Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys: Poems

by D.A. Powell

*Winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry*

I have this rearrangement to make:
symbolic death, my backward glance.
The way the past is a kind of future
leaning against the sporty hood.
—from "Bugcatching at Twilight"
In Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys - D. A. Powell's fifth book of poetry - the rollicking line he has made his signature becomes the taut, more discursive means to describing beauty, singing a dirge, directing an ironic smile, or questioning who in any given setting is the instructor and who is the pupil. This is a book that explores the darker side of divisions and developments, which shows how the interstitial spaces of boonies, backstage, bathhouse, or bar are locations of desire. With Powell's witty banter, emotional resolve, and powerful lyricism, this collection demonstrates his exhilarating range.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Gay, Queer, Read For School

120 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 14, 2012

About the author

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2013.

Repast, Powell's latest, collects his three early books in a handsome volume introduced by novelist David Leavitt.

A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Powell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Follow D. A. Powell on Twitter: Powell_DA

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Reading a review I was attracted to the book. I didn't understand that D. A. Powell is homosexual. I didn't make the connection from the subtitle or from the Boy Scout motif of the cover art. Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys is homosexually tuned. More, much of it is homosexual love poetry. Most of it is lovely. All of it is eloquent as well as powerful. This may be the best new poetry I've read this year. Powell's volatile images ring with such emphatic precision that they rise out of a murkily mysterious lifestyle to show us the truth about desire. He writes it so we're all involved in the fresh exhilaration of the randy, the need for an emotional fix, the headlong rush and clutch at deeper passion. Good poetry makes it universal.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm currently a host of a radio show called The Weekly Reader, which interviews authors of new work every week. I was lucky enough to get D. A. Powell on the phone to discuss this book. I had never read his work before, but I got a big kick out of the humor in Useless Landscapes, as well as the more subtle poems--you know, the ones about landscape. Anyway, he's a really cool and incredibly smart guy. I won't be hosting this radio show much longer, but I'll be looking for his next collection whenever it comes out. I've pasted a link to the interview below in case anybody's interested.

http://kmsuweeklyreader.libsyn.com/d-...

[Michael Buckner · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book delivers poetry that is open and honest, which I like. There are times throughout each poem where Powell tries to let the imagery lead the poem, but it often fell flat with me. The poems that came from within and the personal experiences works much better as they don't seem to be laden with images that try to be crisp and beautiful. These more personals poems had a weight to them and a strong sense of character that I felt like the author was standing on a stage pouring out his emotions for us to truly understand his art.

It is by no means a bad book of poetry, but some of the poems didn't seem to work while others far surpassed the ones that surrounded it.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though Powell's departure from his own form requires a bit of adjustment on the part of the Powell devotee, I genuinely loved the majority of poems in this book. I kept rereading them and I wanted to share them with others. I grew up in the Sacramento Valley region of Northern California, and Powell manages to capture that landscape—both its fertile beauty and its seedy underbelly—for me.

[Inverted · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll probably regret or change this rating later, but fuck. As a collection, Useless Landscape is uneven. Some poems are so so, but there are a good number of poems here (maybe ten, give or take a couple) that make me wish I have the range and the audacity to write something similar.

[Meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The more personal poems about love and sex engaged me more than the ones about landscapes and flowers and shizz. His meditations on aging were darned fine. Why do we need to fall apart physically when we get it together mentally? It is unfair.

[Quiver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hell is the most miraculous invention of love,
no matter how the love turns out.
Hell is the place from whence the music of longing—
which accounts for most of what we call music—
gets written.
(From 'Panic in the Year Zero')

The first collection Useless Landscape features inventive poems that shimmer between agriculture and homoeroticism. I welcomed the fine metaphors, but the ambiguity meant I couldn't decide on which aspect to focus and would find myself flicking back and forth, which created a mishmash effect rather than a coherent, complex whole. A Guide for Boys is more explicit in its eroticism and somehow felt cruder, less innovative for it (though with some nuanced, evocative exceptions on ageing and love).

Crush by Richard Siken remains my favourite on fire in the poetic homoerotic category.

[k-os]

Too sexy, too clever.

[Cassandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was attracted to this book solely for the fact of the lovely cover and that it was poetry.
The feeling I got from this was very melancholy.

“No one gets back to his god unscathed.”

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first heard about D.A. Powell when he was announced as the judge for the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize sponsored by the Hub City Writers Project. I have to admit to being unfamiliar with him previously, although he has been an award winner and nominee a few times over.

I am giving this three stars, which is my typical rating for solid enough writing that also happens to not really be my thing. My eyes glaze over when poets want to be overly descriptive. I found his shorter poems to be far more powerful and thought-provoking. I didn't mind those that talked about his relationships, and it was nice that he didn't filter it. A lot of his poems are about aging, a worn out body, sagging and libidoless. Again, just not something I personally resonate with.

