The Closet Professor

The Imaginal Stage
By D. A. Powell

turns out
there are more planets than stars
more places to land
than to be burned

I have always been in love with
last chances especially
now that they really do
seem like last chances

the trill of it all upending
what’s left of my head
after we explode

are you ready to ascend
in the morning I will take you
on the wing

About This Poem

“An imago is, for many winged insects, the final form of its metamorphosis. The plural of imago is imagines, and this time in the insect’s life is called the imaginal stage. The insect at this point has reached sexual maturity and has also earned its wings.” —D. A. Powell

About The Poet

D. A. Powell was born in Albany, Georgia, on May 16, 1963. He attended Sonoma State University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1991 and his master’s in 1993. He received his MFA degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1996.

Powell is the author of the trilogy of books Cocktails (Graywolf Press, 2004), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lunch (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), and Tea (Wesleyan University Press, 1998). His poetry collection Chronic(Graywolf Press, 2009) received the Kingsley Tufts Award and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent books are Repast: Tea, Lunch, Cocktails (Graywolf Press, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys: Poems(Graywolf Press, 2012).

Powell’s subjects range from movies, art, and other trappings of contemporary culture to the AIDS pandemic. Powell’s work often returns to AIDS; his first three collections have been called a trilogy about the disease. As Carl Phillips wrote in his judge’s note for Boston Review’s Annual Poetry Award for Powell’s work, “No fear, here, of heritage nor of music nor, refreshingly, of authority. Mr. Powell recognizes in the contemporary the latest manifestations of a much older tradition: namely, what it is to be human.”

Powell has received a Paul Engle Fellowship from the James Michener Center, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, among other awards.

Powell has taught at Columbia University, the University of Iowa, Sonoma State University, and San Francisco State University and served as the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University. He currently teaches at the University of San Francisco.