THC: Who else do you consider an influence?

DP: When I was a kid, I was reading a lot of existentialist novels, and one of them mentioned a poet named T. S. Eliot. In the Black Poets anthology, Ishmael Reed mentions “the hell that thrilled him so” in reference to Eliot. So I was at the Waldenbooks in the Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights, California. Waldenbooks has terrible poetry sections, but you don’t know that when you’re young. There was all the usual schlocky stuff, like Robert Browning, that I just couldn’t get my mind around. And then there was a very slim volume called, The Waste Land and Other Poems, by T.S. Eliot. And I thought, I’ve heard of him, I’ll pick it up and have a read. I began reading the very first poem in the book, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table …” And I thought, ‘damn, this is really good.’ So I bought the book and I read the whole thing cover to cover maybe a thousand times. After all, I didn’t have that many poetry books.

Later, I discovered a few white poets that I liked: William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens. I had just started college at San Jose State, and I went to a poetry reading by Robert Bly. Toward the end, just when I was so bored I thought I was going to shoot my brains out, he started reading these García-Lorca translations, and all of the sudden I perked up. So I went out and bought several García-Lorca books. Later I discovered Gertrude Stein and read her a great deal. Then it was the Black Mountain Poets: Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan. And finally, the New York school. I’m glad I came to them last, because as soon as I started reading Frank O’Hara, I thought, this guy’s ripping me off. Except he died when I was three.

THC: How are you liking your new job?

D. A. Powell: I’m enjoying Harvard immensely. In comparison to my past two teaching engagements, in Iowa and in California, Harvard students are wonderful. They’re not skulking into class with a baseball cap over their eyes not having done the reading. They seem very focused, motivated, and intelligent.

At many other schools, I got only English majors, and they all wrote about what they had read instead of what they had lived. Here I get students from different disciplines with their own ways of looking at the world. They have a great deal of humanity about them. They’re all very young, whereas I’m used to teaching a mix of ages. But there’s a mix of backgrounds, cultural identities, and influences.

I had initially thought that I’d get lots of writing done at Harvard. I haven’t, but that’s fine. Let’s face it, writing is the nerdiest pastime in the world. It’s for people with nothing else to do. I tend to write in the cracks of time anyway: before I go to bed, right when I wake up, or in between student conferences. I think my writing benefits from having to compress.

THC: What are you giving your students to read?

DP: Books of contemporary poetry. Etel Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse, which is about twenty years old but as timely as ever given recent events. They’re also reading Forrest Hamer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sam Witt, and Claudia Rankine. And I give them weekly hand-outs. This week it’s elegies by Walt Whitman, W. B. Yeats, and Thom Gunn.