Timothy Donnelly’s most recent publications include The Cloud Corporation, winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the chapbook Hymn to Life. His poems have been widely anthologized and translated and have appeared or are forthcoming Harper’s, Harvard Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as well as fellowships and residencies from the New York State Writers Institute, the Lannan Foundation, and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Director of Poetry at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your latest poetry collection, The Problem of the Many, will be published in October by Wave Books. What would you like readers to know before they delve into the work itself?
Timothy Donnelly: Thank you for the opportunity! To be honest I feel torn between stepping back so that I don’t interfere too much with how people encounter the book now that it’s out of my hands, but I also don’t want to waste the chance to say something that might be of benefit to the book and to anyone who reads it. I guess what I’ll do is say that the collection was designed to be read in sequence, but not because there’s any kind of narrative or thematic arc at work in it. Its logic is more like that of a mix-tape, or like four of them, really—four mix-tapes I’ve been putting together over the last eight years. Also, while I like books that can be taken in all in one sitting, The Problem of the Many probably isn’t one of them. Also, there’s a hidden track—a poem called “The Human” that I was able to sneak in at the last moment, mostly because I was ambivalent about ending the book with my poem “Hymn to Life,” which felt too bleak, and tucking in one last poem after the notes and acknowledgments felt like a way to let the book end twice, the second time a little more upliftingly.
KMD: In today’s insular poetry culture, I find it fascinating that your new book is filled with allusions to philosophers, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Baudrillard and more. What can contemporary poets learn from reading more philosophy and continental theory?
TD: Well, I feel lucky to have stumbled into a mode of writing that can accommodate explicit, sustained thought, my own and others’, as readily as it does things like memory, music, human drama, make-believe, day debris, locodescriptiveness, and so forth—whatever the other elements are that typically provide substance to a poem—and still have it feel aesthetically satisfying to me, and true to my sense of things. When I wrote the proem to the book, the poem “What Is Real,” I knew that the sublime terraforming scene at the start of Ridley Scott’s movie Prometheus would be central to it, but I didn’t know that Baudrillard would end up woven into it at the end. However, I was reading his America at the time, and then, while writing the poem, a couple of passages I had recently underlined in the book came bubbling back to me when I could feel the poem coming to a close. I’m glad they did. All this is to say that reading philosophy, just like going to the museum, or to the movies, or to a place of historical significance, or even just talking to a good friend, inevitably contributes to what you think and feel and know, and if that’s what you’re writing from, or with—and how can it not be—then how can it not contribute to the poems you write, in a very clear, direct way, as well as indirectly in any number of ways? Nonetheless, I would be reluctant to foist Baudrillard, specifically or for example, on everyone, and I also wouldn’t want to suggest that work that isn’t explicitly engaged with Western philosophy is missing out because of it. Also for me, on top of everything, the texture and the music of thought, of drifting in and out of it or even thinking things all the way through, has a beauty of its own that I am very much drawn to and invested in.
KMD: When considering the work of other writers, thinkers, and philosophers, what does poetry make possible as a vehicle for response, as opposed to more traditional forms of scholarly writing?
TD: Poetry can knowingly and consistently privilege affect and beauty in a way that scholarly prose is probably less likely to.
KMD: I’m intrigued by the way your work utilizes the artistic repertoire of poetry to respond to, deconstruct, and critique the work of philosophers and cultural theorists. In many ways, this aspect of your work seems reminiscent of the great modernists, like Gertrude Stein, H.D., and Marianne Moore, who considered the philosophy of Bergson, Freud, James in their poetry, respectively. Which modernist poets do you feel are overlooked as philosophers? Which contemporary poets should we be reading through the lens of philosophy?
TD: Thank you very much for this question! I think the difference is that, by definition, philosophies ought to be systematic and truly committed to serving knowledge above all other interests, and I don’t think that’s too often the case for poetry. Poetry has other work, and play, to do, other values it can elevate or submit to. It might embed philosophical insights or even provoke them in a reader, but my own work, at least, is more committed to a mode of composition that draws from as many sources as matter to me, or even simply appeal to me at the moment of writing. It’s true, though, that I do read a lot of philosophy and theory and nonfiction, albeit very erratically, and I don’t always finish what I start. I read until I feel full, often. There might be as many as seven or eight such books that I’m currently reading in one way or another—and to some extent, it might be true that I read them through the lens of poetry rather than read poetry through the lens of philosophy! Change, diversity, dynamism—these are very important to me, and while writing the poems in The Problem of the Many, I wanted to experiment with a variety of voices and perspectives, not all of them human actually, and certainly not all of them mine, but all of them somehow cohering into a kind of sad but at the same time ardent, exuberant pageant. That’s more or less my day to day.
As for modernist poets, I don’t know that I’m interested in any of them as philosophers per se. For me it comes down to what they built with the ideas, their own and others’, that excited them. Stevens made a lot of beautiful poems out of very few philosophical ideas, most of them borrowed from his teacher George Santayana. And yet, I should add that I do think every time you re-embody a borrowed idea, you inevitably place it in a slightly differently light or key, or you can add to it or enhance it in some way, or you should aim to. The poem “Leviathan” in The Problem of the Many came to me very quickly and directly after reading a passage in Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 in which he refers to Hobbes’s consideration of how the social contract provides protection for us when we are sleeping. In my treatment of this, I tried to add a few layers, all born out of the comparison to being swallowed by a beast that protects you for its own benefit. Later, when I published it in The New Yorker, about a dozen people wrote to tell me that it captured for them much of what it feels like to be alive now. That was deeply gratifying to me as a poet, of course, because I think that’s what we’re here for, but it was also weirdly beautiful to me to know it all traced back to a text written almost 400 years ago.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are trained as a scholar of poetry. In your own writing practice, where does the boundary exist between creative writing and literary criticism? Does it exist at all?
TD: I don’t think of myself as a scholar. It’s true that I did graduate work in English at Princeton and loved it, and was vastly improved by it, but I never finished or even really began my dissertation in earnest, mostly because, by the time I was ready to, I had already started teaching full time at Columbia and it was made clear to me that I should prioritize my creative work. I know there’s a strong sense of structure in my poetry and that it sometimes gives the impression that I’m a reasonably measured and orderly individual, but I’m really not. I’m not even an individual most days. I’m all over the place, and can be very undisciplined. What I do have is stamina for days, and reliably far greater than average excitability levels, along with a longstanding and deep appreciation for, and complex need for, a kind of order that doesn’t quite come naturally to me. This is what it means to be a Gemini with a Virgo rising and a Capricorn moon—the same arrangement, by the way, as Gwendolyn Brooks, and I do love her (“definitionless in this strict atmosphere” is everything to me) and even got to speak with her once on the phone. As for the divide between creative writing and literary criticism, I think it might exist, in that the best literary criticism is, of course, itself an exploit of the creative imagination, but as I understand it, by definition it should be undertaken in service to an existing work or works or to an idea or set of ideas about literary works, and while part of me likes the sound of that, the rest of me feels fairly tight in the chest at the thought of it. Whereas, for me, poetry is all about getting to breathe deep, and for its own sake.