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    Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
    Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
    Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

    By Timothy Donnelly

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    “A strutting, dazzling, exhilarating” collection of poems by the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award–winning author of The Cloud Corporation (The Village Voice).
     
    In his critically acclaimed debut collection, Timothy Donnelly pairs an extraordinary gift for rhetorical exuberance with a stunning formal mastery. The title poem conjures an imaginary play, populated by objects, that forms an allegorical rendering of a single lifetime. In “Accidental Species,” he puts forth a remarkable statement about his own efforts as a poet, a humorous ars poetica by way of a heartbreaking lover’s complaint. For its thoughtfulness, range, and sheer energy, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit is a remarkable work from one of our most original young poets.
     
    “Filled with dreams both romantic and funny . . . [Donnelly’s] self-deprecating surrealism is vivid and often touching.” —Ken Tucker, The Baltimore Sun
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateDec 1, 2007
    ISBN9780802196774
    Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit
    Author

    Timothy Donnelly

    Timothy Donnelly's first book of poems, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, was published by Grove Press in 2003. He is a poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches at Columbia University's School of the Arts. His most recent compilation, The Cloud Corporation, was published by Picador in 2011. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

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      Book preview

      Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit - Timothy Donnelly

      TWENTY-SEVEN PROPS FOR

      A PRODUCTION OF EINE LEBENSZEIT

      TWENTY-SEVEN PROPS

      FOR A PRODUCTION OF

      EINE LEBENSZEIT

      TIMOTHY DONNELLY

      Copyright © 2003 by Timothy Donnelly

      Foreword copyright © 2003 by Richard Howard

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

      Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the magazines in which versions of these poems first appeared: American Letters & Commentary: An Autocracy on the Lounge; The Ghost of a Flea; Conduit: An Acting Appendix; Birdsong from Inside the Egg; Denver Quarterly: Ease; Her Palm, Her Apotheosis; Monastic; Vera on Atmosphere; Fence: From a Further Meaning Faded; Gulf Coast: Relief in Gestures Artificial and Oblique; Jacket: Anything to Fill In the Long Silences; Dark Night on the Inside of a Rock; LIT: Known Minutiae; Nauseous House; Now Culture: Sonata ex Machina; The Paris Review: Bangor; His Long Imprison’d Thought; The Truer; Ploughshares: Maintenance; Marblehead; Scarecrow in Magnolia; Self Exhibited As a Wasting Phoenix; Quarterly West: Isn’t It Romantic?; Slope: Through a Darkness, an Intelligence; Pansies Under Monkshood: A Folly; Der Nachtschwärmer; For a Missing Face; TriQuarterly: Purgatory Chasm; Verse: An Inflorescence; Anything to Fill In the Long Silences; "Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit;" Volt: Delphinium; The Driver of the Car Is Unconscious; Western Humanities Review: Accidental Species.

      The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the New York State Writers Institute and its grant of a Master Writer Fellowship during the summer of 2001.

      Published simultaneously in Canada

      Printed in the United States of America

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Donnelly, Timothy.

      Twenty-seven props for a production of Eine Lebenszeit / Timothy Donnelly.

      p. cm. — (Grove Press poetry series)

      eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9677-4

      I. Title: 27 props for a production of Eine Lebenszeit. II. Title.

      PS3604.O636 T85 2003

      811’.6—dc21                                                                 2002033862

      Grove Press

      841 Broadway

      New York, NY 10003

      For my mother and my father

      CONTENTS

      Foreword by Richard Howard

      One

      Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit

      An Inflorescence

      Sonata ex Machina

      Isn’t It Romantic?

      Der Nachtschwärmer

      Marblehead

      Fanny Fowler’s Poetry and Dioramas Workshop

      Chance of Infinity in a Little Room

      1. The Ghost of a Flea

      2. An Autocracy on the Lounge

      3. The Queen in Fifteen Couplets

      4. Vera on Atmosphere

      5. Her Palm, Her Apotheosis

      Maintenance

      Two

      Scarecrow in Magnolia

      Accidental Species

      Three Panels Depending on the Heart

      1. Known Minutiae

      2. Willful to Sicken

      3. The Truer

      Reading of Medieval Life, I Wonder Who I Am

      Monastic

      Pansies Under Monkshood: A Folly

      Bangor

      The Spleen’s Own Music

      1. Purgatory Chasm

      2. Nauseous House

      3. Through a Darkness, an Intelligence

      4. For a Missing Face

      5. Dark Night on the Inside of a Rock

      6. Self Exhibited As a Wasting Phoenix

      7. Ease

      Relief in Gestures Artificial and Oblique

      Three

      The Monarchy of Papier-mâché

      The Driver of the Car Is Unconscious

      Anything to Fill In the Long Silences

      From a Further Meaning Faded

      Delphinium

      Kneeling Man with Cane on Construction

      An Acting Appendix

      His Long Imprison’d Thought

      1. It Is Not the Man Who Has Too Little, but the Man Who Craves More, That Is Poor

      2. Cold Tributary

      3. Man Is a Reasoning Animal

      4. Swamplife

      5. It Is a Rough Road That Leads to the Heights of Greatness

      6. Dream

      7. It Is Better, of Course, to Know Useful Things Than to Know Nothing

      8. Fall in Sumac

      Birdsong from Inside the Egg

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      FOREWORD

      First things first: readers necessarily unfamiliar with the new poet’s work will gape at the odd title, which means no more than a plethora of supports for the performance of an imaginary play—the allegorical rendering of an entire life (Eine Lebenszeit = a lifetime). Fair enough, if winsomely arbitrary—any other title in the collection is just as likely, as likeable. My own choice takes after another poem, Accidental Species, which embodies just as many clues to the name and nature of the remarkable poetry Donnelly writes.

      This poetry is as vigorous, as fresh, and as authoritative as any new work I have seen since Ashbery’s third book. There is a filiation between Donnelly’s work and Ashbery’s, but it is a matter to be treated briskly, without too much heavy breathing (I speak for myself here—Donnelly’s respiration is ever light, ever lively): Ashbery has come to be known for poetry that refuses to emerge from its rhetoric, its various registers of diction, and its apparent lack of immediately identifiable subject-matter.

      Donnelly’s too is a poetry of words rather than of stories or characters, but where Ashbery treats his nomenclatures with a certain dryness, Donnelly is exuberant. He is a logomaniac, and every poem coils about its syntax like a sleek python of reticulated verbality:

      I was a plaything to the climate, the breezes

      lifted, swept me vast and plastic as they

      wished, all eyes to my assignment from

      the power in whose eyes all palaces, pyramids,

      and the worms that build them are alike

      contemptible; I was a humble ship set

      hazarding from rock to rock, and on each

      I

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