“Elegy On Fire”: Eight Questions for D.A. Powell
I have always been very interested in how family and past experiences affect your life. Poetry is such an engaging way to see the world through different artists’ views of life and the world around them. Poetry allows the readers to relate to their experiences, and feel their grief and emotions while connecting it to your own life. Through poetry, moments of loss, joy, or memory can feel immediate, intimate and universal, even when they are deeply personal to the poet.
While reading “Elegy on Fire” by D.A. Powell, I was particularly drawn to the vulnerability he emphasized in his poetry. He blends personal experiences, with how his family shaped him, and finally includes ideas of the larger world around us. He captures moments that allow readers to feel his grief and openness, all while maintaining a distinct and powerful voice. In “Elegy on Fire,” Powell seamlessly moves between memories of his father and other childhood experiences as well as reflections of war and history. His ability to balance these deep topics while keeping the readers engaged is fascinating.
Born in Albany, Georgia, D.A. Powell is an award winning poet specifically known for his deep personal art. He received his MA at Sonoma State University and his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Throughout his career, Powell has received numerous honors, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Chronic (2009) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (2012). Several of his other collections were also finalists for major recognitions such as the National Poetry Series and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Powell has taught at Harvard, Columbia, and currently, the University of San Francisco. He has also been honored for many awards for his teaching.
I noticed your poem reflects vivid memories of your father and your upbringing in a military environment. How has your family or childhood influenced the way you write poetry?
I wouldn’t say my family or childhood has necessarily influenced the “way” I write, but I do draw from experiences from growing up as well as stories I was told. Sometimes the stuff that goes into a poem can really feel like a testing ground, a place where things can be tried without fear of repercussions. I don’t think the actual experience of growing up is without repercussions. But once it’s all a part of the distant past, it can be recovered, reclaimed, revised and all the other re- verbs. Poetry is a place where we can re- things.
In your poem you say you stand outside barefoot thinking of the song “Is That All There Is” by Peggy Lee. Does music have a particular role in your memory or imagination, and how does it influence the imagery in your poetry?
Yes, music certainly is a key to memory, and songs can unlock memories just the way a smell or a taste can transport us back to a place that it evokes. I’m not sure whether music influences my imagery. I mean, I guess it does, but I don’t think about it that way. Instead, I think of music as the aural equivalent of an image: a thing one has heard rather than a thing one has seen. Certain voices pierce me to the core: Hank Williams, Billie Holliday, Donna Summer, Chet Baker, Dinah Washington, Martha Wash, Sylvester. Their tones slice right through the networks of nerves to the inner part of my brain and awake an emotional landscape that is often dormant until triggered by song.
This poem moves between your personal memory, family impact and history, as well as reflections on war and patriotism. Can you walk me through how you decide to shift between all of these layers and how to blend them into a single cohesive poem?
Oh! “Decide.” Hmmmm … I don’t know if I am really deciding when I shift from one mood to the next, or one tone to the next or one place or time. There was so much going on in my head when I wrote that poem. It was several weeks past Independence Day and people were still setting off fireworks. I mean, really loud ones, huge megaton explosions. I was in isolation; it being the 4th or 5th month of “lockdown” (the entire city was transformed at this time by the covid virus) and my patience for the fireworks was wearing thin. All of this emotion, memory, feeling was churning inside me and just had to be let loose. I had been in the bath, and one of those explosions made me leap out, grab my towel, head to my desk and just start writing. What Wordsworth called something like a spontaneous overflow of emotion. So I wasn’t steering the boat. I was a passenger, and I was just letting the poem spill out of me like a spirit speaking through a ouija board. I did very little to shape it; I just put it all down and let it tell me what was happening. I remembered a time in college when my apartment caught fire. I remembered when I was living in a car and I scraped together enough money to rent a motel room for the evening then accidentally set it on fire. I remembered my grandfather dying in a fire. And I remembered so much about my father and his relationship to guns, fireworks, bombs, etc. But I wasn’t choosing; I was listening to all of it as it tumbled out of the memory box.
