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.

Insomnia

As darkness dissolves
the forms of things

they appear to merge
into the one

unbroken substance
they have been

all along, no single
component of which

can be said to exist
by necessity, but with

such continuous
relation to all other

components, it’s as if
nothing can be

lost without change
to everything, nothing

can be lost without
losing everything.|

The Death of Truth

    The world is a horrible place.
                  —Think Big, Donald Trump

But my own value fluctuates, falling up and down
with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings,
even my own feelings, but I try. Studies have shown

how I try. The sheer force of numbers. The ceiling
shakes with it, which only goes to show—all the science
is on my side. If I want more, I put an order in. I sing

the body mac and cheese, deep-fried: Tom Jefferson’s
personal recipe. But we improved it, like the Taj Mahal.
Eighth wonder of the world. Dot my i’s in diamonds

and that’s what I am. Handsomest Cobb salad of them all.
Ty Cobb himself told me so. Roseanne is my witness.
A very nice letter. I haven’t opened it. A good call

with no obstruction whatsoever. Legs like a gymnast
from here to Venus. Should put the best possible spin on it.
If it’s organized, it isn’t crime anymore, it’s business.

Gather round now, real estate. Come and make a planet
real again. Bible says Ananias sold a spot of property
to make a cash gift to the apostles, which was unfortunate.

Not a good idea. They didn’t have it in their mentality
to deal with the art of it. The whole idea of personal
ownership made Paul nervous. Guy just wasn’t ready.

Don’t get me wrong: This isn’t me. Ananias set a small
portion aside for himself, for family. Nothing you or I
wouldn’t do. When he handed his gift to Paul, Paul

wasn’t too happy. He asked where the rest was and why
Ananias let the devil take up residence in his heart.
The devil rents. That’s what I’m hearing. He said to lie

about this is to lie not to him, but to the Holy Spirit,
and boom! Ananias bit it. Dropped dead on the carpet or
probably dirt floor at this point. If it’s me, I like carpet,

but that’s just me. Did I say Paul? It was Peter. Peter,
Paul. Same difference. Either way, they dragged the guy’s
wife in next and put her to the test. Didn’t do any better.

Also dead, also on the floor. The moral of the story is:
Don’t give anything away. Only acquire. Lie constantly to
lie better, live longer. Charge the devil through the nose

to pitch tent in your heart. What you can’t get, disvalue
loudly in public. Not worth anything, like safety pins.
No thank you. Only losers need those, losers like that blue

cartoon do-nothing donkey. A tail like that and no one’s
taking you seriously. Hold yourself like artwork till you’re
golden. Art lies all the time, and look: nothing happens.

|Fascination

Raleigh filled his cargo hold with sassafras to carry it
    from the New World to England hoping it cured syphilis

which it didn’t, but its fragrance was just heavenly
    enough to make you think a miracle wasn’t completely

out of the question. Elizabeth herself looked out across the blue
    hypnosis of Ocean, saw infection in the form of 132

Spanish vessels and prohibited the setting sail of any
    one of England’s own, having awakened to a military

need for many hulls; for masts that tower; for windloud
    fabrics but bettered with use; for decks seasoned

by the tread of subjects—their finer, British aspects, reserve
    and so forth. Meanwhile, John White, governor of

Roanoke, rich in sassafras but otherwise an inauspicious
    choice for the crown’s toehold in the Americas, is

back in town for emergency supplies and aid, but given
    Elizabeth’s “stay of shipping,” won’t be allowed to return

to Roanoke for years. Two long years White pounds his pewter
    tankard down, having abandoned wife and daughter

to an end without an author, his tankard cylindrical,
    lidded with an acorn thumbpiece, and filled with ale

whose froth spatters on the tabletops in meaningful patterns
    he can’t yet discern: first the arrowhead of Hatteras,

then a crescent of the Armada, then at last a mitten or
    one- or three-lobed leaf of sassafras, frequent thickener

of stews for the Choctaw, who still dry its foliage and grind
    it into a powder high in mucilage, which is found

also in quantity in okra, whose seedpods are said to have
    been taken from Africa to feed the colonies’ growing slave

population as cheaply as possible. High on the list of
    heat- and drought-resistant crops, okra means to live

despite untenable conditions and deserves a tribute
    unique among those owed to every plant whose leaf, root,

flower, berry, bark or fruit has gotten us as far as this
    without complaint: aloe, apple, artichoke, and asparagus

to start, then aubergine, a favorite of Alexander the Great
    who carried it from India and into Babylon despite

his astronomer’s warning that the thunderous local deity
    Marduk had enough already, but the Macedonian was pretty

sure a promise to repair Marduk’s temple—in ruins since
    Sennacherib toppled it, and felt by fringe historians

to have been the true Tower of Babel—might serve to soften
    the god’s heart. But apparently not. Alexander’s coffin,

all gold, filled with rumored honey and carried west, far
    from his deathbed in the palace built by Nebuchadnezzar

centuries earlier, came to rest in Alexandria, founded by
    and named for himself, site where his successor Ptolemy

eventually built the celebrated library that Callimachus
    worked at, and whose fiery destruction was traumatic as

a blunt force to the head of humanity. You can still feel it
    today. Cherokee drank a tea of sassafras root to dispollute

the blood in Raleigh’s day, but knew never to drink it more
    than a week at a time. English colonists came, saw

