I have maybe a hundred things to say about that, but I’ll try to limit myself to three. Like the borders we draw, these formal determinations serve a need, or an interest, or a number of them, but they are ultimately arbitrary. The sense of care and ceremony that this puts in a poem, the feeling of a framing and the focus it can bring, plus that pleasing estrangement from the workaday tongue, or from what Sidney calls “table-talk fashion” and “words as they chanceably fall from the mouth,” make all the difference to me.Īsked if this is all necessary, I would say no. There are exceptions, I think, mostly concerning my preference for larger-scale structural patterns like stanzaic regularity, which is something I typically get a feel for early in the composition of a poem and then adhere to. While I’m usually aware, in a way that feels as much bodily as mindful, of the effects of every line break, say, and of what it feels like for sense to be, as Milton says, “variously drawn out from one verse into another,” none of this is transpires in a way I would call predetermined, or even completely deliberate. That said, compared to most other poets throughout time, my own forms tend to be pretty flexible-if there’s often a strong sense of rhythm to what I do, I almost never write in actual meter when I rhyme, it’s mostly loosely and while there’s often a fair amount of assonance and consonance in what I write, for the most part, it’s instinctual, spontaneous (at least at this point). The words aren’t there just to refer to what isn’t. ![]() I can’t account for every one of them, but on a primal level, underneath them all, as far as poems go, I’ve always felt that poetry’s ancient emphasis on the physical properties of language, and the use of certain of these properties (such as quantity or syllable count or stress) as leading principles in its composition, is what most distinguishes poetry from other kinds of writing, and what makes it most palpable, most present. History is full of evidence not simply of how wrong we have been, but of how we have used our wrongness to support our avarice and ego and atrocity.Īs for form, I’ve always been interested in patterning of all kinds, probably for a lot of reasons. Basically, I think my interest in borders is really just a constant awareness of how humans have come to organize the world and give it meaning, and while I’m weirdly moved by our need to do so, I’m also wary of our habit of mistaking the way we organize things, which is a kind of fiction, for the way things truly are. Other species might define us very differently than ourselves. They exist not for their own sake, but to serve some human need or appetite-beginning with basic cognition and self-preservation, but then also phobia, greed and so forth-and they are contingent on human perception. Not unrelatedly, my interest in the borders that humans draw is informed, I think, both by an awareness of our need for them, as well as by a suspicion regarding how they are, to some degree, arbitrary, no matter how necessary or real they come to seem. But moreover, I liked how it seemed to reflect on its own polysemy, as if the manyness of its meanings was itself problematic-which I take to mean difficult to define or to determine complicated, intricate, which to me, as writer, actually isn’t a problem at all, but an essential condition of art, as well as of consciousness. The phrase suggested a lot of things that matter to me as a distractable Gemini in our nation’s most populous city. Timothy Donnelly: From the moment I read the title of Peter Unger’s essay “The Problem of the Many,” even before I had read the essay itself, I knew I had to name a book that. What is your relationship to form when you write? Is it predetermined? What do you really think of it? In other words, in what way is it necessary, and how does it relate to the book's insistence on the dissolution of boundaries? All of the poems adhere to some fairly strict forms. Monica Fambrough: The idea of borders is important in this book (the title itself referring to a philosophical problem, which is also a scientific problem, of defining any particle-based object whose boundaries are unclear)-I am interested in the formal implications here. He places high demands on his poems and his audience, but it is his faith in them, and us, that ultimately allows for transcendence. -Monica Fambrough ![]() The language is revered, and it is exhaustive. The past, present, and future live together in his work. Donnelly’s poems enact a kind of alchemy. Having known and worked with Timothy since his second collection, The Cloud Corporation, was published to much acclaim in 2010, I was excited to learn about the process of a poet I considered to be among the most insistent and precise of his generation. Timothy Donnelly’s third full collection of poems, The Problem of the Many, was released in 2019 from Wave Books.
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