In “Elegy on Fire,” there are vivid scenes of escaping a burning building that feel both real and metaphorical, especially as the poem moves into memories of war and family. How much of your poetry comes from personal experience, and how much comes from your artistic imagination?
I’d say it comes from both places simultaneously. Thank God I’m not mathematically inclined, or I’d have to reduce it to something like a 50/50 ratio. But it’s more like 80/80. Eighty percent comes from my personal experience. But eighty percent all comes from my artistic imagination. So everything that is personal is also imagined, and everything that is imagined is personal. The other twenty percent is just things I find I’ve written down or collected in my junk drawer and stuck in there where it feels like it needs to go. It’s like I’m building a building out of rock and I don’t know which rock to put into the wall next because it has to be a) something I have on hand already and b) something that will fit. Also, none of these numbers really matters so I don’t know why I’m using numbers to explain it. But the short answer is that both real things and imagined things are used, and then there’s stuff that just leaps into my head from someplace else. Homer and the Iliad for example. They hang out in my head. But I didn’t know they were going in until they went in. And I’m no expert, but I think Homer falls into the category of neither real nor imagined. Because it’s stuff being handed down through time. And you know and I know that story must have been added to and revised every time it got passed along. So we can never know what’s real, because “real” isn’t even a concern for these kinds of history-adjacent myths.
Your poem is layered in ways that feel personal yet expansive, reaching into ideas of history and how history can shape personal experiences. Are there poets or other artists who have shaped your view of poetry and influenced the way you write?
Oh, yes, Good question! I’d say I get a lot of influence from the way camera shots are combined in movies to create emotional complexity. And for poets, I’d cite Jorie Graham (who was also my teacher), Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Walker, Charles Reznikoff, Robert Hass, Barbara Hamby, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, Thom Gunn. Poets who are never afraid to put it all in.
What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of writing poetry in America today? In our class, we have read essays about the current state of American poetry. How do you view poetry in America today?
I think there’s a lot of puffiness when folks start writing about capital-P Poetry. I’ll say this: whatever people want to think about the subject of poetry, that’s just dandy. But my real inspiration has always come from writers who don’t put on any airs. They are in fact often rather skeptical of poetry with a capital P. These writers include Arthur Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara, Charles Bukowski, E. E. Cummings. Read some of Cummings’s “non-lectures” by way of example. And even Tristan Tzara. They are not propping up the institution; they are having fun and playing games and saying awkward things and not worrying about whether poetry will save us or them or the planet or time or anything else worth saving. We all need something to do that’s (to others) a form of “goofing off.” Poetry is my place to goof off. I don’t care whether anyone thinks it’s important. I shut the door and open up my mind. Whatever comes out is fair game. I do like to play with it and dress it up a bit. But for the most part, I just like surprising myself. To which Gertrude Stein would no doubt add “and others.”
When you start writing your poems, especially “Elegy on Fire,” do you usually know how it’s going to take shape, how it might end, or what to include, or does that mostly come naturally to you as you write? Also, do you have a way of approaching writing poetry that feels unique to you?
I don’t know any of the hows. If I do, I might get bored or disappointed. I’d rather just see what happens. I mean, I learned a lot of stuff about poetry and I can draw upon that learning. But I usually prefer to shut off the little voices in my head that might say, “Oh, now, you can’t do it like that,” and just open up the throttle. I’m on a journey to a place that I ain’t discovered yet. Seems silly to plan anything until I see what unplanning gets me.
Writing about loss and grief can be a very vulnerable thing to do. How do you approach writing about grief so your thoughts are expressed honestly while also giving readers a way to connect with the pain you feel?
Also an incredibly good question. I don’t know if there’s a right way to grieve. But I think if you are able to get an honest answer from the voice inside you, that’s a huge plus. I did theatre before I came to poetry, so I was already used to being vulnerable and risky in art. That helped a lot. Also, I was always the kid who’d say the things we weren’t supposed to say. And I’m still that kid. But I try to parent that child just a little bit so he isn’t a total embarrassment to his elders.