Kristina Marie Darling Interviews Timothy Donnelly for Kenyon Review

A conversation with Timothy Donnelly, author of the forthcoming The Problem of the Many (Wave, October), is up at Kenyon Review. "In today’s insular poetry culture, I find it fascinating that your new book is filled with allusions to philosophers, ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Baudrillard and more. What can contemporary poets learn from reading more philosophy and continental theory?" asks Kristina Marie Darling. Donnelly's response:

TD: Well, I feel lucky to have stumbled into a mode of writing that can accommodate explicit, sustained thought, my own and others’, as readily as it does things like memory, music, human drama, make-believe, day debris, locodescriptiveness, and so forth—whatever the other elements are that typically provide substance to a poem—and still have it feel aesthetically satisfying to me, and true to my sense of things. When I wrote the proem to the book, the poem “What Is Real,” I knew that the sublime terraforming scene at the start of Ridley Scott’s movie Prometheus would be central to it, but I didn’t know that Baudrillard would end up woven into it at the end. However, I was reading his America at the time, and then, while writing the poem, a couple of passages I had recently underlined in the book came bubbling back to me when I could feel the poem coming to a close. I’m glad they did. All this is to say that reading philosophy, just like going to the museum, or to the movies, or to a place of historical significance, or even just talking to a good friend, inevitably contributes to what you think and feel and know, and if that’s what you’re writing from, or with—and how can it not be—then how can it not contribute to the poems you write, in a very clear, direct way, as well as in indirectly in any number of ways? Nonetheless, I would be reluctant to foist Baudrillard, specifically or for example, on everyone, and I also wouldn’t want to suggest that work that isn’t explicitly engaged with Western philosophy is missing out because of it. Also for me, on top of everything, the texture and the music of thought, of drifting in and out of it or even thinking things all the way through, has a beauty of its own that I am very much drawn to and invested in.

Read the full interview here.