist the intelligence, almost successfully,’’ and everyone knows that the most important word in the aphorism is almost. No resistance means no challenge, and therefore little pleasure; but a totally successful resistance means no understanding and no desire to go farther. (I think of the worst excesses of so-called experimental poetry.) Donnelly’s poems resisted my intelligence but they also challenged it. This is the right thing. A good poet, when we first encounter him or her, makes us scratch T h e C l o u d C o r p o r a t i o n , by Timothy Donnelly (Wave, 176 pp., $16.00 paper) 1 5 6 S P I E G E L M A N Y our head and admit that any sense of discomfiture belongs to us; it’s not the poet’s fault that we don’t get it all at once. And sometimes, I confess, it is hard to know what a specific poem by Donnelly may be about, although we can register its e√ects. Helen Vendler once began an essay by saying that it was time to talk about John Ashbery’s subject matter. Subjects? He had subjects? As with Ashbery, so with Donnelly: although we know that something is going on, its wholeness may still evade us. But there is enough there to make us go back again, this time more slowly, to resume our labors, and to repeat our pleasures. I expect that other readers have shared my experience. Donnelly writes poetry of and for today. Between his arcana and his colloquialisms, his indebtedness to precursors and his alertness to the present moment, you can find – and hear – virtually everything about our shared cultural life, as well as the poet’s own personal one (albeit at one remove), in this elegantly produced volume. Donnelly has written one previous book, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (2003). His accomplishment in two volumes was su≈cient to gain him the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Prize, a hundred thousand dollars for a mid-career artist. He deserved it. His poems, with their stately rhythms, antic wit, sociopolitical savagery, and calm analyses, betray an indebtedness to Auden, Stevens, the Romantics and (above all) Ashbery, but they are uniquely his own, Like Ashbery, Donnelly ranges far and freely with regard to subjects, tones, and registers of diction. Even the concluding Notes suggest a hungry mind or temperament that takes in all stimuli hospitably: Osama bin Laden, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Gustave Flaubert, Edward Gibbon, Monk Lewis, Charles Maturin, H. L. Mencken, Bruce Springsteen – and this list doesn’t include the other echoes one hears in the poems. Nothing escapes his notice; nothing is beyond his attention. Donnelly is admired by cool young Brooklynites, whooping and hollering, and also by the senior poets Mary Jo Bang and Mark Strand, all of whom showed up – you can find this courtesy of YouTube – at his book-launch party. Donnelly’s is a poetry that combines opposites, from the title on. Clouds are nebulous, airy, dreamy, indecisive, and temporary. Think of Wordsworth’s single cloud, which ‘‘floats on high o’er vales and hills.’’ A corporation, on the other hand, is etymologi- P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 5 7 R cally of the body, something substantial. In...
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