Tag: d a powell

Douglas A. Powell: “The Spokes of Fortune’s Wheel in Constant Turn”

Photographers Unknown, The Spokes of fortune’s Wheel in Constant Turn

I have had to learn the simplest things
        last. Which made for difficulties….
                                           –Charles Olson

We know from accounts of the judgment of Paris how Love took
first:
the apple burnished by–it turns out–her own husband, working
the bellows,
forging to Discord’s specifications, her need to break the
spaghetti strands
of marriage, her undiluted vitriol, that oversaw his flux and
foundry,
guided the sparking hammer to its urgent deeds.

Spoils of war.

Power, undeterred and wily as it always is, the figural eye and its
agency,
took gladly the second chair, from which advantage
machinations could be seen.
Advised, conferred, deployed the second wave of ships, provided
mercenary aid
to every side and fanned the air, and made her counsel with all
sides, supporting
every one and none, out-waiting tides.

If we believe the Greeks, the spokes of Fortune’s wheel in
constant turn would allow
the last to be the first–beatitudes bestowed upon the losing
side,
a draught of time in which the wily ones, by their equine portage
made
the mind the victor over Love’s inconstancy and strife,
and, over brute acts, gave thought dominion in a golden age. But
that’s just a myth.

Wisdom, you are the last to whom I turn. Not for your spear,
fashioned in that same fire as all bright jealous objects of desire,
But for you shield.
Protect the least of us. Or lift me from this battlefield,
and take me home.

D. A. Powell, To Last, 2019

Born in Albany, Georgia in May of 1963, Douglas A. Powell is an American poet. After finishing his primary education in the California town of Olivehurst, he relocated to Santa Rosa where he entered Sonoma State University. Powell earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1991 and his Master of Arts in 1993. After completing his graduate work, he studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and received his Master of Fine Art in 1996. 

After his formal studies, D. A. Powell began a career as a poet and university professor. He has taught at New York’s Columbia University, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University and the University of Iowa. He also served as the Biggs-Copeland Lecturer of Poetry at Harvard University. In 2004, Powell left Harvard to take a teaching position in the English department at the University of San Francisco. 

Powell’s work blends the mythology of gay culture with his own distinctive voice and personal experiences. His first exposure to poetry was through Dudley Randall’s anthology “The Black Poets”. An early exposrue to such authors as Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker also played an influential role in Powell’s development. While exploring local bookstores, he came across T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste land and Other Poems”. Eliot’s poetic  influence can be seen in Powell’s use of fragmented life experiences later reconstructed in verse on paper.  

In his work, D. A. Powell mixes both conventional and non-conventional techniques of poetic format. There were no titles to his early poems; the poems’ working titles were their first lines. Similar to the work of E. E. Cummings, the first letter of a new sentence is not capitalized. Shifting between popular culture and more complicated themes like religion and AIDS, Powell uses rhetorical devices, such as puns, to serve as bridges between these separate areas of experience. Open typographical spaces are often inserted in the middle of his lines that in effect lend pause to the cadence of the poem.

Powell’s first published collection was the 1998 “Tea”, a work he started the day he arrived in Iowa for grad school. This early work gathered reference material from both high and low culture: Whitman’s poetry and biblical heroes to Hollywood romances and Batman’s Robin. In 2000, Powell published “Lunch”, layered poems of memories from childhood and adolescence fractured by his adulthood and diagnosis of HIV. His third collection, the last of this trilogy, was the 2004 “Cocktails”, a contemporary Divine Comedy composed from witty and eloquent poems born of the AIDS pandemic. “Lunch’ was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and “Cocktails” was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

D. A. Powell’s 2009 “Chronic” was a work of wildly varied subject matter with effects drawn from contemporary free verse. The poems contained colloquial clichés, odd punctuation, parenthetical marks, lack of capitalization and quotes without any ascribed credit. Among the poems included in this volume were  “clown burial in winter”, “clutch and pumps”, and “cancer inside a little sea”. In February of 2010, Powell won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his work. “Chronic” also won the 2009 California Book Award. Powell’s next work “Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys”, published in 2012, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for that year. 

Powell was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 2011 and in 2019 received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Notes: Additional poems by D. A. Powell can be found on the PoemHunter website located at: https://www.poemhunter.com/d-a-powell/

There is a more comprehensive article on D. A. Powell’s poetry collections, entitled “D. A. Powell’s Unruly Elegies” and written by Christopher Richards, in the online New Yorker Magazine that is worth reading. This Page-Turner article can be found at: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/d-a-powell-poetry

Douglas Alain Powell: “The Earth Has Asserted Itself”

Photographers Unknown, The Earth Has Asserted Itself

had no direction to go but up: and this, the shattery road
its surface graining, trickle in late thaw—is nothing amiss?
            —this melt, the sign assures us, natural cycle
                         and whoosh, the water a dream of forgotten white

past aspens colored in sulfur, they trembled, would
—poor sinners in redemption song—shed their tainted leaves