and concocted a copycat tonic that mutated into the diet
    root beer I have here, its frothy head no longer an intricate

play of sassafras mucilage because the FDA determined
    a principle in the root was hepatocarcinogenic to rodent

life in 1960. Now most manufacturers add extract of soapbark
    to parrot the effect. In his Life of Alexander, Plutarch

recalls that the hero was born on the same day Herostratus
    set the Temple of Diana in Ephesus ablaze so that his

name would live forever. Soapbark acts as a foaming agent
    in many fire extinguishers. Without his imprisonment

and brace of assistants, Raleigh wouldn’t have produced
    The History of the World, whose first book states the greatest

wonder of the earth is the palm tree. I have stood beneath
    a tall one in L.A. and watched its full fronds seethe

like the mane of a lion. Diana’s temple the way the Ephesian
    workforce fixed it is remembered as one of the seven

wonders of antiquity, its chalk white blinding under chicory
    blue Turkish skies. I hear the fingertips of history

thrum on tabletops in Roanoke and when popcorn bursts as it
    spins in my microwave. When I open the bag opposite

my kitchen window, the night reflects my face back in at
    me through the steam expressed from kernels to fascinate

its way back into the water cycle, in order to be the rain
    that fed the sassafras we hid in before I had to be human.
|All Through the War

I couldn’t remember any of it any more than I could feel
the corporate brotherhood at work among my breakfast flakes
or in those protein shakes I drank to keep my strength up.

I couldn’t feel the toxicity the way I thought I should:
little silver pinpricks in my liver and then all over my body
steadily proceeding to a brownout in my limbic system,

the not knowing when I was, if or where we were at war with
and for what reason now. All the time I stopped eating
meat again. I stopped eating sugar. I bought four watches,

each watch stopped. I bought a pound of raw rough bulk
lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and I couldn’t stop my tongue
from licking a certain piece of it like a dirty blue wedge

of Toblerone to know how it would feel. As for time, I didn’t
always feel right with it, especially when alone especially
by the sea, where time widens to include more of itself,

partly because of the motion and partly because of sound,
which is also motion. A decade of drone strikes in the north
couldn’t stop Pakistani street vendors from salt-roasting

sweet corn in pans like steep-sided woks. My eyesight grew
worrisome, I felt light tingling in my extremities and left cheek
I imagined meant diabetes, but it turned out to be nothing.

I turned out to be fine. Last week an airstrike in Somalia
targeting an insurrectionist youth group killed a dozen or so.
Yesterday they seized a village in the center of the country.

After my father’s surgery, I went to Ireland on my own.
I told the lighthouse keeper I was worried something was
wrong with me because I couldn’t stop looking at the water

with all its changing shapes and color. She said we are all
the same here love, all the same. Often in quiet I can still feel
the stone’s abrasion on my tongue. I pulled a lichen from

the bronze age megalith with intent to burn it back home.
I made Syrian red pepper and walnut dip flavored with cumin
and pomegranate molasses. There is nothing more delicious

when eating this. How many seeds did Persephone take?
I thought I could cry for my friend no further until I opened
her armoire to lay to rest her scented shirts in an appliance box:

white, off white, shell pink, true pink, lilac, lavender, blue.
As polar seas warm up, the shrinking difference in air pressure
between the poles and the equator weakens the jet stream

and makes its path wobblier, explaining all this erratic weather
we’ve been up to. The senate voted against the resolution
to stop support of the Saudi intervention in Yemen as Trump

took lunch with the Saudi crown prince. I wake with scratches
I can’t explain. I order herbal supplements at night online
and forget what for by the time they get here: ashwagandha,

schizandra. I read objects are more like events with longevity.
On average 130 Yemini children died each day last year
of extreme hunger and disease. A Saudi blockade on seaports

stops the ships delivering aid. These are casualties of war.
The instant the technician’s needle found a vein, the seascape
on the wall rattled uncontrollably. She whispered the clinic

used to be a funeral home. Trump showed the prince posters
of the assorted planes, tanks, ships and munitions his oily
billions might buy him like an infomercial in the Oval Office.

What use is an adaptogen when I worry my own daughter
should soon prefer the hazards of an underworld to those of this
and social media? I dropped a fossilized trilobite in the toilet

and it cracked in half. Millions of years of structural integrity
finished just like that. Without Persephone it all froze over.
No crops grew. It was almost the end of us but Zeus her father

pulled strings to get her back. This service won’t reactivate.
I have come to love catachresis because what’s wrong with it is
right: I light my heart with so much emptiness there’s room

here in the dark for everything. War-related violence in Libya
left 47 civilians dead this May: 38 men, three women, four boys,
and two little girls to dust returneth. One version of the myth

says Hecate leads Persephone to her mother with torches
at the end of winter. Mother with torches at the end of winter,
some days I just sit back and watch things tear each other

apart. It is winter on and off now through the end of spring.
Emotion is everything and nothing. Same is true for structure.
I said to my daughter on the phone: Be an honest person,

just be an honest person. Be honest, be honest, be honest.
Some days I can’t believe what it means to be alive some days.
Some days I think about tearing myself apart but not exactly

with pleasure. Some days I know the strongest feeling is grief
but I believe it must be love: it has to be, has to be, has to.
Some days I feel each cell in my body has its fingers crossed.
|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