Two
books of poetry that I’ve returned to frequently over the past couple of
years are the most recent books by San Francisco-based poet D. A. Powell, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide
for Boys. I’ve followed Powell’s books since his 1998 debut, Tea,
and his five volumes together form one of the most exciting, innovative bodies
of work in contemporary American poetry. Chronic and Useless Landscape are assured
in their voice and imagery, commanding and relaxed at once.
The
title of Chronic refers to many
different thematic aspects interspersed throughout the book, literally and
figuratively: constancy (in the
sense that pain and illness can be chronic and ongoing, just as life itself can
be, if we’re lucky), the persistent drives of desire and addiction (“chronic”
being one of the slang nicknames for a drug like marijuana, for instance), but
most of all, in terms of time (chronicles, chronology, the ticking of the clock
that never lets up). Powell also
plays with the word via the poems’ titles and the sequencing of the collection,
which is divided into three sections—“Initial C,” the long title poem, and
“Terminal C.” Over half of the
poems’ titles begin with the letter C, and nearly half of the poems’ titles end
with that same letter.
This
is indicative of both the fullness and the playfulness in Powell’s poems. All of the major motifs like love, sex,
and death are underscored, delicately and deliberately, by fragments of
beautiful but derelict landscapes, glittering shards of pop music and
entertainment culture, and the slow-motion transition of an agrarian society to
a thoroughly post-industrial one.
Powell’s style and stance have taken root somewhere directly between a
couple of other poets with distinct California ties, Robinson Jeffers and David
Trinidad, though Powell’s poems don’t ever sound exactly like anybody else’s.
Situated
amongst crematoriums, California poppies, and continental divides is one of
Powell’s finest, most evocative poems, “meditating upon the meaning of the line
‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song good times by chic.”
Even in his more formal and classically allusive moments, Powell is
never too far away from disco, and this poem raises that association to
near-classical heights: “it’s
still 1980 somewhere, some corner of your dark apartment / where the mystery of
the lyric hasn’t faded. and love
is in the chorus waiting to be born.”
Bananarama,
Michael Sembello, and B-movie horror flicks are also invoked elsewhere in the
book, alongside Maria Callas and Virgil.
There’s an ode to a crab louse that’s as hilarious and trenchant as
Frank O’Hara’s wonderful poem “Louise.”
Chronic is the only poetry book
I know of that includes an actual fold-out centerfold (!) for two of its poems. The amiable ghost of Walt Whitman
always lingers here, too, in Powell’s long-limbed lines and his
all-encompassing eye as it sweeps across the plenitude of meanings of
America. And not just the American
past and present, but its potential future. From the end of Powell’s poem titled “cancer inside a little
sea”:
“what
does it matter now, what is self, what is I, who gets to speak
or
who does not speak, whether the poems get written
whether
the reader receives them whole, in part or not at all
child
to come, what will you make of this scratched paradise
this
receptacle of soil, water, seed, bee, floating scat and spore
brutal
wind and brutal tide. the
insignificance of fortunes”
If
D. A. Powell's close concentration on squandered rural/urban hybrid landscapes began to take shape
in Chronic, it became the
sprawling connective tissue in Useless
Landscape, or A Guide for Boys.
During my very first reading of the book upon its release back in February, I was already in tears by the poem “Tender Mercies,” which is only the second piece in the collection, a rapturous apocalyptic prayer that’s suffused with redemptive
hope:
“The
earth’s a little harder than it was.
But
I expect that it will soften soon,
voluptuous in some age hence,
because
we captured it as art
the
moment it was most itself:
fragile,
flecked with nimbleweed,
and so alone,
it
almost welcomed its own ravishment.”
In
“Landscape with Sections of Aqueduct,” Powell writes, “Ruin, by the wayside,
you took as sacrament,” and that acts as a sort of aesthetic/religious mission
statement for the book. He’s able
to find some overflowing gorgeousness wherever he turns, from a blossoming grove
of almond trees to a young man in worn-out jeans strolling through a suburban shopping
mall. I’ve kept swooning over
“Boonies,” a sensuous remembrance of a youthful encounter that’s as close to
Cavafy (by way of Antler, perhaps) as anybody else has gotten: “We’d keep together, he and I, / and
we’d gain meaning from our boyage; we’d pursue / each other through the crush
of darkling rifts.” The poem
“Pupil” spins a swift reversal on the intellectual seduction of a
student/teacher relationship (“You are the headmaster. Now you must master me”).
I
think D. A. Powell is the poet who’s currently pouring the most of himself,
with great candor and daring, right into his books. Composed of equal parts humor and risk, poise and feeling, Chronic and Useless Landscape make an infinitely readable double-portrait
that continually resolves, without ever quite settling or coming into permanent
focus. To quote the
reassuring closing lines of “Tender Mercies”:
“Be
unafraid of what the future brings.
I
will not use this particular blue again.”
