The Cloud Corporation

by Timothy Donnelly

"The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence . . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity."—Allen Grossman Timothy Donnelly's long-awaited second collection is a tour de force, fully invested with an abiding faith in language to illuminate the advances of personal and political contingency. Timothy Donnelly 's The Cloud Corporation won the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the 2011 William Carlos Williams Award. Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit was published by Grove Press in 2003. He is poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughters.

Genres: Poetry

153 pages, Paperback

First published September 21, 2010

About the author

Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010) and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove Press, 2003). His work has been translated into German and Italian and has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, and Poet, Poems, Poetry edited by Helen Vendler. A graduate of Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Princeton Universities, he is a poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

For more info, go to
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/66-...

Reviews

[Patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do not be fooled by the title, these are poems of substance. They are complex and meaty. People who enjoy reading poems that require careful attention and close reading will love these. I found that if I read too many in a row, they started to feel a bit mechanical. Perhaps that's because they are constructed with metaphor, rather than images? Some of them are quite profound. I enjoyed this book very much.

Thereafter it happened there would be no future
arrangements made as the present had begun
handing itself over to the past with such vehemence
whatever happened already happened before
or stopped its happening the moment it began.

[Raffi · Rating 1 out of 5]

In his world-weariness, self-pity, and rage directed towards the institutions that have put him in debt, Donnelly projects an image of himself three times his human size. Everything misses the mark for me.

Irony in lyric poetry can signal that the writer doesn't take herself too seriously. If poetry's gonna be ironic, it must, for me, meet this requirement. Donnelly, however, takes himself entirely too seriously. He is earnest about how insecure he is, how in financial debt he is, how divine the natural world is. His use of irony usually just reinforces his earnestness about these facts that are, admittedly, hard for me to care about. I kept thinking: You're in debt - so what? You, a white male who teaches at one of the most expensive universities in America, are going to be fine. You are privileged. Stop making a spectacle out of the one unfortunate thing in your life. And don't pretend like you didn't have a hand in putting yourself in debt. No one made you go to grad school.

Donnelly's inflated style, brimming with gratuitously fancy words and winding in long, prosey, unintelligible sentences, lacks the rhythmic drive and clarity of good poetry. My theory is that his style is the byproduct of having nothing to say. Often the book plunges into long descriptions of orientalist fantasies, or of natural imagery, and ends in an epiphany about the holiness of the world that leaves me cold. Perhaps Mr. Donnelly is, like Wordsworth, a believer in animism, but it often seems that his epiphanies are unoriginal and therefore, like his long-winded descriptions, mere fluff to hide his lack of anything to say.

[Biscuits · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of poems to be afraid of, enchanting in their lyricism, captivating in their density, yet somehow simply lovable in their sincerity. I dig how there seems to be so much in these poems, both content-wise and stylistically, without being clogged. Where a lot of good poems today leave me with the feeling of "Okay, I'm affected, I get it" these poems beg to be jumped in, buried beneath. A thick book full of dense poems. An enjoyable book full of engaging poems.

Favorites:
The New Intelligence
To His Debt
The New Hymns
The Rumored Existence of Other People
No Mission Statement, No Strategic Plan
Explanation of an Oriole
Through The Wilderness of His Forehead
The Last Vibrations

[Allyson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm on a roll, finding the good ones. Or, they are finding me.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't usually add poetry collections to things that I've finished because you are never really finished with them nor they you (and the same goes for any novel or fiction worth a shit but that's another....) but this book is perhaps the greatest single collection of american poetry since Ashbery began repeating himself; since the Dream Songs, or Elizabeth Bishop or maybe even Stevens or Williams. There is art here that rivals Crane's best such in "White Buildings;" it harkens back to the french symbolist yet stays here in the present and projects the future. It is a work of genius. An unqualified masterpiece worthy of standing alone with all of the above and just as inclusive as Whitman...it is a carefully wrought and exuberant book; elegant, beautiful; it is both traditional and experimental; above all it is original. You should fucking read it!

[John Pappas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complex and dense poetry about existing in the in-between states prior to or during successful or unsuccessful transformation. Highlights include extensive and adept use of marine imagery, a near-perfect construction of line and an attempt to reanimate some phrases borrowed from law, theory and the commercial world that have become dead. Using these in new and inventive ways, Donnelly's excitement is palpable as he experiments with methods to make them more meaningful. There is a density here, but it is not a density that lacks meaning or motion; it is a density that does work, and rewards close readers.

