"Hate the Fleur de Lis."

He spoke with the intensity of a bright, driven young man who had just lost his father a day or two before. He spoke about poetry and how poetry is a way we make ourselves who we want to be. And he spoke about the big lie: that New Orleans as we outsiders see it is an elaborate charade, perpetrated by a dominant (white) class and a subservient (black) class who have been acculturated to believe that they are less worthy of personhood than the people whose money and power depends upon their labor and creativity. The story of colonialism. An old story. At least a story many of us who non-New Orleanians would like to believe is an old story whose ending in the United States is close at hand. Kataalyst Alcindor believes otherwise.

Ehren "Kataalyst" Alcindor

Kataalyst is a twenty-six year-old poet, and in 2013 was host of the annual, traveling competition called the Southern Fried Poetry Slam, in his adopted city of New Orleans (He is originally from the cross-river factory town of Marrero, Louisiana). 

When we spoke about the Southern Fried Slam and about the New Orleans poetry scene more generally, the young poet talked about how difficult it was to put to good use the history that so many of this city live with every day in rituals and customs designed to keep the dead ever present, the Ifa' deities behind the saints forever marching in. It is a lived history, but one, as Kataalyst sees it, from which too few people draw the lessons that could help them reject the way things still are in New Orleans. The people of other Southern cities had done it, or at least tried to, but not the people of his city. New Orleans has remained locked inside the caste system in which white Krewes on Mardi Gras floats still hand strings of beads to outstretched second-line white hands, while they hurl the same beads and all manner of objects as hard as they can at the black faces in the same crowd. These Krewes (with a "K") are the brainchildren of the Klan and the descendants of those who branded runaway slaves (whose ears they also severed) with the fleur de lis, the symbol ubiquitous in the present-day Crescent City. "Hate the fleur de lis," he said. "Always hate the fleur de lis." 

When Kataalyst spoke of his people, he meant black people. When I asked him if black people were the only ones who made up genuine New Orleans, who could understand the need for mental liberation resulting from centuries of mental abuse and inculcated self-hatred and shame, he said with some hesitation that they might not be, but that, basically, he was talking about the black people, the African Americans of New Orleans. He did not, however, claim that only black poets could be legitimate New Orleans poets. His network of poets included many races, and was, at bottom, a league of the conscious.  

***

I believe that, even when they can't express themselves in unrehearsed language with the spontaneous insight, passion and precision that Kataalyst can, all poets or people who aspire to be poets understand the power of the simulacrum. The city, the performance, the poem, even the poet are simulacra--constructs, projections, fantasies. To recognize the simulacrum, the charade, the big lie, is the work of the poet, whose weapons are language, simulacra themselves, and the willingness to poke holes in the facade. To paraphrase Kataalyst, we have to speak something before it comes into being. I would add that speak it publicly we have to pretend that the world, the stage, the poem and we ourselves are something that we are not, but would like to be. To understand this imperative is to begin understanding what moves people toward poetry, poets toward other poets, and, may we hope, New Orleans and its people toward belief in a better simulacrum and a better reality.

Desperation on St. Charles Avenue

Another tropical storm skittered past New Orleans this weekend.

I felt its fingertips on my back as I walked down St. Charles Avenue past a plaque commemorating the erstwhile St. Charles Theater. Built in 1835, it was home to a grand opera. The first opera performed at the St. Charles was Bellini's Norma, a tale of desperation if ever there was one.

Poydras Street, looking toward the site of the St. Charles Theater, 

in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina

There's a sweet desperation about New Orleans, the kind that leads lovers (all kinds of lovers) to sacrifice themselves for a lover, an ideal or an end to pain. It's the kind of desperation in which a poetic soul delights, a feeling that you are floating alone through life but will try to reach the world even if the world has not come looking for you. It's the kind of desire that pulls people to poetry, a desperate desire to express longings and hopes that could otherwise destroy them, that could fade away before brief lives conclude, and that will certainly fade away in the end. 

When Katrina hit and flooded eighty per cent of the city, the desperation that anyone with an eye and heart could see and feel in the vagrant clinging to his bottle in a doorway on Dauphine Street, or in the furious street tap of a little boy and a little girl from the other side of  Louis Armstrong Park for tourists' coins, or the tourists' hooch-fueled quest for exhilaration that could make them feel alive beyond their ordinary days, or the ecstatic, virtuosi performance of a jazz combo in an obscure bar on the far end of Bourbon Street, or the young poet's concentrated stare at her pad, on a bench in Washington Square off Esplanade--all of it came to a head in this city gone temporarily missing. 

In Hearing Sappho in New Orleans, her lyrical rumination on New Orleans poetry post-Katrina, Ruth Salvaggio proposes that 

Missing New Orleans means entering into desire. It means that we step into the long lyric call of poetry, because what goes missing is precisely what ignites the lyric voice of longing that keeps securing the bonds of our relations. The conundrum of desire is that what goes missing marks the limits of emptiness and fullness, severance and relation. We know what it means to miss New Orleans because we are creatures of longing.

I take the "we" to be all of us, anyone who has ever wanted to connect with someone else through the word, especially the word set to music as it has so often been in the Big Easy. 

