“'All the Shrimp I Can Eat' and Timothy Donnelly’s Catachresis"

March, 2023

In an interview with Ann van Buren as part of the Katonah Poetry Series, Timothy Donnelly calls attention to a specific kind of metaphor emblematic of his poetry: catachresis. Defining the term as a “misuse” or purposely incongruous construction of a metaphor, examples of catachresis like “Some days I feel each cell in my body has its fingers crossed” in “All Through the War” can be seen throughout The Problem of the Many—where they also blur with Donnelly’s anthropomorphisms of natural and unnatural things. As our readings in class have focused on Donnelly’s eco-oriented poems, a great addition to our studied body of work would be “All the Shrimp I Can Eat,” a short poem featuring catachresis of ecological and mythical proportions, comparing how humans consume food to how humans are consumed by time. Put in the context of “The Stars Down to Earth,” “Diet Mountain Dew,” and “Solvitur Ambulando,” “All the Shrimp I Can Eat” offers further examples of Donnelly’s uniquely anthropogenic brand of catachresis that go hand-in-hand with his blending of the immaterial feelings and material realities of the Anthropocene.

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As the introductory poem of section 1 in The Problem of the Many, “The Stars Down to Earth” exemplifies Donnelly’s ability to unearth the reasons for natural phenomena in human terms, envisioning rising sea levels through musical and anthropomorphic lenses. Relying on catachrestic similes to transmute aspects of the sea to something humans can feel more sensually, Donnelly compares the froth of waves colliding with rocks to “wool” and “thought,” as though the froth is a tangible thought of the sea (Donnelly, 5). In a similar way, “All the Shrimp I Can Eat” begins with an impossible conversation between the speaker and a troupe of shrimp, making use of catachresis to anthropomorphize the shrimp: “They are telling me this is their preferred way to die” (Donnelly, 1-2). By transposing thought onto the sea and sentient conversation onto shrimp, Donnelly constructs an imaginary space in which the reader can feel direct empathy for the heaving sea or the shrimp fleeing a grisly death. Taken together, both of these poems illuminate a different way in which Donnelly uses catachresis to provoke direct emotional responses in the reader, often related to issues like sea-level rise or overconsumption—issues difficult for humans to digest.

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“Diet Mountain Dew,” on the other hand, is one of the most overtly Anthropocene-concerned poems in The Problem of the Many, detailing a toxic, highfalutin love affair between the poem’s lyric speaker and the directly addressed green beverage. Focusing on human consumption, the poem mirrors “All the Shrimp I Can Eat” in both its narration style and subject matter—though they end up at two very different places. The aforementioned conversation with shrimp becomes a reminder of how humans are digested by time, which Donnelly anthropomorphizes through the classical figure of a god: “Through the body of a god, one who elects to eat each of us / If not out of hunger, then boredom, or in an act of love impervious // To human reasoning” (Donnelly, 9-11). Similarly, the way the speaker in “Diet Mountain Dew” addresses the beverage smacks of religious fanaticism, as Donnelly gives a planet catachrestic agency to destroy another—as a human would destroy themselves with junk food: “I put me in your path which is / the path a planet takes when it / means to destroy another I think / you know I’m okay with that,” (Donnelly, 45-48). In both poems, what is human is placed on a collision course with what is not, illustrating what individual observation cannot reveal about the Anthropocene: just as humans struggle against the passage of time, our attempts to find joy come at the expense of our own bodies and the bodies of non-human others.

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One of the most interesting aspects of Donnelly’s poetry is how it features catachresis not only as a fantastical literary device, but as an active process in our bodies and world. “Solvitur Ambulando” explores this paradox in a thought experiment about the impossibility of movement and consciousness based on the composition of each from non-movements or non-living elements. While on a walk, the speaker comes to a catachrestic revelation: “the way no atom in my brain tonight / feels on its own capable of wanting to walk out into / the street to see the stars, but together, / they still want to and it feels miraculous” (Donnelly, 27-30). Though the atoms do not “want” to walk, they comprise a greater whole which does. Put in conversation with “All the Shrimp I Can Eat,” “Solvitur Ambulando” represents a wondrous view of real-life catachresis compared to the nightmare of a god eating humans out of boredom. “All the Shrimp I Can Eat” also takes the hungry god a step further, describing the god’s digestive process, breaking the human down into “what we call the soul, and this he then exerts / Through his infinite wisdom, grinds into a powder, and snorts” (Donnelly, 15-16). As the soul can be considered a catachrestic metaphor by the reasoning of Donnelly’s other poems—an immortal product of mortal parts—the finale of “All the Shrimp I Can Eat” is its ultimate mockery: humanity ground into dust and snorted like cocaine. Thus, while “Solvitur Ambulando” celebrates the miracle of life and “All the Shrimp I Can Eat” contemplates its cost, both do so using catachresis as a way to explain and disassemble the human consciousness.

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None of Donnelly’s poems are of the same perspective or reach the same conclusion, but every work discussed in class features a catachrestic way of thinking. “All the Shrimp I Can Eat” epitomizes this approach, and read in combination with “The Stars Down to Earth,” “Diet Mountain Dew,” and “Solvitur Ambulando,” the poem further clarifies Donnelly’s thought process as he blurs the lines between the human and nonhuman, the material and immaterial. The complex movements from idea to idea in each poem make it difficult for one to claim that our selected works can be related to each other as ecopoems, but the techniques Donnelly uses to have a conversation with the voiceless remain consistent throughout. If thoughts can be wool, planets can intend to destroy one another, and atoms can want to go for a walk, so too can the soul be the dregs at the bottom of a god’s stomach.