Poets in the Conversation Room | Timothy Donnelly

Join us for the next Poets in the Conversation Room!

Featuring Celebrated Poet Timothy Donnelly

Saturday, March 22 | 2 to 4 PM

The Conversation Room, Mellon Hall, St. John’s College

Hush – by Timothy Donnelly

At night the sea’s surface is the penetrable onyx of deep sleep.

I enter it without fear, as if to lower the input of the eye

reduces risk, and whatever I can’t presently see

exists only in memory, which has been calmed by the water’s

cold hypnosis, and to be here is impersonal. Only the moonlight

interrupts this near-nothingness, the play of it on the glossy swell

like a music you can feel, or like the mapping of something happening to me

on another level, something that can be understood so long

as it never finishes—and, when it finishes, there is nothing

left to understand. In the distance, other lights appear now

on the far side of the harbor, and, closer, the dull-white gull-like hulls

of a band of anchored boats rock softly, without intelligence.

Later, elsewhere, I remember it vaguely, and it feels like the most

meaningful way to go about it, as if the value of it grew

by resisting precision, and that, in coaxing particularity to glide from it,

the sea retained a unity unlike anything other than the sky

with which it had come to merge, but likewise it set itself outside

the reach of grammar, whose designs on it were not kind, and yet

what I mean by “it” isn’t even the sea anymore, but an experience

of the sea, which syllable by syllable I make the mistake of displacing.

Timothy Donnelly is currently a Director of Poetry in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and the author of four books of poems. His second, The Cloud Corporation, was published by Wave Books in 2010 and appeared on many lists of that year’s best books of poetry. The Cloud Corporation was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award and received the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Donnelly is a recipient of a Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and Paris Review’s Bernard F. Connors Prize. His latest book is Chariot, published by Wave Books in 2023. Donnelly’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Nation, New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals.