Photo by Kevin Killian D A Powell's most recent book is Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004). His work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Chicago Review, American Letters & Commentary, Fence and Xantippe. Together with Katherine Swiggart, Powell edits Electronic Poetry Review. He teaches at University of San Francisco. Buy his books here. See some of his work here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? "Ante-Bellum Sermon" by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. I loved the tonal changes of the poem, the way the speaker is using the story of Moses to talk about slavery and yet denying that that's what he's doing (lest he be overheard by the slaveholders). It's a brilliant linguistic game, and Dunbar's tonal switches are made even more disarming by the conventional rhyme scheme—even though you know you're headed toward a certain sound, you never know what they poem will tell you, because the form of address is ever-shifting. At 14, it was the first time I'd ever encountered a poem that was so artfully complex. Most of my other early favorites were the ones you'd typically find in a young person's canon: "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by Yeats, Eliot's "Ash Wednesday," "Poetry of Departures" by Philip Larkin, "An agony. As now" by Amiri Baraka, "Marriage" by Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California," Frank Horne's "To Mother," "Goodbat, Nightman" by Roger McGough, "Sunday Morning" by Stevens, Plath's "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Etheridge Knight's "I Sing of Shine" and "For Freckle-Faced Gerald," "Summer, A Far-Off War" by Clarence Major, Randall Jarrell's "The Ballad of the Ball-Turret Gunner," James Dickey's "Sheep Child" and Blake's "When Klopstock England Defied." 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I don't know that they'd necessarily be surprised. I love Edna Ferber's novels. They're unfortunately melodramatic at times. But I love the historical information in them. Also, she's quite transgressive in terms of her depictions of race and gender. I also like Boyd MacDonald's "Straight to Hell" series of chapbooks--it's erotica written by ordinary people; it's not trying to be literary. I find it much more interesting than most contemporary short fiction. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? When I was a freshman in high school, I discovered existentialism. I was wild about Sartre and Camus. I also read Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" and as much as I could of Kierkegaard (which, alas, wasn't much). For a while I imagined that I was a philosopher, which is why most of my first poems were awful--I kept trying to fill them with philosophy. Now, I just write. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? I don't even think about who's what. That's really a big problem with writing programs that no one talks about: even though there's been a tremendous move toward "inclusiveness" in anthologies and on syllabi, there's still an underlying assumption that Asian-American students are going to be influenced by Asian and Asian-American poets, that African-American poets are going to be influenced by Carribean, African and African-American writers, etc, etc. And white. That is, whatever one's identity is, you still have to add "and white." Because everyone is going to be reading Shakespeare and Keats and Lowell (or Olson) and whatever else the instructor treats as central. It's sad, because everyone ends up being crippled by issues of identity and there's not enough cross-pollination. I just turned my back on the computer for a second to see what's on my shelf in my office. I don't organize alphabetically, so it's a hodgepodge. Here's a sample: Susan Mitchell, Frank O'Hara, David Antin, Edward Hirsch, Pura Lopes-Colome, Spencer Selby, Caroline Knox, Reginald Shepherd, Ikkyu, Robert Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Lucille Clifton, Cecilia Vicuna, Thom Gunn, James Dickey, Christopher Reiner, Pablo Neruda, H.D., Rodney Jones, Ntozake Shange, Katie Ford, Brenda Coultas, Saadi Youssef, Jerome Rothenberg, Nizar Qabbani, Sean Singer, Jane Mead, Catherine Wagner, Brenda Hillman, Stephen Mallarme, Spencer Short, Charles Reznikoff, Carol Frost, Robert Hayden, Seamus Heaney, Hart Crane, Rita Dove, Rae Armantrout, Timothy Liu, Arielle Greenberg, Peter Sacks, Cesar Vallejo, Sylvia Plath, Virgil, Christopher Logue, Kevin Young, James Schuyler, Mark Levine, Tomas Transtromer, Judy Jordan, Ted Berrigan, Farough Farrokhzad, Jon Woodward, Heather McHugh, Ho Xuan Huong, Monica Youn, Aime Cesaire, D. H. Lawrence, Hilda Raz, Apollinaire, Peter Gizzi, Xue Di, Brian Teare, Steve Benson, Charles Wright, Maxine Kumin, Robert Herrick, Clarence Major, Rachel Loden, Forest Hamer, Lynn Watson, Mutsuo Takahashi, Donald Revell, Brenda Shaughnessy,Ted Berrigan, Jaroslav Seifert, Claudia Rankine, Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kevin Prufer, Etel Adnan, Stephen Rodefer, Jean Day, Mary Szybist, Adonis... I don't think I'd be able to begin to sort out the Anglo-Americans from everyone else. In some cases, I don't think I really know. Is Brenda Shaughnessy Anglo-American because her father was? Is Peter Sacks African-American because he was born in Africa? I like good poetry; I don't care if it's written by Anglo-Americans or Greco-Americans or Sino-Americans or Blue Meanies. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? I do read a lot of poetry, in so many different contexts--student poetry, manuscripts, books. I usually have piles of poetry books in all of the major reading areas of my domicile. In terms of my own writing, I think reading poetry was much more crucial as I was formulating my poetics. Now, I continue to enjoy reading poetry, but I'm not influenced by it in the same way that I was when I was a student. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I don't think I can even list all of the things I haven't read. I always feel horribly under-read. I've read the Bible, Ovid and Virgil, most of Shakespeare, most of Willa Cather, most of Tennessee Williams, all of Remembrance of Things Past, and most of Stein. That seems like a good amount of things that I know well. Plus lots of poets in their entirety. But I've missed some very obvious things. Like "Paradise Lost" by Milton. I did read a few lines when I was younger. I don't know about the "Why Haven't You?" part of the question, though. It's not like I don't keep busy. Look, I'm just now reading Evelyn Waugh. He's intensely pleasurable. I'll try to get to everything, honest. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? I think seven year-olds understand what poetry is better than adults do. It's the intense pleasure you derive in playing with words. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Stephen Rodefer says, early in his Four Lectures, "It is not the business of POETRY to be anything." I think that a poet's role is to make the poem, and that the poem's role is to be the poem. That's it. A citizen, however, has all sorts of duties. A citizen has to be responsible. Poets don't have to be responsible. This will probably piss off a lot of people, but I admire Baraka for writing a poem like "Who Blew Up America?" He took a lot of heat for that poem. But the parts of the poem that people objected to were the parts that were most like the citizens--he was holding up a mirror, repeating things that were already being spoken in other corridors. Should he be stripped of his laureateship? Absolutely not! You can't simultaneously ask for an artist to create and also demand the right to judge his creation. Poets aren't politicians; we're not elected. And we're also fallible, just like the pope. But unlike the pope, we don't pretend that what we say is right. We simply make our work in response to the world we live in. If someone doesn't like it, then, as citizens, they should change the world, so we won't have to keep reminding them of how ugly it is. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Skyscraper Chiseled**Frame I**Claudius Of**Green Form**Chloryform 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? The text is the record of what the body takes in: sight, smell, sound. It is the susurration of the breath, the systole and diastole of the heart, the angst of the liver. Poems are like erections--you can probably call one into being through sheer will. But the best ones happen when you're thinking about something you weren't supposed to be thinking about.