Other cities coddle you. In San Francisco the warm sun soothes longing. On a recent trip there I could feel my worries, my longing, my desire to report on the emotional lives of human beings, evaporate in the gentle rays, wash away in the cool Pacific waves, be in fact pacified. The California sun can almost make you believe that you will never die. 

In New Orleans the sun drives you on, and even the remnant breezes of a merciful storm hit you with a thick sense that you've got to make some sort of noise before the heat or the river or the po' boys and pralines or the memories of pain put you under. You could be the frat boy crawling from pub to pub, the saxophonist from what used to be the Upper Ninth Ward, the jilted hipster dodging the unshaven men in dirty tee shirts and Saints caps on Canal, the family from Chicago in their Walmart-bought whites getting palms read in Jackson Squre, the hundred opposing intentions heading into the Quarter, the Creole aristocrat tossing pebbles into Bayou St. John, to count the decades gone, or the high school student riding the streetcar to the end of St. Charles, imagining something Uptown that once she discovers will make all this longing worthwhile. When you are here, you are desperate, and you find yourself inching toward desperate words. Poetry needs desperation, and desperation needs poetry. They live side by side here, as the city and its people will tell. 

Boring Readings are Not Always Bad

A recent photo of me at a poetry reading got me thinking.

Many poets have told me privately that sitting through poetry readings can be tough. Dull. Boring. Inane.

I would say the same thing, but even a tedious reading experience, like the walk through a non-descript part of town, can be good for the soul.

The fact is that I was not sleeping during the reading pictured above. It was mostly a terrific reading, and I was actually concentrating--or, on occasion, during lesser moments, trying to concentrate--on what the readers were saying and how they were saying it. I was submitting to other people's thoughts in a way that, at least when they aren't shuffling papers or checking their text messages and email, audience members do at poetry readings.

How rare that is: total submission to the workings of someone else's mind, in a public setting, for an extended period of time. Contemplation in company. The suppression of one's own desire to express anything other than approval or indifference.

Boredom at readings happens for different reasons. Sometimes the poetry being performed is boring, dull, inane. More often, however, it gives us something valuable to consider, Marianne Moore's "place for the genuine," even when the poetry is crude or unsophisticated. When the former is true, boredom can move poets and others rapidly to introspection, the opposite of public participation; or it can lead poet/audience members to reflect on what to avoid in their own poetry. When the latter is true, we can drift into contemplation, and find it difficult to stay with the next poem or next poet simply because we are preoccupied. This is an eternal conflict for many people, especially for writers: how to appreciate a revelation and still remain in the moment, remain outwardly focused.

Of course, poets may be bored by readings simply because they have had to leave the orbits of their egos. They could hardly, after all, be poets without egos. At readings they are forced to listen closely to people they have not necessarily chosen to hear, particularly if the event in question includes an open mic. Listening closely, or at least trying to, is an exercise in humility, which tempers ego and leads to greater compassion.

So are we necessarily complaining about poetry readings or about certain poets when we say were bored by particular readings? Maybe. Or maybe we're just complaining about having to do our work. 

Sitting Down with Poets of the Bay: Episode 2

The moment I arrive, the reading is over. I've stayed too long at coffee in Alameda with my college roommate. Life is short, and the nature of the Lunch Poems series is uncertain. Still, I've driven out to Berkeley, albeit too late to hear members of the faculty and staff read. As the audience chats with the readers and begins to file out, I approach someone who appears to be in charge, and ask if he is Robert Hass, the great poet who curates the series. I should know what Hass looks like, but I do not. He is not Hass. But he is a librarian and can point me to a small man making his deliberate, downcast way to the door. He appears to be, in the words of Emanuel Carnevali, a hurried man.

Alexander Givental is a professor of mathematics. Like the other readers, he is not a poet per se. When I ask to speak with him, he eyes me suspiciously, explains, in a fairly thick Russian accent, that he is on his way to class, but could talk for a few minutes. In the meantime the librarian continues corraling readers with whom I might speak. As I'll need to do a lot, I diplomatically move from one to the other, explaining my project and enlisting their help. Givental waits patiently by the door until the handshakes and exchanges of cards are done.

When I finally return to him, Givental allows me to suggest that we re-enter the venue, Morrison Library, where he and other readers stood at a podium before a marble hearth, reading poetry to nearly a hundred people seated on comfortable couches and in leather wing chairs nicely placed around the 200' x 50' space, while students studying at gallery tables above tried to concentrate on the first-week reading. The walls here are oak, the floors, like the hearth, marble. Busts of Roman statesmen sit atop built-in bookshelves below enormous windows with views of the Berkeley Hills, huge spruce trees and campus buildings of various vintage.

We choose a comfortable couch near the hearth. I admit to Givental that I did not hear him read. He is kind, and explains that, with a collaborator, he's just done a volume of poems by the twentieth-century Russian poet Marina Tsetaeva, To You in 10 Decades. He hands me the book, and we begin to talk about why a mathematician at one of the nation's leading universities is translating poetry. It has to do with his education in Russia, with the place of poetry in people's lives there, and with his willingness to be part of poetry in America.  