My favorites:

Love Hangover, which includes the line "I'd blow the devil if he offered. Apparently he did."

Outside Thermalito about how bitterness is sometimes the only way, both going and coming. It is also a tiny tiny poem, and I love thoughts well-expressed in such brevity.

Pupil , where he muses about teaching young poets. I really loved this one. As someone who works with students who are creative (although not on creative ventures exactly), I understood those feelings. A different sort of flipped classroom, shall we say.

[JS Found · Rating 5 out of 5]

Desire, sex, change as filtered through Nature. These are lyrics where man's lusts have their correlative in natural wonders and processes. These are also funny, playful poems about weakness, place (in the towns rural of California) and people. They're sexually explicit puns. They're stories about illness that recall Aids. Powell has an incredible vocabulary and he uses a lot of nature jargon--bring a good dictionary with you. Many poems deal with childhood and the change both in the person and the place he's from as the years go by and some things, things you were fond of, things that meant the whole world, disappear. The sweet ache of memory. Some of the poems are inscrutable but one way to read poetry is not for the meaning but for the beauty of the language. In this I recommend reading these poems out loud.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a graceful languor to many of these poems which makes them a tremendous pleasure to read. Powell's characteristic wordplay and wit are in full flower, and he solidifies a growing pastoral strain from Chronic, his last volume, which has added a gorgeous new dimension to his already quite rounded repertoire.

[Darrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection has some solid humorous moments. And for me the humor is based upon the audacity of the speaker to be so deliberate with allusions and references. Those points made me laugh. Also there were really short and impactful poems as well. I feel the collection petered out near the end, but there are some really strong poems in this collection. Would recommend.

[Luis Correa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite of his. Depends a little too much on the double entendre, which had me giggling when I saw him read, but maybe I'm just in a bit of a funk (and no, not in Funkytown). Some transcendently brilliant poems in here though, especially the two title poems!

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gorgeous collection of language and song. These poems explore all sorts of landscapes, pulling the reader into place with the density of the music and the detailed descriptions. "Tender Mercies" is one of the very best poems I've read this year.

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one reminded me how awesome poetry is as a tool for going where other kinds of writing can't and coming out unhurt.

[elise amaryllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5
dunno how i feel about this collection. i found the poems that i didn't enjoy suuper dull but i did like a good amount of them. it was also just that the poems i liked & disliked would be clustered together, so i'd be reading pages of stuff i loved, enthused, contemplating a 5 star rating, & then everything would be painfully dull again. makes it kindaa hard to rate because my emotions about the collection changed pretty rapidly depending on the section. gonna go with a 3.5/5 and round it up to a 4. it did feel like reading a mix of 2-star and 5-star poetry so i think that's pretty accurate.

some of my favorites:
- Cherry Blossoms in Spring
- Tender Mercies
- Love Hangover
- Abandonment Under The Walnut Tree (!!!)
- Goodbye, My Fancy
- Transit of Mercury (!!!)
- Summer Of My Bone Density Test (!!!)
- The Great Unrest (!!!)
- Orchard in January

quotes:

"9 o'clock. Time to smoke a joint
that's lets me take my pills.

10 o'clock. Time to take my pill
to take my pills.

11 o'clock. I take my pills

12 o'clock. I take my little pills.

I call them dolls this time.
I take my dolls.

I always loved this film.
But then: I wasn't in it.

When did I stop feeling sure, feeling
safe, and start wondering why

Suspense, you're killing me.
[close-up on dolls]"
—Valley of The Dolls

"I can only give you back what you imagine.
I am a soulless man. When I take you
into my mouth, it is not my mouth. It is
an unlit pit, an aperture opened just enough
in the pinhole camera to capture the shade.

I have caused you to rise up to me, and I
have watched as you rose and waned.
Our times together have been innumerable. Still,
like a Capistrano swallow, you come back.
You understand: I understand you. Understand
each jiggle and tug. Your pudgy, mercurial wad.

I am simply a hand inexhaustible as yours
could never be. You're nevertheless prepared to shoot.
If I could I'd finish you. Be more than just your rag."
—The Fluffer Talks of Eternity

[Joe Sacksteder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fruit and frost are predominant themes—or, more generally, verdure versus aging—and Powell's poems become preservation techniques by which something more may be made of loss than regret. "Would that there were some other way," he muses, the simultaneous sweetening and decline catalyzed by experience. "Stonefruit is almost as good as fresh, / when the spiteful frost arrives."

Fresh word play and always surprising collocation reveals a volatile combinatorial engine at work. Squiggling unknown or volatile words, I found myself suddenly having never encountered the word pity in "the night he drove her in his pity truck," such is the defamiliarizing capacity of Powell's lines.

