Writer changes the definition of a poet

NEW YORK — His one published book is a collection of poetry, but when Timothy Donnelly is asked what he does for a living, he often answers, "Writer."

"A lot of people have peculiar ideas about what a poet is," explains the 34-year-old author, whose elaborately titled "Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit" came out last winter.

"They imagine someone very emotional, perhaps sentimental, nostalgic — someone whose writing reflects their own personal experience, someone who is subject to bouts of melancholia."

The close-shaven, round-faced Donnelly, who lives in a walk-up in Brooklyn, doesn't deny the truth in the image. During a recent interview on a drizzly afternoon, he impresses as a man of passion and drama, a man with a sense of purpose a novelist or biographer would rarely confess in public.

Poets have traditionally been the most idealistic of beings, the so-called "unacknowledged legislators of the world," as Percy Bysshe Shelley famously declared. Donnelly himself acknowledges being touched by "the excitement for fame . . . the wish to be in the spotlight, but on my own terms."

But for the vast majority of poets, and that includes Donnelly, the intangible dream of changing the world with words coexists with the tangible fact of sales. Most collections only sell in the low thousands. Reviews are rare in mainstream publications and few publishers are willing to send a poet on tour.

"I don't even trick myself into thinking I'm speaking for the whole public. I'm content to let the poetry reading public . . . stand for the general public," says Donnelly, who since 1996 has been co-editor of poetry for the Boston Review.

The poetry community agrees that sales are small but disagrees on whether that's a problem. Recent U.S. poets laureate such as Billy Collins and Robert Pinsky worked hard to broaden poetry's appeal. But Louise Gluck, the nation's current laureate, told the AP last fall that she preferred her readership to be "small, intense, passionate."

Richard Howard, a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who wrote an introduction for "Twenty-seven Props," believes the art form is too demanding for most people.

"I don't think poetry is a popular sport," Howard says. "Poetry requires a certain amount of solitude and silence and those are not the activities most people are interested in." Donnelly is a native of Providence, R.I., who fell for poetry