Here's a Brooklyn Poet's $100,000 Poem UPDATED

Brooklyn poet Timothy Donnelly has been named the winner of the annual $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, one of the largest poetry prizes in the U.S. (More here)

Donnelly won the award for his poem book "The Cloud Corporation." The book is named for the central poem of the same name, as commenters have pointed out.

Here are a few stanzas from part 3 of "The Cloud Corporation":

. . . The clouds part revealing blueprints of the clouds

built in glass-front factories carved into cliff-faces

which, prior to the factories’ recent construction,

provided dorms for clans of hamadryas baboons,

a species revered in ancient Egypt as attendants

of Thoth, god of wisdom, science, and measurement.

Fans conveying clouds through aluminum ducts

can be heard from up to a mile away, depending on

air temperature, humidity, the absence or presence

of any competing sound, its origin and its character.

It is no more impossible to grasp the baboon’s

full significance in Egyptian religious symbolism

than it is to determine why clouds we manufacture

provoke in an audience more positive, lasting

response than do comparable clouds occurring in nature.

The full poem can be found at the Poetry Foundation.

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