Parks haunt peripheries, even in the heart of the city, patches of pastoral where encounters edit the history of desire. Likewise these poems bloom in our blurbed canon, offering some respite from safety, some comfort come oblivion.

[atito · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow i may be making a mistake jumping from tea to this book but i had these two from the library so here we are. this is a completely different beast of similar proportions. powell makes of erotics a substance ephemeral & tangential & heartbreakingly capacious, as he is wont to do, and in this volume it is wide enough to count for a landscape or the way you would trace one. so many of the poems look retroactively to sex--past the cumshot, which makes the sex sweet & strange & already gone, gone enough to miss. and that feeling itself gets mapped on to aging, which is itself a map of california, which is really a river into a flower, which was the trumpet vine near which powell was fucking, i think, once

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like I have to give this a 3 star rating because objectively it is very well written, if a bit lofty and challenging at times. Personally, I did not resonate with most of the narratives being told here, as it focused mostly on a very specific set of experiences that I don't have personal attachments to. That being said, it is an extremely interesting set of reading. I would in no terms say this is a bad reading experience but I know theres gonna be a spectrum of who this works for and who it doesnt.

[Ery Caswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

excellent writing but ugh. punishing.

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

D.A. Powell's language is warmly erudite, sometimes erotic, and always appealingly personal.

[K.V.D. K.V.D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made me cry.

[Jay Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an incredibly erotic piece of literature.

[TA Inskeep · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of these poems irritated me, seemingly impressive at how they clever they are. A few got under my skin in a good way, but overall, this just... wasn't my thing. (2.5 stars.)

[Helin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably need to come back to some of them, rushed it a bit too much

[Nicholas Cordes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the more challenging poems I’ve encountered, but it has encouraged me to continue diving into this form.

[Daanish Shabbir · Rating 5 out of 5]

A local treasure

[DuVernay Mr. R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poetry

[Donovan Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Who

Who are you? The defining characteristics of each person are often both varied and unusual. As humans we can all claim similar traits. We love; we laugh; we live; we die. Externally, we even define ourselves through the region in which we live. I am a Seattleite; I am Cascadian. My region defines me. I don’t mind rain but my smile beams widest when the bluest skies emerge during summer in the Emerald City.

I mention Seattle to illustrate the foundational ideas which kept circling in my mind as I read D. A. Powell’s Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys. Partly a rumination on the physical places we inhabit and partly an impressionistic look at relationships and the power of sexuality of the human person, Useless Landscape paints a beautiful picture.

The Golden State

In terms of place, Powell writes of Northern California—the Bay Area and its corresponding waves of grain. Powell’s poetry hints at consanguinity with the land. The terrain carries emotional importance to a person defined by this region.

Moreover, Powell ponders the connections between people and the place in which they live. His poetry carries a sense of the fading importance of the land and a disconnect between people and the earth.

“Let in the needy, the glutinous,
the bald-headed children nearly posthumous.
Finish each thought with a sprinkle of pixie dust.
Hello, once formidable kingdom. Goodbye” (76).

The “kingdom,” the physical place where person and land connect has left. Once formidable. Now gone.

By Relationship We Are Saved

Even stronger, in my opinion, is Powell’s collection of verses on manhood, sexuality, and the relationships between people.

Unabashed in his sexual preferences, Powell lyrically appraises themes of love, sex, friendship, and the spiritual connection between people.

“When I see the flattened box of an out building
lying in a rusty rhombus on the ground,
I think of so-and-so. Or whojamadoojy.
That’s where I met him, the man who was it for now.
The Luke who was my mark.
The Matt who was my john.
So many acts. xx” (88).

To Powell, the power of relationship is restorative. While many lean on faith in an immaterial, immutable being, Powell considers the spiritual connection with a lover to be the ultimate example of hope, joy, and a foundation for a fruitful life.

“Let him be born of every ash that glows
in the oil drums of winter parks.
Let lesions disappear, let brittle bones be knit.
Let the integrity of every artery be restored.
There is no God but that which visits us
in skin and thew and pleasing face.
He offers up this body. By this body we are saved” (103).

What Identifies You?

Powell’s culled poems powerfully present illustrations of identity. The places we live; the people we befriend, love, exploit, and redeem: they all unite into a cohesive view of how we view ourselves. I am Seattle; I am Cascadia; I am happily married. D. A. Powell is San Franciscan, an updated Steinbeck extolling the virtues of the Golden State. His sexual preferences define him. The physical matters beyond all other considerations

If you are a fan of imaginative poetry, the Bay Area, and lyrical poetry, check out Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys.

Originally published at http://www.wherepenmeetspaper.com