The Problem of the Many, page 12
Insomnia is indebted, in part, to Emmanuel Levinas’s discussion of insomnia in Existence and Existents (translated by Alphonso Lingis).
Hymn to Life is dedicated to David Skeist, James Rutherford, Laura Butler Rivera, and everyone in their ensemble, who have been adapting it into a multidisciplinary performance piece since 2015. Their artistry and commitment have given me hope. The poem quotes from Looking Back by Lou Andreas-Salomé (translated by Breon Mitchell).
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to all the family, friends, and colleagues who encouraged me throughout the writing of this book, especially Mary Jo Bang, Alan Gilbert, Jeff Hipsher, Dorothea Lasky, Brett Fletcher Lauer, and Elizabeth Metzger, who were first to lay eyes on many of these poems. In particular, I am grateful to Eleanor Sarasohn, whose editorial genius and dedication to this book in manuscript form had enormous impact on its final state. I don’t know where, much less how, to begin thanking Lynn Melnick, who suffered every twist and turn and all the sleep deficits that transpired during the writing of this book, who weathered all the setbacks and celebrated the achievements, who shared in all the tragedies and made the miracles possible. I will always love you. I am grateful, too, to my parents and to my daughters, and I will never be done thanking Peter Sacks and Lucie Brock-Broido for their life-saving mentorships. I am thankful, too, to so many others, living and dead—too many to name here individually—who offered me moral and practical support at some point during, if not throughout, the eight years in which this book was written.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for awarding me a fellowship to support the writing of this book, and likewise to the Lannan Foundation and to the T. S. Eliot Foundation for providing me with generous residencies during which many of these poems were completed. Thanks are due, too, to Columbia University for its investment in my work and for providing me with stable employment and a brilliant community of artists. I am also thankful to Erin Belieu for choosing a selection of these poems for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript in progress. No end of thanks to Matthew Zapruder for his faith and guidance, and to Charlie, Heidi, Blyss, Ryo, and everyone at Wave Books for helping to pull this book together.
Grateful acknowledgment is also made to the editors of the following periodicals and websites where these poems originally appeared: American Poetry Review: Levitation; Poem Written with a Pinecone in My Hand; A Public Space: Apologies from the Ground Up; The Stars Down to Earth; Art in Print: Escape into Time; The Baffler: Chemical Life; The Believer: Golden; BOMB: Burning Lichen from a Bronze Age Megalith; Happiness; Some Comforts at the Expense of Others; The Cortland Review: Fascination; Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review: Smartwater; Harvard Review: Traveler; jubilat: Gifted; Lana Turner: The Problem of the Many; LA Review of Books Quarterly Journal: The Death of the Author; The Death of Print Culture; The Nation: Solvitur Ambulando; New England Review: All Through the War; Poem Written with an Arrowhead in My Mouth; The New Republic: Poem on a Stair; the New Yorker: Diet Mountain Dew; Leviathan; Malamute; Unlimited Soup and Salad; 92y.org: Lunch in a Town Named After a Company Slowly Poisoning Its Residents; Oversound: Arrows from the Sun; Insomnia; Lapis Lazuli; The Paris Review: After Callimachus; Parnassus: The Lighthouse of Alexandria; Plume: All the Shrimp I Can Eat; A Habitation of Jackals, a Court for Ostriches; Poetry: Hymn to Edmond Albius; Hymn to Life; Poetry London: Apologies from the Ground Up; Cursum Perficio; The Death of Truth; Poetry Northwest: The Earth Itself; Poets.org: By Night with Torch and Spear; The Endless; Lycopodium Obscurum; Poem Interrupted by Whitesnake; Prelude: Prometheus; The Scores: November Paraphrase; Stunt; The Spectacle: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos; Surface: Roof; T: The New York Times Style Magazine: Shame; Tupelo Quarterly: What Is Real.
Grateful acknowledgement is also made to Sharmila Cohen and Paul Legault for publishing “Mutual Life” in The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare, to Will Harris and Richard Osmund for publishing “NyQuil” in The Mimic Octopus, and to Daniel Lawless for publishing “The Radiance of a Thousand Suns” in Plume Anthology of Poetry 7. Thanks, too, to Denise Duhamel and David Lehman for including “Apologies from the Ground Up” in The Best American Poetry 2013 and to Bill Henderson, Patricia Smith, and Arthur Sze for including “The Earth Itself” in the Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: Best of the Small Presses 2014, as well as to Jason Koo and Joe Pan for including it in Brooklyn Poets Anthology. And, lastly, I thank Dara Wier, Pam Glaven, Emily Pettit, Guy Pettit, and everyone at Factory Hollow Press for reprinting “Hymn to Life” in a beautiful limited edition chapbook.
The Human
In the interim I will find a way to feel at home with the animal
Aristotle in his Politics says nature made for politics
because alone among animals it enjoys the gift of speech.
Other animals have a voice to indicate what is pleasant,
what painful, and to relay it to each other, but true speech,
says Aristotle, takes things further, and is intended to make clear
what is beneficial, what harmful, what is good or bad,
and this among animals is peculiar to the human, who alone
enjoys perception of the just, which nature would never
provide without cause, he says, but does so that they might live
collectively, in communities, and not like those of the goat,
which seeks only what gives pleasure, and wanders
endlessly to avoid pain, but in settlements, vast cities
it takes politics to build, an effort extended across centuries
like bridges over waterways, their lengths reflected in the
flowing underneath them and up glass faces of towers the sun
illuminates with such intensity it feels like intention—
the will of what is to go on, to take things further, to adapt
parts of the body intended for breathing into a means to
force air into sounds, sounds into words, words into prayers of
thanks to the sun. And when I close my eyes to brace against
the late imperial effects of it, I feel a forebear step forward
from a cave in thought, its arms extended as if to take part
bodily in the beauty of what we call sky, and through some new
distortion in the throat, indicates what the many, still situated
in dark behind us, come one by one to tremble at the mouth to see.
The Problem of the Many
Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Problem of the Many; The Cloud Corporation, which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit. 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.
Also by Timothy Donnelly
The Cloud Corporation
Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
First published 2019 by Wave Books
First published in the UK 2020 by Picador
This electronic edition first published 2020 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-5290-4125-5
Copyright © Timothy Donnelly 2019
The right of Timothy Donnelly to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Timothy Donnelly, The Problem of the Many
