Episode 13: D. A. Powell
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Host Rachel Zucker talks with her friend D. A. Powell, author of five award-winning books of poetry and professor at University of San Francisco. They talk about the presidential election, outrage, disturbance, poetry as social activism and action, normalization, resistance, erasures, palimpsests, minimalism, droplifting, notebooks, revision strategies, chaos and order(ing), and going forward. They also talk about their time together at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, teaching, their mutual affection and respect for one another and the importance of friendship.
Books by D. A. Powell
Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2014)
Repast: Tea, Lunch and Cocktails (Graywolf, 2014)
Chronic: Poems (Graywolf, 2012)
Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master (edited alongside Kevin Prufer) (Pleiades Press, 2010)
By Myself: An Autobiography (collaboration with David Trinidad) (Turtle Point Press, 2009)
Cocktails: Poems (Graywolf, 2004)
Other Books and Projects Mentioned in the Episode
Sentences by Robert Grenier
garlic in the ground by Robert Grenier (video portrait by Charles Bernstein), published by Jacket2
Soldier's Heart: The Campaign to Understand My WWII Veteran Father — A Daughter's Memoir by Carol Tyler (Fantagraphics, 2015)
Howl by Allen Ginsberg (the Moloch section) (City Lights reissue, 2001)
Citizen by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf, 2014)
Other Relevant Links
“D. A. Powell’s Unruly Elegies,” by Christopher Richards, published in the New Yorker
30 Books: Gregg Barrios on D. A. Powell’s “Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys,” published in Critical Mass
“Hell's Music: A 'Guide For Boys' With Adult Themes,” by Craig Morgen Teicher, published by NPR
People, Publications and Events Mentioned in this Episode
Radi Os by Ronald Johnson (Flood Editions, 2015), an "erasure" of Paradise Lost
Boomerang! (Rachel’s contributor’s journal): A limited edition literary journal created to encourage communication between writers (modeled on ROOMS a contributors Journal made by Bay Area women poets. Committed to linguistic and visual experimentation, Boomerang! Ran for 15 issues. Contributors included: Rick Barot, Miranda Field, Alan Feldman, Joy Katz, Wayne Koestenbaum, Lisa Lubasch, Hermine Meinhard, D. A. Powell, Reginald Shepherd, Elizabeth Robinson, David Trinidad and Max Winter.
