Long
lines; and long, long, long lines. He
piles up the words into waves which he then lets break. The sound remains after reading, like the
sea. I haven’t read any D A Powell for
at least 24 hours, but I can still hear him.
How many contemporary poets have that effect? Now to read him again: here is the beginning
of ‘cruel, cruel summer’ (from Chronic,
the more recent of these two collections).
I can hardly bear not to quote the whole thing, but it can be read here.
either the postagestamp-bright
inflorescence of wild mustard
or the drab tassel of prairie smoke,
waving its dirty garments
either the low breeze through the
cracked window
or houseflies and drawn blinds to
spare us the calid sun
one day commands the next to lie
down, to scatter: we're done
with allegiance, devotion, the
malicious idea of what's eternal
That
is a poem that is about
everything. A lot of the poems seem to be about everything, whatever
they are ostensibly about. The long
lines, most often in couplets or tercets, can soothe and comfort; they can also unsettle, and some of the content
certainly unsettles. I thought Cocktails was a frivolous book title,
until, reading, I remembered that it’s a collective metaphor for drugs. Similarly, Chronic contains both “time, the cruel banker” and the chronic
illness of AIDS. There are alcoholic cocktails
in Cocktails too, and plenty of
surface frivolity reflected in a magpie use of language – both books are full
of unusual words, archaisms, slang, and multiple cultural references from pop
and film to the classics to birds, flowers and fields.
The
poems in Cocktails have no titles,
and are known by their first lines in square brackets. Some address Powell’s illness with direct
brutality mixed with, but not leavened by humour. [when you touch down upon
this earth. little reindeers] is
addressed to “father xmas” and goes from innocence to experience to near-death
in 12 lines.
I left you tollhouse cookies. you gave me bloody briefs
lipodystrophy neurosthesia
neutropenia mild psychosis
increased liver enzymes increased
bilirubin and a sweater
don't get me wrong: I like the sweater. though
it itches
but what's the use of being pretty
if I won't get better?
The
poem’s in terza rima, subtly, and clatters along like the reindeer “hoofing
murderously”. It can be read in full here.
Powell’s
work seems to contain a lot of earlier American poetry. For example (and these are just the ones I’ve
thought of, somewhat cartoonishly characterised to make the point): Marianne
Moore for eclectic, exotic description; Walt
Whitman for line length; Wallace Stevens for the rolling tone; Frank O’Hara for
pop culture, slick humour and elegantly casual turn of phrase; Sylvia Plath for
shock tactics; ee cummings for poetic tweeness; Elizabeth Bishop for moving overtly
through thoughts (and a moon/almanac poem).
Looking
through Chronic, I’ve even just spotted
(though may be imagining it) Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’ in the title poem: “in a
spring of misunderstanding, I took the cricket’s sound // and delight I took in
the sex of every season, the tumble on moss”.
There’s
plenty of the Bible too, surely the King James version, and poems in the last
section of Cocktails have
faux-biblical titles/themes. There’s also
Shakespeare, in the core theme of love-and-death / love-in-death. This is the ending of [gardenhose dilated
with rain: a puff adder].
I too made love to nameless male no. 17: his hair curled
around
his dagger tattoo suspended over his
heart. he said:
and I answered in the same
tongue. seedling
your roots exposed along with a chambray
shirt: tugging
you out of the earth: naked.
trampled. pulp. scythe
I called you darling 14 ways. I called you peaches
In
the set-piece ways he writes about some love situations (the one-night stand,
the fickle lover, etc) Powell also reminds me of the Latin elegiac poets (Tibullus,
Propertius, Ovid). This has been done
thousands of times before, and will be again. But there’s nothing set-piece about Powell’s treatment of the themes. Some of the poems are too sexually explicit
for my taste, but that’s just taste. Out
of these two books, the only poem where I feel that Powell’s high-wire act fails
is one in Chronic called ‘Republic’,
which describes human destruction of the planet and modern human illnesses. He does the political or eco-politics as
brilliantly, when aslant, as everything else, but loses his footing in this
direct approach (though I’m utterly in accord with his thesis).
Going
back to love, the last two poems in Chronic,
set apart like a coda, are called ‘corydon & alexis’ and ‘corydon &
alexis redux’, after a pastoral love story in Virgil’s Eclogues. The ‘redux’ poem can be read here, has a
lovely shepherdesque bit: “doesn’t the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and
slender oats foraged in the meadow”, and ends like this:
guess I figured to be done with
desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way
one burns a pile of twigs and brush
what was his name? I’d ask myself, that guy with the sideburns
and
charming smile
the
one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I’d expire with him on
my tongue
silly poet, silly man: thought I
could master nature like a misguided
preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our
sleepy
eyes
Powell
says somewhere that O’Hara is a big influence; also his first teacher, Black
Mountain poet Robert Duncan. By chance I
was reading Olson in ‘Projective Verse’ on the open field, and that works too:
From the moment he [the poet] ventures
into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts himself in the open—he can go by no track other
than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself.
…
ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND
DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.
Starting
out, Powell seems to open a wide, wide space, and then find the track the poem
wants to follow. There is plenty of
irony (and he is pun-crazy), but no sense of hiding the poet’s voice under layers
of the stuff. The tone varies from
bardic to frivolous, but keeps an element of bardic even when most
frivolous. It’s unusually authoritative,
for contemporary poetry, and in this is as original as in anything else.
It’s
worth listening to him reading online, including here and here; he sounds less
bardic aloud. The poetry reading I most
regret having missed (along with Philip Levine at Aldeburgh one year, which
finished after the last Sunday train back to London) was when D A Powell read
in a small, crowded London pub last January… I had the remains of the winter’s 2-week
flu, and couldn’t get myself out of bed. Afterwards the audience seemed half in love
with him.
Poetry
Trust, are you there? The last Sunday
train goes much later now.
Cocktails
(2004) and Chronic (2009) are both published by Graywolf Press, as is Powell’s
latest book, Useless Landscape, or a
Guide for Boys. There
are two earlier books, Lunch and Tea. If I had to bet on
who’d be most admired of his generation of contemporary English language
poets in say 100 years’ time, right now I’d place my bet on D A Powell.
*** Pop-up poetry in London: two at once. Next week, there’ll be a pop-up poetrybookshop in the Portobello Road, where it will actually be possible to browse
and buy poetry collections and pamphlets from small publishers – who never get
bookshop space. There will be books from
the organisers, CB editions (who are also running the now annual Poetry Book Fair
on 7 September) and Eyewear publishing; and also Arc, Five Leaves, Flipped Eye
and others.***
*** There’s also currently a pop-up poetry stall on Fridays at
Lower Marsh in Waterloo, run by Emma Press, with books also from Sidekick,
Donut and Valley Press. Must go and have
a look at this too. ***
