Liam Powell is a writer living in Brooklyn. His poems have appeared in Prelude, Fields, the Indianapolis Review, Maggy, and elsewhere. A semi-finalist for the 2017 Boston Review Discovery prize, he is a former poetry editor of Columbia: A Journal.
Liam's poem “Dialogue with a Fly 4” appears in the Fall 2019 issue of Carve. Order your copy here.
There's not a clear line from the title to the poem, so how did you come to "Dialogue with a Fly 4" as the title?
This piece is part of a larger sequence that’s attempting to process climate catastrophe, broadly, and to do so in dialogue with a line from Blake’s Songs of Experience, as I remember it. “Then am I a Happy Fly / If I live or If I Die”. I’d been reading Kari Norgaard’s Living in Denial, a work that charts how a community in Norway processes, or doesn’t process, the implications of climate catastrophe. How it’s something so large the mind, as a principal response, either dances around or ignores it outright—a hyperobject, like Timothy Morton writes—but also something that’s hyper local, that can only be experienced with an intimate knowledge of your environmental surroundings and how they’ve changed over periods of time.
I latched onto that sentiment—this kind of knowing, flat nihilism from the Blake poem—as a way of expressing or dramatizing a particular kind of denial. A stage of grief, really.
All of the poems in this sequence, and this period of my writing, have pretty 1:1 titles. I like to be more playful or slant with titles, to create a leap from title to poem, but there was an attempt at flatness or directness during this period. A stare-the-dragon-in-the-face type thing.
What was your impetus for writing this poem?
I was steeped in reports coming out of Standing Rock and reading about grassroots climate action in Greece, and felt powerless and numb. If the whole of the sequence—or the book, really—is trying to process climate catastrophe, this poem susses out what happens when nihilism takes hold. It’s a vacuum filled by darker, older forces: police and the various institutions, people, or studied neglect they buttress.
Since 2015 there have been fissures in the way power dresses itself in this country: it’s clear who owns it, and what they plan to do with it, and what elements of institutional power are most easily leveraged for their needs. “Disaster takes the shape of a policeman”: Klein has already articulated so exhaustively how the old guard (the petro-state, which we absolutely are at this point) is able to leverage catastrophe for political and capital gain, and I think this line is really the hinge of the poem, where the police lumber in and form rank around impending disaster, pure elements of obstruction. Faceless, violent, alien, unlistening.
I was impressed with how you managed to keep this fluid, sort of dreamy quality to the piece, while simultaneously writing such a vivid and devastating scene. How did you balance that while writing this piece?
I'm fascinated by elliptical writing—most of my own work finds footing in a lineage of elliptical poets—but that style doesn’t necessarily map to the political cleanly. So it was a challenge the whole piece was attentive to: balancing this sort of style I’ve accreted over time, this subject matter that’s devastating me, and the political origins and implications of climate catastrophe. There’s something inherently dissociative about processing it, too, where a dream-like or elliptical tone takes shape as the mind plays with geological scale—zooming in and zooming out, the geological and the personal, the geological and the political—the whole process watching itself, the body trying to track meaning where it can.
Its being part of a larger sequence, also, frees it up a bit. In the sense that one poem of a sequence doesn’t have to bear the weight of the whole (which Blake would probably disagree with, lol). It can get in, give us this one view of an isolated scene, and get out. It keeps the cast of characters & images small, which maximizes their impact.
But this is all post-rationalization.
What contemporary poets inspire you?
When I discovered Chelsea Minnis, fairly recently, I kind of put everything on hold. Baby I Don’t Care is a perfect book. I laughed so much reading it. She’s a master of the non-sequitur, of imbuing it with meaning, it’s magic. I laughed more than when I discovered Ben Lerner’s 21 Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan high, with a friend, in a basement, in 2010, which was a lot.
I sat with Josh Bell’s Alamo Theory for a long time while writing this sequence, his poem "Where the I Comes from" is just devastating, a masterpiece, something that haunted and helped me. Wendy Trevino’s Cruel Fiction, another masterwork I read while revising a lot of these poems.
Always Geoffrey G. O’Brien. And can I say Lucy Corin? One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses is technically micro fiction but the way she works with source material and in such a small, concentrated space is just mind boggling.