Chronic

"Powell is someone who doesn’t do a whole bunch of about-faces in his style, in the way that someone like Wright does. But he expands and deepens what he can do, and his subjects expand. It’s fun to introduce people to Powell. Powell is a poet who can be appreciated by people who mostly read short stories and novels. Powell is a great poet of sex; he is a great poet of coming of age and figuring out who you want to be. Since he’s a gay man of a certain generation, he’s also had to become – almost as soon as he started writing – a poet of the HIV/AIDS crisis. And it’s very easy to go through his first book, Tea , and see how that book invites you to see it as a book-length sequence about sexual pleasure and sexual maturity and gay identity, at a time when you couldn’t be a gay man without being aware of what HIV and AIDS were doing and how those illnesses and deaths talked back to, and horribly echoed, the very old associations of sexual pleasure with sin and destruction. Powell begins as someone who is trying to craft a style adequate to all of that, and to the Whitmanian, wonderful tradition of sexual pleasure as a kind of life. And also, he was trying to craft a way to bring gay and queer popular culture into high literary style. So, Powell evolved his first style, in Tea , in terms of long lines that keep restarting and keep trying not to stop in almost the way that the disco music that is so important to his early work tried to keep people dancing through the night. He’s trying to turn something that was supposed to isolate you in a homophobic world into a source of solidarity. Powell develops this long line that is designed to bring people together to celebrate pleasure and acknowledge danger and keep going where you might expect it to stop. And then, he turns this long line back on to other subjects: back on to the lives of other people, back on to the southern landscape – he’s from the American South – and on to the Californian landscape. “Powell evolved his first style in terms of long lines that keep restarting, trying not to stop, like disco music that tried to keep people dancing through the night” He spent his teen years and most of his adulthood in California, in the agricultural Central Valley and then in San Francisco. Chronic is an eco-poetry book. Chronic is a book that is super aware of sexual pleasure among men, but it’s also aware of the unsustainable beauty and ugliness of industrial agriculture in California’s Central Valley. It’s aware of what Elizabeth Colbert called the “sixth extinction” that we’re in the middle of now. The book is aware of climate change and it’s aware of the possibility that we are living at the end of civilization, at the same time as it is aware of the possibility that we are in a society that has more possibilities for human flourishing than ever before – and that maybe, in some ways, can continue. So, it’s got apocalyptic and anti-apocalyptic, liberal and anti-liberal, humanist and anti-humanist, landscape and portrait views all put together in short and long poems, with very long lines that are characteristically and uniquely Powell’s. And it is Powell’s book that has the most internal variety. I think he broadened himself. Chronic is a book that pays more attention to landscape and the nonhuman world. For Powell, as for Whitman, everything can be sexual just as everything can be natural. But it has all the subjects that his previous work had and more. And if you’re someone who wants to read about biology and landscape and region, and doesn’t especially want to read about sexuality, then Chronic is the Powell book for you. He is a modern romantic, in the lowercase ‘r’ sense, in that romance – dating and hookups and sex and ‘who do you want to get busy with?’ – are among his subjects. He’s also a capital ‘R’ Romantic – like Wordsworth and Blake and Coleridge he is interested in the numinous; he is interested in how you get from the visible world of sublunary and historical experience, to the invisible world of spiritual experience, the world where everything that matters could be forever if it exists at all. He’s absolutely in the Romantic line, and I think he would admit that. He’s also a religious poet. His poetry since the book Cocktails has a running dialogue with varieties of sex-positive Christian beliefs. When I read Kasischke, a lot of my experience is some form of mediated self-recognition. I read the poems of teen experience and I read the poems of parental experience. I mean, I’ve never given birth and I’m not a mom but I say ‘I’m close to people who have been there’, and I say ‘I really wish I could do that’. When I read Powell’s work, I sort of oscillate between ‘I’ve been there’, ‘I wish I could do that’ and ‘oh, that’s quite distant from me; that’s nowhere near my experience.’ The relationship to Christian belief – and I have this experience when I read Coleridge also – is one of the parts of Powell where I read this and I say ‘oh, that’s not in me.’ I love the way that he evokes both responses when I reread him."