The Spoils: April 2012

To celebrate National Poetry Month, I bought one book. That would be sad if that one book wasn’t:

the cover of Timothy Donnelly’s debut collection

It’s a great book though, even if I’m beginning to realize that I can’t read Timothy Donnelly‘s poetry straight through unlike, say, Graham Foust, John Beer, and Michael Robbins.

Anyway, Donnelly has gotten a lot of buzz, especially since the release of his second collection The Cloud Corporation a couple of years ago, so I’ll just link to an interview where he talks about what it was like “before he was famous” and this link has one poem and a short piece on what one might call his poetics, at least circa 2003, when Twenty-seven Props… was released.

Three Poems By Three Poets

• “Nietzsche’s Hands” by Christopher Middleton
• “Stone” by Michael Palmer
• “The New Intelligence” by Timothy Donnelly

Timothy Donnelly

I once posted an excerpt from a great interview with poet Timothy Donnelly, but I’ve yet to write about how captivated I am by his poems and poetics. His recent collection The Cloud Corporation has gotten rave reviews, and he’s been compared to Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane (and Jay-Z).

What I’d like to do here for now is link to the text of “The Cloud Corporation” and his reading of it, as well as a review that discusses the difficulty and duplicity of his work, especially with regard to selfhood (and which also compares him to Jay-Z). All of those are themes I’m seeking to explore in my thesis. Well, not Jay-Z, but you know.

Timothy Donnelly on Wallace Stevens

With Stevens, even before understanding any of his poems, I just felt that my thoughts wanted desperately to sound like his poems, at least on special occasions—those cadences, that composure. Even just the example of the tercet alone, actually, was important to me when writing these two poems you mention, and many of the others in the new book, too. The fall of thoughts through tercets the way he does it has always seemed just so right to me. They’re dynamic enough to keep things feeling always like they’re moving forward and yet they convey something of a solidity, a groundedness considerably greater than the couplet’s, yet not so very stable as the quatrain’s.

from Coldfront » spotlight: Timothy Donnelly.