Cloudy cloudy calculator

Along with Paris Hilton and Kanye West, poet and Boston Review editor Timothy Donnelly was on Entertainment Weekly's 2003 "It" list after Grove Press published his first book. Seven years later, he's set to release his second collection of poems, The Cloud Corporation. Lord knows what could happen. In this interview with Craig Morgan Teicher at Publishers Weekly, Donnelly talks about how he tries to capture the movements of the thinking mind in his poems, why there’s no such thing as an ideal reader, and finding inspiration in the Boss:

A couple of these poems were composed through a process by which you took language from other sources. What was that like?

Those took forever. This assignment was dreamed up by the poet Geoffrey G. O'Brien, a good friend. Basically he said to write a poem using the words in a chunk of the Patriot Act and, once per line, a word from another text. I picked Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run." Two other poems mashed up Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry with a chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report, and Osama bin Laden's 1996 fatwa against the U.S. with the theme song of The Beverly Hillbillies. The text that surprised me the most, actually, was the fatwa. Its fusion of history, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and unabashed razzle-dazzle is frantic, frightening, and just plain hard to believe. And yet there are aspects of it—like the call to economic independence, or the dream of taking back control of one's life from corporations—that I found it hard not to sympathize with, at least in the abstract. But mostly I realized how people will say pretty much anything, true or false, beautiful or ugly, realistic or ridiculous, to get you to feel and think and do what they want you to . . .