Gathering will to lay down with it, y’hear? (82)
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The poem Dream of Arabian Hillbillies - an amalgamation of language appropriated from Osama Bin Laden and the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies - searingly underscores the absurd repugnance of our contemporary political power structure even as it outlines, with businesslike pragmatism, the humble species of resistance we can hope to expect:įiddling among hills of fed clouds and shaken These poems make no attempt to call readers to any particular action, aside from a general resistance to the status quo. To call these poems political, at least in a conventional sense, would be a distinct misrepresentation. The result of this rhetorical end run is a sort of communal transcendence that refuses to accept compartmentalization. Rather than pulling away from introspection and self-discovery, Donnelly writes straight into these modes, embracing them with a cacophony of self-reflective “I’s” all reflecting at once. “Listen to them carry on / about gentleness,” he continues later in the same poem, “when it’s inconceivable / that any kind or amount of it will ever be able to // balance the scales” (10). Just as he plays the restraints of form and meter against the emerging voices of these poems, Donnelly allows the notion of singular transcendent genius to collapse under its own weight. “I don’t want to have to / locate divinity in a loaf of bread, in a sparkler, / or in the rainlike sound the wind makes through // mulberry trees,” writes Donnelly in the book’s fourth poem, The New Hymns, “not tonight” (10). If a poem’s position as an art-object provides a soapbox from which to launch a program of resistance, it is also a potential prison, where aesthetic value is prized absolutely. They systematically chip away at the finely crafted veneers of the poems they occupy, all the while rebuking themselves, and us, for our inability to see past them.Ī cloud of hypocritical guilt looms over the proceedings, which constantly calls into question the efficacy of any resistance these voices prepare to implement. Collectively, these protagonists, whatever their origin, strive to imagine “what it might be like to live / detached from the circuitry that suffers me to crave” (146). These voices are intensely communal, mapping themselves over a “we” that sifts through both time and space. There are historical, contemporary, and imagined characters occupying landscapes that range from ancient Mesopotamia to the 9/11 Commission Report. The Cloud Corporation is populated by a mélange of first-person personas with an array of spatial and temporal origins. This approach frees Donnelly to embrace the role of aesthete even as he dissects poetry’s inevitable complicity in the construct of capitalism. Donnelly frames each poetic art-object as an aesthetic commodity with the reflective capacity to wonder “why clouds we manufacture / provoke in an audience more positive, lasting / response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature” (31). The poems in The Cloud Corporation are fundamentally aware of themselves as objects of production.
What moves The Cloud Corporation into distinctively new, and welcome territory, is Donnelley’s inspired decision to indenture this formal prowess into the structural backdrop for his text.
![taproot gift of the magi taproot gift of the magi](https://i1.wp.com/thecultivatingproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Ratty-and-Mole-1-WitW-1-v2.jpg)
As Richard Howard observes in the foreword to that volume, “every poem coils about its syntax like a sleek python of reticulated verbality” (ix). Donnelly’s virtuosic aptitude for employing traditional poetic form to deliver delightfully idiosyncratic content will come as no surprise to any reader already familiar with the poet’s previous collection, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit. Timothy Donnelly’s second full-length book of poetry, The Cloud Corporation, is chock-full of feverish strings of iambs and strictly measured stanzas that deftly lilt their way into the subconscious.