[Mark Folse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book of poetry I've read this year. This is The Wasteland and Howl of our generation. Highly recommended.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

almost entirely mindblowing, but hampered by a glut of overwrought descriptions too focused on maintaining a rhythmic consistency. to some extent it read like a rhythmically lineated novel instead of a cohesive book of poems. so while parts were immense, on the whole i don't feel as "holy fuck" as some of the folks who recommended it. quite a few times i got lost in the sound & flow, to the detriment of my comprehension. perhaps all these things were purposeful in some way and i just had issues digesting.

i will say that it requires/deserves a second read and i can't give it that right now. definitely worth checking out, though.

[Ryo Yamaguchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic array of talents and approaches--readable and challenging, of particular note, Donnelly really commits to his conceits and let's his wild imagery develop--a nice breath of thoroughness in what I was expecting to be off the cuff image-porn.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cloud Corporation: cloud, which tropes feeling; corporation, the investment in persons of the company that is one's feeling. Timothy Donnelly, with much good help from his book designer Jeff Clark (Quemadura), and the folks at Wave, has created a grand scaffolding upon which to investigate the persons of this drama which is the self. The book takes very seriously the dynamism between what Whitman would describe as "the real me" which stands "untouch'd, untold, altogether unreach'd," the "electric self" out the pride of which poems are uttered, and that self caught out by objects, "other people" -- in short, the world's erotic pursuits, which draw one out and initiate change: "I'd never do anything to hurt the miniatures, you [the electric self] know that. || I sense a change about to last, a shadow inching inward | toward the center of the pool, but then that old alarum | in my ear starts again, a stillness fills the room. Evidently || my purpose is to maintain it. Now and then I shift somewhat | back and forth to throw the too-perfect stillness into relief. | But this is more than just maintenance. This is enhancement." From this excerpt (the close of "To His Detriment") it's easy to fall in with Donnelly's voice, to identify with his bracing honesty -- he knows this inquiry ultimately "enhances" the very electricity it wishes to liquidate -- and his literary enthusiasm (for we are eager to follow those who understand the subtle difficulty of the Whitman project). Nonetheless, the achievement of that caught-out self somewhat eludes Donnelly. The book feels overscaled; as frustrating to read as it is appealing. I didn't get through Donnelly's first book Twenty-seven Props for a Producion of Eine Lebenszeit, adducing which I would not advertise but as it symptomizes the querulousness Donnelly sets up in his reader. The self flickering from the syntactical clothesline is a barely sensible project. The title suggests at least that. There are wonderfully shrewd verbal performances: "Between the Rivers"; "His Apologia"; "Fun For the Shut-In"; "The Rumored Existence of Other People"; "Through the Wilderness of His Forehead." There are poems of a hard-shell overstressed music that make one think of Stevens and Ashbery ("His Future As Attila the Hun"). There are lovely echoes, revisions of Graham, Larry Levis, Hass, Crase. It strikes me as a book that is enabled by our new production methods in poetry, and is trying to redeem them. The effort, however, can seem to overtake the art.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

2 hours of book club conversation and 1 and 1/2 reads of this book boiled down to this:

Donnelly handles beautifully the mind thinking toward and away from the limits of its own thinking and the limits of one's own agency and culpability as a person of privilege in a post-industrial society. The sentences sloshes magically across the line breaks, across the corpus callosum: 1/2 brain corporate manager having just taken an ambien, the other the anti-capitalist hippy high on his own perception of all the systems that make everything suck.

Also, no amount of self awareness, irony, foregrounding, etc can make a book so obsessed with one's own alienation THAT interesting to me.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

finally ... and about time ... this is really good, head & heart engaging poetry (am i allowed to say this?) & my difficulty in "bringing it home" has almost nothing to say about the quality of the poems ... i'm just too easily distracted ... by clouds & leaves & shiny bits of stuff

Update (8-12-23): on re-reading along with the poet's audio performance of the whole book, I'm thrilled again by how good these poems are.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dazzling and challenging book of poetry, often dark and disturbing, focusing on the ideas of knowledge and grappling with the notions of space, both physical space and the spaces between our knowledge and how we know anything. It is brilliant and very worthy of the several prizes it has received.

[Tom Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Formally superb, technically totally cool, but what stays with me is the beautiful anger at a self/culture so possessed with its own hotness (i.e. money). Some of the smartest, funniest woe I've traipsed in many a year.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book I loved, loved, loved at first but cooled a bit towards on rereadings. Particularly, some of the 'found' poems are a little lackluster, and it lacks some of the manic creativity of Donnelly's earlier book. Still, fantastic, you should read it, etc.

