The Problem of the Many - Hardcover

Donnelly, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1940696488 ISBN 13: 9781940696485

Publisher: Wave Books, 2019

Synopsis

Winner of the Big Other Award for Poetry and finalist for the Believer Book Award.

If The Cloud Corporation is, as John Ashbery called it, “the poetry of the future, here, today,” then Timothy Donnelly’s third collection, The Problem of the Many, is the poetry of the future yet further pressed to the end of history. In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts—from a contemporary vantage point—the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and, especially, Alexander the Great.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Problem of the Many (Wave Books, 2019); The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010; Picador, 2011), which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003). 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 from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is Director of Poetry in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Nebuchadnezzar

We won’t get back the hours we mismanaged on all fours
what many years we did the horse, then quivered bull, or drank

chemical lycanthropy: the punishment of a god, his rivalry
by the book, compelling us to chew the grass and otherwise

be beastly in our appearance, but never in one thought
that scratched its point across the vinyls of our meditative

practice in those days, as now, we were always on the scent of
possibility: whether you can love, for example, a human

being in the abstract but still find it difficult to stomach
in the particulars, such as speech, or its behaviors, so often

off in the moral sense, which despite some ardors of the past
and spasmodic form we still keep fucking working on.

That’s what makes a king. Thunderclaps are buttercups
from where we’re listening, the cobalt blue of glaze on over

twenty-thousand bricks an average fleck in Ishtar’s eye.
The same is true for time. You can stretch it or compress it

but you can’t get it back: the god of it wraps the present
constantly in butcher paper, hands it to custodians who walk

into the walk-in but never out. The dented-up door opens only
in recollections. We found a cave in our exile and we sat

in it like a linnet in its nest, resting for a time that stretched
into an impulse to forage for radish tops, wild carrot, distanter

herbages conquered in a sequence ideal for the absorption
of such nutrients as folic acid, niacin, potassium and lycopene.

That's what makes a king. Careful diet, frequent cardio,
waterbreaks, putting yourself first and feeling good about it

especially at the workplace, where everyone waits for you
to crap out anyway, knowing when to say no, or no thank you—

now that the sunrise and sunset points have migrated south
we’re working on ourself tonight. Wash the sheep’s mouth out

with juniper, cut into its side and slide the jiggly liver loose
and onto a platter to read: all the divots and the swollen spots

not the outline of the city as it is, but as it might be, doubleringed
in walls twenty-five feet thick to protect our coworkers’

particulars as they fall away as they power down as they sleep
in interchangeable but smartly furnished domiciles of clay.

That’s what a king makes. Don’t tell your dreams to anyone
who won’t take your meat. They’ll worm them into curses

genetically perfected to attack you in the throne room softly
at first, then graduating up into the big booming voice that spoke

down to us from a cloud at a point when Rome was just
disorganized mud huts. We built canals. We built the abovementioned

walls and covered them in bulls, lions, dragons.
Traditionally it’s thought we built the famous hanging gardens

but some recent archaeological trends suggest we didn’t.
Let’s just say we did. Let’s just say a hidden god who wants

endlessly to be praised has no place telling us to be modest.
Look at all the lollipops that jangle from the rooftops as if

the bold fruits of our own synthesis. Let’s spoil our royal supper.
Let’s spoil our supper twice and eat when we the king say eat.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wave Books
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1940696488
• ISBN 13: 9781940696485
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208