There’s one poem in The Cloud Corporation called “The Rumored Existence of Other People.” In that poem I referred to a dream that I had when I was a grad student living in New Jersey. I don’t usually use them in my writing but I let the logic of them carry over. That’s at least one of the reasons I take pleasure in doing it and why it seems to serve a kind of psychic function quite separate from mere expression.ĭo you catch dreams? Do they resurface in your writing? It has a semi-meditative quality for me, writing does-weaving everything into a single thread. I often think of my writing as a way for me to bring it all together, to focus myself. We both concentrate very deeply on things-in my case, partly to counter a natural tendency to grow distracted. The first time this happened she ran to her mother saying “Mom, Dad spoke the words right out of my brain.” The way her brain works in general-her wild imagination, the way she relentlessly analyzes things, her spazziness-this is all me. My wife would try to wake her up and she would say, “No, just five more minutes, I need to finish my dream.” She never saw or heard me say this, my daughter, I swear. For example, my wife for the longest time thought I was being ridiculous whenever she would try waking me up in the morning-I hate waking up-and I would say “Just give me five more minutes, I just need to finish my dream.” She thought I was feeding her a line! But then, completely independently of my example, my daughter started saying the same thing. I’m revisiting what I was like as a kid lately because I have a five and a half year old daughter and both my wife and I recognize certain traits in her as being, so to speak, my fault. Can you tell me a little bit about what you were like as a child? ![]() I read this thing that you wrote about how you were as a child, which I just loved. ![]() He has been the poetry editor of the Boston Review since 1995 and currently teaches writing at Columbia University.ĭonnelly is the kind of writer- and person- who never ceases to keep you on your toes and who, while you are balancing there on a precarious intellectual tightrope, winks conspiratorially as if to say, “We’re in this together, aren’t we?” He earned a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, and a PhD in English from Princeton University. His work has also appeared in publications like Harper’s, Iowa Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Timothy Donnelly is a wordsmith whom The New Yorker has called “the barreller-in-chief of the younger generation of American poets.” He has published two collections of poetry, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (2003) and The Cloud Corporation (2010).
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