[Mariochampion · Rating 5 out of 5]

just really beautiful really compelling really inventive writing. even if you never read poetry, read this book, yo!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very much in my sweet spot-- singular poet tackles the malaise of contemporary life through extended metaphor and humor, etc, and it's from the blog/ html giant era. And this collection doesn't disappoint. These are heady, abstract poems, some in sections that stretch over five or six pages, the kinds of poem that require you to slow down and read them and work through their moves in a deliberate way or to feel like you've been left behind.

The title poem/sequence is representative of this tendency, capturing the poet doing some wool gathering staring at the clouds, reflecting and also (I imagine) connecting it to cloud computing, maybe punning on some secondary meaning of corporation, maybe corporeality, etc. All good.

So I enjoyed it, but it maybe wasn't quite my favorite. The poems weren't studded with enough sideline stuff for me, jokes or surprising terms or memorable and fresh comparisons. These aren't dour by any means, but I also don't think you'd call these poems playful. Donnelly writes in a couple different stanza patterns-- triplets, quatrains, indented lines-- but I couldn't feel any difference in the way I read them. And there was a section in the book, section 3, where Donnelly kind of turned the poet on himself, showing his social failings as a friend, etc, which didn't work for me. I can't say why, exactly, except that I expect the poet in a poem like this to be an avatar, and giving him a real grounding, in a social sphere that I don't share, kind of eroded that voice I was looking for. But I'll acknowledge, that very much feels like a me problem and might not bother you at all.

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

i anticipated this so much i almost built resistance to it. it is such a disarming collection of poetry on entrapment in the world and in the mind and in the bent of language. the cloud stuff is absolutely fantastic as a recurring image because donnelly seems invested in tracing the weights of air piling on one's shoulders, the atmospheric sickness of sublimated forces. many many stunning passages through the meaty work of thinking but this following is hard to beat: "...but in your absence, once again, I will begin / drafting apologies in a language ineffectual as doves." so good it makes me grateful. the only thing giving me pause is the "performance"--in multiple registers--of these poems

[Matthew Buxton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the most remarkable and inventive poetry I’ve ever read. There is real rage, humor, and cutting wittiness in the world building and topics he writes on—especially climate change. Sometimes I think the wordy and complex lengthiness of certain lines when describing really simple ideas make parts of the book feel unnecessarily inaccessible, but for the most part I felt I was reading genius work page to page.

[Hui Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the definition of 3/5 to me

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

He's almost exhaustingly good at the syntactic level. Male Poetry downnnn

[Tim Morrissey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite amazing in how it blends the Egyptian book of the dead with Irish medieval asceticism and the modern woes of a 9-5 corporate employee, amongst a thousand other Muldoonian references.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to say about these poems as I am of several divergent opinions. They are quite erudite and philosophical and sometimes that works for me and sometimes not. Often there are long, complex sentences and then, now and again, there are smallish fragments, sometimes in the same poem. There is nothing inherently right or wrong with either but the short fragments seem out of place in the overal style of the poet.

All in all, I think perhaps he's trying too hard. But I did enjoy something about them. I'll have to revisit these poems in the future and see if I can pinpoint what that is.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult, maybe because I loved the idea of this more than the book itself. There are some spectacular lines here, even some beautiful, fantastic poems. The book itself has a strange, hypnotic energy, and some lines seem to leap off the page in their intensity. Other poems seem lifeless, just nonsense and random phrases. I'm casting around to understand their construction and the emotional resonance I expect from a poem. A good lesson that a poem cannot hang completely on a few interesting words and lines. What's beyond that?

[Luis Correa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a lot of difficulty following these poems and the arc of the book because of the way Donnelly writes and the length of the book. He's not as imagistic as most other poets, his writing, focusing on sound and a dreamlike sense; however, I enjoyed the spirit of the poems, like a manic fever dream. While most of the poems slipped away from me moments after reading, there were some really amazing ones in the mix namely the tiny "His Excuse." Maybe it's just me.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

KOBOBOOKS

Reviewed by The Guardian

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title poem is incredibly beautiful. I kind of lost steam in the muddle of the rest. I think these are best read out loud - great metrics. But overall these felt a little too academic for my personal tastes.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a density of language in these poems that allows one to ponder their actual knowledge of each word used by donnelly. He creates a complex world the spins alternately slower and faster.

[Molly Brodak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of the growing history of my cloud fascination.