Getting To The Bottom Of D.A.Powell
I've just watched the 1987 film 'Hamburger Hill', directed by John Irvin. It's one of the lesser known Vietnam films but is an engaging depiction of male camaraderie in wartime. There's no plot, no arty frills, no big names, just an intelligent, naturalistic script and believable, horrifying action - a squad of men climbing a hill, acting like idiots, becoming friends, growing up, getting killed...
I wrote the following section from my poem '1969' on the back of it:
Sun-
beams prise open the smoking palms
in a gashed glade at the
base of Hill Nine-Three-Seven. Serg. Bates
slits
apart, smells deep, his airmail. Don
picks foot-rot. Doc sutures
a wound with Disneyland heartbeats:
There-
there, there-there, there-there, while stuttering
lionpurr of chopper-
blades seep through helmets, flak-jackets - What's
goan
down in Baltimore, bro? - seep like blood.
Bitch gone to college, smokes
weed, gets into this 'peace' and 'love'. That's
what's
goan down. Niggers, spicks, wops, micks, greaseballs,
even gooks - got buttons
on her pretty flowered blouse for shits
who
ain't even born yet, but none for me.
Don't even tell her room-
mate 'bout me. Us. This. He gestures, spits
as
Doc attempts to stitch one life, in time,
instead of saving nine
strewn out there, roasting on their own spits
out
there in the elephant grass. Keep talkin',
Serg. You're fine. You're doin'
jus fine...
I've also just finished reading D.A.Powell's 'Cocktails' - so I'm writing here my first reaction to it. It's experimental, very camp, lyrical and sonically gorgeous - experimental in that his sentences often seem fractured (although at the same time - and I missed this at first - he often rhymes and uses couplets). He's more interested, I think, in the impressions that individual words and images make rather than in the coherence of a sentence. Although, having said that, his poems do conjure up particular scenes and emotions. They're certainly not abstract the way Ashbery can be. (Coherence is overrated, as I think I said in my last entry. For most of my writing life I've thought that 'not making sense' was puerile. But as I get older I realise more and more that not making sense is actually not puerile, but invigorating, liberating and necessary. I suppose as a Literature student I was always anxious to find the 'key' to a text - once I'd inserted my key I could render the text penetrable. All very macho! Do texts need to be penetrated? Is there not a different kind of reading practice which enjoys a text's blushing, alluring resistance? Can I, as a reader, not be pleasurably penetrated by a text I don't fully understand? I suppose I'm exploring this idea in my poems which have the titles which begin 'Poem While Reading...' So far there are two: 'Poem While Reading Frank O'Hara, Lachanau, Southwest France' and 'Poem While Reading Miroslav Holub In The Genito-Urinary Clinic Waiting Room'. There will definitely be more in this 'group'. Maybe the active/passive, masculine/feminine binary inherent in this reading metaphor should be ditched completely - maybe the act of reading is more of an erotic 'merging'...) Anyway, back to Powell. He's very camp because a lot of his effects rely on an awareness of sexual (and specifically homosexual) double-entrendre and irony. So I suppose his text allows itself to be penetrated by 'those in the know', but, possibly, is more obscure to those 'out of the know'. He's a master of eccentric linebreaks, spacing and punctuation which usually force the reader to reconsider or overlay the meaning of a word or phrase. In this sense, maybe we could say that his text is not so much waiting to be penetrated by the right kind of reader, but actively queering ALL readers who come to it... now that's an interesting idea!
It's also very much poetry borne out of AIDS and living with HIV, threading the medical terminology of it into his text and making it his own - owning it - and actually making it beautiful, which, without referring too directly to the disease, is a canny way of, if not beating the disease, then of at least making a gesture of fearlessness and honesty. Possibly, by recontextualising such terminology, by metaphoricising it or drawing attention to its musicality or by rendering it semantically imprecise, he's robbing it of its usual power and gaining an imaginative victory of sorts. There's certainly no self-pity here. Or anger. He's wry, mischievous and celebratory, acknowledging suffering while deftly taking the sting out of its tail.
He reminds me most of all of G.M.Hopkins, or at least G.M.Hopkins infected, thankfully, with a dose of postmodern humour. It's the blurring of the religious and the erotic, and the luxurious musicality. There's a hint of Jacques Brel in there, too...
Anyway, that's my first reaction. He's certainly a poet I'll be returning to - and there are precious few of those! And I've just found out he's got a new book out called 'Chronic'.
It's Easter holidays, and, typically, I'm laid low with a 'man flu' so I'm not utilising the freedom nearly as much as I'd hoped. Bloody typical! And no, I didn't just google 'symptoms of pneumonia'. I didn't. No. That would have been stupid.
Thanks for reading,
Richard
