“You Know Now What’s Real”: Eight Questions for Timothy Donnelly
Every time I’m on social media, I see some crazy video that just makes me stop in awe and ask the question, “Is that really real?” Our digitalized world in the 21st century has spiraled out of control. The overabundance of media on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. has become integrated into our lives on a daily basis. While this may bring us closer to our communities, it comes with harm, and often feels like overstimulation whenever we open our phones. Timothy Donnelly, an American poet and professor at Columbia, tackles this question and attempts to broaden the reader’s perspective on life through his poetry.
Donnelly was born in 1969 and grew up in the village of Graniteville, which is within the town of Johnston, Rhode Island. He credits growing up in a more rural area to the topics he covers in his poetry: the natural world, traces of history, and the connectedness of the nonhuman. Additionally, he is known for covering complex, thought-inducing topics in a more digestible manner by linking his ideas to everyday topics and themes. Throughout his extensive career, he has written four full-length books of poetry, as well as several smaller collections. Donnelly’s most recent book is Chariot, released in 2023. His works have garnered him several awards throughout his career, most notably the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2012.
I understand that you were born and raised in Providence. Do you believe growing up there had any impact on your poetry, and have you drawn any inspiration for your writing from there?
While I was born in the city of Providence, I actually grew up in the far northwest corner of an town that borders Providence, namely Johnston. The phrase “far northwest corner” suggests a much greater distance than we’re actually talking about, however—Rhode Island is notoriously small, and even though it felt like a whole different world to me at the time, my childhood home was only three miles down the road from the city hospital where I was born. The particular neighborhood I lived in, which was a little village known as Graniteville—home to an old quarry and a landfill—was hilly and rocky and fairly densely wooded, and we lived in the last house on the road, so depending on which way you looked, it felt more rural than suburban, at least until developers started building new houses. Until then, I spent a great deal of time outdoors alone among old oak trees, maples, slender white birch and friendly white pine, brambles, ferns, moss, lady slippers, spongey princess pine and wild blueberry bushes you could smell from a distance when the sun warmed them up, a creek and old colonial stone walls. The feeling of safety and belonging one feels in their home extended for me well into the woods, and it has never left me, although the land I’m referring to has been completely overtaken by suburban sprawl and exists only in memory now.
The natural world, the wonder and the beauty of it; its endangerment due to human activity; solitude, traces of history, connectedness to the nonhuman; a world that exists now only in the mind—all of this bleeds into my poetry, I think, and informs the space where my poems take root, and factors into my never have felt completely at home in New York.
I was a little confused on the last two lines in the second stanza of your poem “Instagram,” “and those I picked up over time like a janitor inching his push-broom of consciousness into winter in Wisconsin?” Do you mind explaining a bit more on what you meant by this, and why you chose this metaphor?
Yes, of course. In this stanza, the speaker is simply asking whether they would be able to distinguish between “implanted” memories and memories resulting from lived experience, which is essentially to ask if they would be able to tell if they were an artificial versus a naturally occurring person. The phrase I use to describe authentic (rather than implanted) memories is “picked up over time,” which gave rise to the notion of a custodian picking up trash on their shift, so I finished the line with “like a janitor.” The pacing of the poem, but more importantly the poem’s implied privileging of authentic, lived experience over ersatz versions of it, wanted me to land on an individual here, ideally one who would be sympathetic and poignant. So, in the line following, I further modified that janitor as one who is “inching his push-broom,” which is a reasonable thing for a janitor to do, but then I wanted to reconnect the janitor simile to the larger idea at play, namely that of “lived experience,” so I made the push-broom a “push-broom of consciousness”—the idea being that as the janitor moves the broom forward in space and time, his consciousness advances along with it. But having zeroed in on the specificity of the janitor and his push-broom, I wanted to pan back a little, so I went with “into winter in Wisconsin.” I like the five instances of the short i sound in this phrase, as well as the repetition of the n, t, w, and s sounds. It feels like a little squall to me. The secret to this line is that I drew the image of the janitor directly from the Charlie Kaufmann movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), which isn’t set in Wisconsin, but could easily have been. The first line in the poem, “What if I was uttered into existence through the teamwork of cultists,” is a major plot point of the movie The Empty Man, which came out the same year.
I understand that this poem was written in 2023, right around the boom of AI. So I had to ask, were you writing this with the rise of artificial intelligence and deepfakes in mind, or was it just an ironic coincidence that what you were writing about was what was becoming of the world at that very moment?
I actually wrote the poem in January 2021, shortly after streaming the movie The Empty Man. It was first published in the online magazine Plume in 2022 and then in Best American Poetry 2023, which was edited by Elaine Equi. In the movie, the protagonist comes to discover that he isn’t the person he and the viewer have assumed he was, but a tulpa created by a cult and programmed with memories of a life he never lived but whose reality we have never thought to question. I had by that point watched I’m Thinking of Ending Things many times, and its plot also involves characters who are presented as real to the viewer—or as “real” as characters in a movie can be—but who ultimately turn out to be products of a lonely janitor’s hypertrophied imagination. This notion that human lives that appear real to others, and even to themselves, might in reality not be real led me to think about Instagram as a platform not only for fabricating a preferred version of oneself for public speculation, but also as a means of reinforcing one’s sense of one’s own identity—which, when we come to see how convincingly such a thing can be simulated, might start to feel at least somewhat destabilized and hard to verify. Deepfakes and AI raise similar questions regarding what the real is, but I don’t think they’re new questions—we’ve been asking them since time immemorial, but more urgently since the advent of photography, and increasingly with each new related technological development.
What was the purpose of your reference to spaetzle and vivid description of cozy food in the third stanza? Why did you want to paint this picture in the reader’s mind?
I think a lot of factors contributed to my landing on spaetzle. I had been making it at home that winter, and found the way the dumplings tumble and circulate in boiling water to be completely mesmerizing, very much resembling snow falling in a blizzard. Also, the word Spätzle means “little sparrow” in Swabian German, with the noodle presumably deriving its name from the shape of it, which might suggest a bird in flight, or collectively, a flock. So taken together these two things should explain “little sparrows of dough / canoodling in the pot’s hot storm,” with “canoodling” a sort of pun I couldn’t resist. I think I knew I wanted to shift focus to food, because as much as I have done it myself, I find the practice of photographing food, especially average-looking food, and posting it to Instagram to be pretty strange, and overdetermined in the Freudian sense, meaning satisfying multiple psychological needs at once, some of which might be unconscious. It’s “telling,” but I don’t exactly know of what, although it does seem to seem to declare to the world: I chose this (or I made this), I consumed it, I photographed it, I posted it; this is abundant evidence: I must be real. This is making too much of it, I know, and I know that posting photographs of food might be a way of celebrating good times and travel and the beauty of a well-prepared item or meal, but I don’t think it’s ever that simple.
More importantly, although I can’t remember what came first, what really motivates spaetzle’s presence in the poem is the statement “Reality has holes in it,” which compares reality figuratively to a story with inconsistencies and lacunae, but also literally to a spaetzle maker, which is patterned with holes like a cheese grater. Lastly, I wanted this stanza to move into the mind of the janitor, who was invoked by way of simile in preceding stanza, but who now takes on a life of his own, so to speak. And owing to the state’s large population of descendants of German immigrants, spaetzle is relatively commonplace in Wisconsin.