The cloud corporation

“The Cloud Corporation” by Timothy Donnelly. Poets tend to be either lingerers or barrellers. Some of the most affecting moments in poetry happen when a born barreller stops to linger or a natural lingerer has to barrel. Timothy Donnelly is the barreller-in-chief of the younger generation of American poets. At forty-one, he teaches at Columbia and has just published his second book of poems, “The Cloud Corporation.” His style is like a game-show shopping spree: everything is tossed into the cart. He demonstrates why the critical cliché of “mixing high and low” is pushing retirement age. What do those categories mean for an American, born in Rhode Island and living in Brooklyn, who, in a given day, reads some Shelley, gets despondent about the news, spends some time thinking about his childhood (Childcraft books, “The Beverly Hillbillies”), takes care of his infant, and has something stiff to drink. You might expect, from contents so miscellaneous, a kind of amorphous blob of a style, phrases splayed across the page. Instead, Donnelly is an acrobatic formalist, albeit one on fast-forward. Donnelly’s style must be withstood before it is enjoyed. The title poem of “The Cloud Corporation” reimagines the Biblical story of Noah, only with the cogs and wheels of corporate machinery where we would expect a rainbow. The language of faith has been transformed into the slogans of commerce. These poems are full of old vocabularies now repurposed for commercial use. Successful books of poetry imagine the world in their terms; but the world of money and power that “The Cloud Corporation” imagines is especially dangerous, because it has already imagined us, our futures and fates.