Contributor’s Marginalia: John Gallaher responding to Timothy Donnelly’s poems “No Small Task” and “Night of the MacGuffin”

“No Small Task,” I’m told at the outset, and I’m already up for it. It’s the kind of title I like. It sets up a process of behavior. What is a small task? What isn’t? Who decides? Am I to be given a job, challenge, dare?

I’m a slow reader. However slow you think I might mean when I say that, double it. I’ll sometimes read a title like this one and wander awhile, looking around my house for small tasks, or, as in Timothy Donnelly’s second poem in this issue, MacGuffins. Of course, MacGuffins are everywhere, little triggering towns and prompts to and for all sorts of things. There are many not small tasks and MacGuffins ahead of each of us.

And this is the beginning of my delight in Timothy Donnelly’s work in general. It’s full of cliffs and junkyards and gardens and mystery boxes of thought. I love museums and thrift stores, places I can get lost in productively, because they yield to the imagination, they allow me to participate where I will, and glide past where I don’t. They’re journeys of destinations.

When reading Timothy Donnelly’s poetry, I first have to admit that I don’t always feel confident I’ve gotten to where Donnelly has by the end, or that I’m taking the same path he is in his poems, but I’ve gotten somewhere interesting, and, for me, that’s a good trip. What follow, then are some notes from my trip through these two poems: “No Small Thing,” and “Night of the MacGuffin.”

Are there small things? How small means small? An atom is the size of the universe. Well, it’s not, but what I mean is that things divide and subdivide all the way down, in our investigations so far. So already, to go back to my first paragraph, I’m wandering around the nature of things before I even begin the poem proper.

“Make dust our paper and the ink will be our tears . . .”

That’s about as grand and over-the-top an opening to a poem I think I could imagine. We’re writers, I’m guessing, from the economy set out of paper and ink, but we’re embodied by our dust, any dust, I guess, but, being raised Catholic, the rising up from dust and returning to it, is pretty deeply woven into my imagination, as well as house cleaning rituals. And our tears will be what we write with. Are we to write our lives with grief? Possibly. Possibly we do. But we also laugh and do other things. But in this poem, it’s the former, that to write is to remember, and to remember is to be an “adaptation of the second Richard.”

It’s hard for me to see “the second Richard” and not go directly to Shakespeare. Am I correct in that? I hope so, but if not, it feels right to my reading, that this act of remembering, this adaptation of Richard II, this “For heaven’s sake let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings” is, lofty as it is, fitting to one’s own primary relationship to memory. This does seem, indeed, to be no small task.

From there we wrest ourselves from the earth, and more, I find the thing that is for me the most striking move in Donnelly’s work. You can call his poetry, or one of his common methods, that of working an extended metaphor, but I like to think of it more fundamentally present than that. I think of it like paint maybe, or maybe a weight, that when a word enters a Donnelly poem, it’s as much present as any other word. Take a simile or a metaphor, say “hungry like a wolf” or something: one might say something like that, and move on. Not in a Donnelly poem. In a Donnelly poem there’s now a wolf to contend with. And, often, that wolf will stick around awhile, cohabiting.

In this poem, it’s first Richard II, and then a snake, from what we were thinking was dust paper and tears ink. And once the snake enters, we’re now in a snake economy. It first enters, after a little trail through the earth, that was “divorced” earlier in the poem from “notions like truth and spirit and one’s wishes.” And when it arrives, it arrives from its having been: “like the wavy / traces a snake makes.” This trail left behind, which mirrors the trail we’ve left behind that is erased by the wind (because, remember, we’re writing this on dust, with tears), becomes the actual “snake itself (a given)” and the myriad things that must occur for the snake to be there or anywhere. It’s no small task, the poem tells us, at this point.

So, all along, “no small task” has been with us, in our doing anything, getting anywhere, in time, remembered, adapted. And yet, and yet, the poem tells us, look, there are snakes everywhere, improbable as it might seem from the associative journey we’ve just been on.

Anyway, that’s how I read “No Small Task.” It’s neither random nor necessarily circuitous. It’s a logical progression, of a sort (with an antic, but realizable Richard and snake joining us). One might even say, obsessively logical, from form to function. In reading Donnelly, I’m reminded first of Wallace Stevens’ logic, a lyric logic that, as Stevens wrote, “must resist the intelligence almost successfully.”

It’s a progressive logic that I love reading along with, and, in the chance instance of this issue of 32 Poems, I’m given another excellent example, “Night of the MacGuffin.” Again, I have to note my envy for Donnelly’s titles. Noted, I bow and move on. “Night of the MacGuffin” sounds like a title of a film, and, of course a MacGuffin is a term most often associated with film. So, am I going to get a film about what gets a film going, though, in itself, having little importance? And so, when I read the opening bit, “The George I see in paintings fights a different type of dragon / than the one I have in mind” I’m already thinking past it, that perhaps this George is going to be passing like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction or a whispered “Rosebud.”

And what we get is a list of things the speaker of the poem doesn’t have in mind, things that aren’t this dragon, and then that list itself becomes a kind of dragon as well, until we admit defeat “in an audible sigh as we continue doing what we do // to get to the next point and the next.” So, in this way, the MacGuffin is nearly everything or anything, and the poem itself becomes an illustration of thinking, maybe, or a kind of existential panic, possibly. The speaker wants to face this undescribed dragon, and the only way to do so is to avoid it, as all of this is just ways to get going, to continue, a kind of hunting the Snark meets going after Medussa, when really, what’s going on here is a day to day operation, an operation of lowering the stakes of what one is up against, “seeing what was once so fearful reduced / to a piss-trickle of images.” It’s perhaps a coping strategy, stay against confusion, of just getting through the day.

The only dragon is the non-dragon, the poem seems to be saying, a MacGuffin, a kind of objective correlative that allows for abstractions to cohere, leading the speaker to remark the one objective fact: “if there’s anything I know after all this / typing, it’s the difference between dragons and whatever this thing is.” It reminds me of Marianne Moore’s famous “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” that there is something obsessively present in Donnelly’s poetry that is useful, a journey of thought that thankfully (for me at least) steps out of the way at the vista, for you to make of it what you will.