Timothy Donnelly's The Cloud Corporation

The Cloud Corporation, by Timothy Donnelly
(Wave Books, 2010) 

You see there is this logic that has taken over the world. A logic capable of every imaginable feat: transforming the world into a math problem, producing clouds and inspecting those clouds for their profitability, producing furniture that grows nostalgic for its manufacturer, figuring parts of “him,” the speaker, because he is so innately a part of this world. But that logic, when given reign, is disorienting. Or maybe living through that logic doesn’t guide the speaker so much as leave him more acutely aware he needs guidance, like if you logically found yourself submerged in the Atlantic Ocean, and you got stuck there, it wouldn’t be all that comfortable. It would be nice if you could find a way out, even though everyone has pretty much consigned you to that one place. The fact of The Cloud Corporation is that logic will forever be a force of and with and contrary to the imagination. And these poems indulge that relationship to its utmost.

So how are you going to do make a poem where logic can be both pliant and structured? Logic, by definition, is complete, because it’s logical. It’s the statement part of a sentence. Logically, however, there must be a point in logic’s history, in its thoroughly redundant perspicuity, in the absolutely finite quality of this world that keeps opening to us until we’re reminded we don’t really know it completely, where all the things we believe whole and logical must eventually be found at least incomplete if not also wanting for more logic. Marilynne Robinson touches on this in her book Absence of Mind, where the presumption of having solved the world is always met by pure science or imaginative art with a shrug. Not quite, says the artist. Not in my research, says the scientist.

To describe the sublime as represented by The Cloud Corporation, I would draw an analogy where logic is a glow stick. Donnelly snaps the logic of late capitalism open, and yet keeps it intact as a system, because as a system it is breathtakingly thorough and insidious and possessive. It makes an excellent vehicle for writing poems. At the very least it gives no end to probing analysis and presumptive solutions.

What do you do in the face of this? It seems the most subversive action is boredom. But how does this speaker reconcile boredom with an obviously strident intellect? How does a speaker negotiate the stimulation available in the market with an eager and active and insular imagination? For the poems of The Cloud Corporation, these dilemmas are inexhaustible. And utterly insoluble. Of course, rest assured, this speaker endeavors to perform some sort of solution. The entire book is a project of proving. There is no end to proving. As a poetics of argument this book is treatise and Sears Christmas Catalogue and neighborhood covenant and profound delight. In this late capitalism, where every conceivable argument purports to have already been conceived, where every impression can supposedly be accessed, we are healthy provers. The Cloud Corporation guides us to the very threshold of proving. And at that threshold Donnelly looks out, like Keats’s Cortez, to show us a whole new landscape awaiting its proving.

Recommended Links:
The Cloud Corporation
NNDB (linking the world) - It's very ironic to me that this page exists and The Cloud Corporation exists.