I tell you what boy I was, writing lyrics to reflect my passions:
the smell of a bare neck in summer
a thin trail of hairs disappearing below the top button of cut-offs
the lean, arched back of a cyclist straining to ascend a hill

in the starlight I wandered: streets no better than fields
the cul-de-sacs of suburbia just as treacherous, just as empty

if wood doves sang in the branches of the acacias, I could not hear them
anyone lost in that same night was lost in another tract

the air pulsed and dandelion pollen blew from green stalks
                        —that was all

and yes, someone took me in his car.   and another against the low fence
in the park at the end of our block.   under the willow branches
where gnats made a furious cloud at dawn and chased us away

I knew how it felt to lie in a patch of marigolds: golden stains
the way morning swarmed a hidden rooftop, the catbirds singing
the feel of ruin upon lips rubbed raw throughout the night

granite peaks: here, the earth has asserted itself. and the ice asserted
and human intimacies conspired to keep us low and apart

for an ice age I knew you only as an idea of longing:
a voice in the next yard, whispering through the chink
a vagabond outlined against the sky, among the drying grass

we journey this day to darkness: the chasm walls lift us on their scaly backs
the glaciers relinquish their secrets: that sound is the ice bowing
and the sound underneath, the trickle: the past released, disappearing

you pinnacle of my life, stand with me on this brink
half-clouded basin caked in flat grays, the very demise of green

you have surmounted the craggy boundary between us.

you open a place for me in earth, receiving my song

                                 —for Haines Eason

D. A. Powell, continental divide, Chronic, 2009, Graywolf Press

Born in Albany, Georgia in May of 1963, Douglas Alain Powell is an American poet whose work is experimental in form. Growing up in Georgia and Tennessee, he relocated, after his parents’ divorce, with his brother to live in California with their mother and new stepfather. Powell lived on and off the streets in his teen years, often running away from home and working odd jobs to support himself. He graduated from Lindhurst High School and made several attempts at colleges, including a short term at San Jose State University.

At the age of twenty-two, Powell entered Sonoma State University where he began to write poetry under the tutorage of poet David Bromige. During his years in Sonoma County, he organized poetry readings and co-founded “Avec”, which became a major journal of the post-Language Poetry avant-garde. Powell received his Bachelor of Arts in English in 1991 and his Masters in English in 1993, both from Sonoma State University.

After completing his graduate studies, Douglas Powell entered the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and received his Masters in Fine Arts in 1996. For his work during the Writer’s Workshop, he received an Academy of American Poets prize. While in Iowa, Powell wrote his first full-length poetry collection, “Tea”, which focused on AIDS in particular and the gay subculture in general. The poems in this collection examine pain, loss, abuse, rejection and suffering; however, the essence of the volume is one of survival. Published in 1998 after Powell’s return to California. this first work generated a great deal of excitement. Powell’s openness about his HIV-positive status contributed to interest in the book and readers’ response to it.

The writers cited by Powell as influences on his work cover a wide range; he uses their writings as a litmus test for his own work. These writers include t. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, and the Black Mountain poets, among others. Known for his syntactically inventive, longer lined and sometimes untitled work, Powell creates poems that are almost collage-like in form, where fragmentary elements of allusions and references are joined together into mosaic compositions. The source list for his 1998 volume of poems, “Tea”, include the following: Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”, the Supremes, Tennessee Williams, mid-1980s disco divas, gay slang, Batman’s sidekick Robin, and “The Exorcist”, among others.

Settled in California, Powell began doing work in San Francisco’s new media industry. In 1997, he was awarded a Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Foundation. In addition to his career as a poet, Powell was a university professor with teaching positions at Columbia University, Sonoma State University, San Francisco State University and Harvard University, where he was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry, a prestigious five-year position.

In 2000, Douglas Powell’s second collection of poetry, entitled “Lunch”, was published by the Wesleyan University Press. This volume built on the survival aspect in “Tea” and directed it onward to restoration and rejuvenation. While again examining the issue of AIDS, the poems were not about dying from the virus, but about living with it and through it. “Lunch” was more eclectic, both in its formality and theme, and contained biblical and mythological allusions, such as the stories of King Midas and the birth of Aphrodite. The lines in the poems were shorter than those in “Tea”, almost conventional, while the poems were generally longer in length, with a greater variety.

Powell’s next collection of poems, “Cocktails”, was published in 2004 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. His 2009 “Chronic” won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and also was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. The 2012 “Useless Landscapes, or a Guide for Boys” was a witty and emotional collection of poems which examined the occupied spaces of boonies, backstages, bathhouses, and bars. This fifth volume of poetry by Powell won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. His poetry can also be found in the 2008 anthology “Best American Poetry” and “American Hybrid”, an anthology published in 2009.

Note: A collection of twenty-six poems by Douglas Alain Powell, including a reading of his poem “continental divide”, can be found at the Poetry Foundation. The link to the recorded reading is: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51144/continental-divide