Poet D.A. Powell returns to the Writers’ Workshop for a reading of era-defining poetry both new and old.
By Tessa Solomon
Poet D.A. Powell has a theory about writing.
Everything in the universe runs on these pulses, waves of sound,” he told me over the phone. “Every once in a while, a signal is sent through our arm: Sketch or record to remember this. Writing gives us a chance to consider after its initial shock the idea we just gave birth to … it’s going back to reveal something truer or more authentic.”
In the 1980s, the United States was in the throes of its AIDS epidemic, a selective, stigmatized plague. The writing that emerged attempted to capture the era with some resonate results: Paul Monette’s memoir, “Borrowed Time” and Tony Kushner’s seminal “Angels in America.”
At that time, Powell, gay and not yet diagnosed as HIV positive, was new to literary pursuits — “I’m not a serious person” — and had even refused his first acceptance to the Writers’ Workshop; “chickened out,” as he put it. But he had a problem with the ways some of the voices represented the epidemic and wanted to do something about it.
“I feel like there was a lot of poetry going on that to me felt strangely foreign and careful and considered,” he said. “I felt like I wanted a world that was more shattered and broken. One where someone had taken a hammer and smashed all the windows.”
In the Workshop, he began recording the infinite but also occasional pulses of his personal universe: a world of dying lovers, friends, community.
The work that emerged, Repast comprises three collections: “Tea,” “Lunch,” and “Cocktails.”
“I was going into gay life in the ’70s and ’80 — the discotheques, the alt world of gay bars and spaces where gay people could feel space. I was bringing back to life an entire segment that had been decimated by the AIDS.”
The trilogy would stand just beyond compare in the myriad reflections of a complex, deteriorating, time and space. Among new works, he’ll read bits of each collection 8 p.m. today at the Writers’ Workshop Dey House.
Powell describes entering the Workshop in the late-90s without any familiar waxing of the honor, tradition, and awe. Actually, his relationship with poetry had a rocky start.The classic read in high school — Poe, Dickinson, Byron — were “boring,” the award-winning poet said.
“When I went back to college [as an undergraduate], I took a poetry class, and there was no pressure to imitate poems of the past,” Powell said. “There were no models that we had to think about poetry with a capital P.”
Despite this, he struggled with committing time to a possibly “pretty unnecessary” degree.
“But then I began to think, what am I going to do anyway?” he said and laughed, a warm, well-worn sound.
He moved into the Iowa City’s Econo-Lodge — there was no room arranged for him by the university yet — and sat down with a poem. As he began working, and as he eventually settled into classes, a change in his perspective came like shifts in the Earth’s tectonic plates, slow but irreversible.
“[The Workshop] taught me how to be a poet, a listener, a reader by paying attention to poetry in a way before that no one had asked me to,” Powell said.
He is adamant, though, that his collection is not about AIDS and that he is not an “AIDS writer.” In the original introduction to “Tea,” he states: “I do not deny this disease its impact. But I deny its dominion.”
Stature, Powell argues, belongs to the community, not the disease.
“It was a kind of public sentiment that came to shorthand the disease,” Powell said. “Instead of actually looking at it as a human issue, AIDS became a brand.”
In Repast’s ending poems, he gives those affected men a new home, a remembered place.
“Phantoms of the handsome, / taut, gallant, bright, slender, youthful: go on / the garment that tore: mended. the body that failed: reclaimed,” Powell writes. “Here is the door marked heaven: someone on the dance floor, waiting just for you:”
