San Francisco-based poet D.A. Powell is Butler’s first Visiting Writer of the fall series, which kicks off September 10 at 7:30 PM in the Clowes Memorial Hall Krannert Room. With five books of poetry under his belt, Powell’s latest, Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012.
The International Poetry Library of San Francisco writes that “Powell has a talent for expanding the lyric form into the experimental and metaphysical realm while simultaneously writing with an accessible, ‘everyman’ tone.”
In this way Powell allows his readers – or in our case, his listeners – to proverbially have their cake and eat it too. While the lyric form lends itself to volleys of wild, surprising, often unsettling imagery, Powell’s distinct “everyman tone” grounds his poems firmly. He is somehow both avant-garde and approachable. Even for the most reticent readers of poetry, those who balk at the first sign of a symbol, Powell provides secure footholds.
This of course means even those more firmly entrenched in prose have no excuse but to attend! But for those not sold, let’s take a look at “sprig of lilac” from Powell’s Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award-winning fourth book Chronic.
in a week you could watch me crumble to smut: spent hues
spent perfumes. dust upon the lapel where a moment I rested
yes, the moths have visited and deposited their velvet egg mass
the gnats were here: they smelled the wilt and blight. they salivated
in the folds of my garments: you could practically taste the rot
look at the pluck you’ve made of my heart: it broke open in your hands
oddments of ravished leaves: blossom blast and dieback: petals drooping
we kissed briefly in the deathless spring. the koi pond hummed with flies
unbutton me now from your grasp. no, hold tighter, let me disappear
into your nostrils, into your skin, a powdery smudge against your rough cheek
Powell’s language is luscious and daring, but evocative and resolutely clear, even on a first read. You can taste the heartsickness. Here, the speaker is the titular lilac sprig, spent and rotting, infested with insect eggs and dieback, its pollen no more than remnant traces of dust on the lapels of an old love. It speaks of a capricious spring romance, a broke-open heart turned to pluck, and two conflicting desires: one, to at once be ‘unbuttoned’ from the ache of the lover’s grasp, and the other, to have that intimacy restored, to be wholly consumed.
If you find yourself aching for more, admission is free, the event is open to the public—no tickets required. September 10. 7:30 PM. Clowes Memorial Hall Krannert Room. Be there, or be pluck.