Sitting Down with Poets of the Bay: Episode 1

Neeli Cherkovski is posting a picture to Facebook: the cover of the Italian translation of one of his books. Can I help? I'm distracted by the shelves and shelves of poetry lining his snug study, but I dutifully follow to his computer, bag full of recording equipment still on my shoulder. It turns out I actually know what to do. I help. But this is a small gift compared to the one Neeli will give me.

He and his fifteen year-old behemoth of a dog, Cosmo, lead me to the deck in the small yard behind Neeli's house in Bernal Heights, San Francisco's most vertiginous neighborhood. It's 11:30 in the morning on a typically sunny and comfortably warm/cool day. The house is quiet. Neeli's partner of thirty years is at work. The dog is trying to bark, but has a respiratory ailment that renders his bark more of a faint chuff. The only other sound is the breeze--The breeze must be perpetual here--rustling through the potted bamboo. 

Neeli sits on a patio chair in the corner of the deck. I switch on the voice recorder. Neeli begins talking, I fumble with the video camera, afraid, as he speaks to its lens, that I'm not actually recording him. Which is a shame, because Neeli is a trove. So I pace the deck, wanting my body language to match the genuine intensity of my interest. Every once in a while I tweak the camera, all the time listening to one insight after another. 

    

Starting in San Francisco (O. K., Berkeley)

Prominent California poet and former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia has written eloquently of the Bay Area literary scene. In his 2004 book Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, Gioia reminds us that at the turn of the twentieth century, San Francisco was a literary hub, home of a "Populist Modernism" in which "Poetry was not conceived as a self-enclosed text for private meditation but as a direct address to an audience" (92). Between the early twentieth century and the publication of his book, Gioia claims, Bay Area literary culture had waned, a development he blames on the rise of West Coast suburbia and the ascendancy of automobile culture. No longer is it easy for Bay Area poets and artists to gather, as they did in the time of Jack London and Bret Harte, or of Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. San Francisco thus no longer offers "a critical mass of enterprise and opportunity" (95) to support a vital local literary community.

And, in what is perhaps his most trenchant comment, Gioia remarks that the lack of critical mass and the resulting lack of a local coterie of the best writers and critics the region can offer has led to local "boosterism, the uncritical praise of all things local," which is "not merely a poor substitute for arts criticism, it is also...a slow poison to native excellence" (102-103). Anyone who takes part in a local poetry scene, who is aware of the historical development of various poetic conventions, and who believes that poetry should offer not just observation, but also insight and in some cases spiritual and moral vision, can see truth in Gioia's remarks. (Of course such a position may be fairly understood as cultural snobbery.) What can happen, and often does, on such as scene, is that a city's or other locale's literary culture can thrive, but will likely become "necessarily retrospective," worshipful of its past literary glories. In the Bay Area today, as in some other places around the country, the objects of worship remain the Beats, a group that has produced an uneven body of work, at least as measured by the culturally "snobbish" standards described above; and a group whose existence in large part depended on their creation of a performance poetry scene.

I don't yet know how literary culture and the poetry scene of the Bay Area have changed over the last decade, but I do know, as Gioia predicted in 2004, that the literary community there has leveraged the power of the Internet to create a myriad of new journals and to develop connections that have resulted in a scene averaging a half-dozen readings daily at a variety of venues. Of course the migration of money and ambitious intellect back to urban areas of the last decade (Brooklyn being a leading example) has also been a factor in reestablishing the "critical mass" that Gioia laments.

Still, a lot of the Bay Area's and the nation's literary activity has migrated not back to the City, but to the Internet, of which the Bay Area has been the cradle, the nursery and now the proving ground. What then have our poetry scenes become in the Age of the Internet? And what better place to ask that question than in San Francisco and Oakland and Berkeley? I will head there this fall, to seek answers.

Gioia claims, finally., that literary culture has been centralized in New York City" and fears that the "global standardization of electronic media" (105) will lead to homogenized literature and literary scenes. He believes too that local culture "matters because human existence is local" (106). I hope my research both questions the idea that our literature has taken a turn toward homogeneity; and that it reveals more about the state of our local cultures.

  

The Questionnaire

I used to watch as graduate fellows I "supervised" in my college's writing across the curriculum program prepared surveys to assess our progress. The fellows with social science backgrounds could write these surveys in their sleep, it seemed. I gladly let them take the lead, and peeked over their shoulders.

Now I find myself without graduate students to design or even help me design surveys, and so I spent a good part of my week after shoulder surgery trying to put together an instrument I could, without shame, give poets who perform their work and agree to take part in the research for Virtue. The project is gaining a momentum that I probably couldn't stop if I wanted to. Having finally sent off all necessary documents to my college's IRB, and having finally planned the first research trip to San Francisco, I am now approaching the time when I can begin interviewing, filming and asking people to complete this survey on which I've labored.

The printed survey will travel with me to research destinations, and will go out in electronic form through email or Survey Monkey. But is it too long? Is it too determinate? Is it too open-ended? Is it too much to ask? Maybe as a way of obfuscating the answers, I've refused to number it. Or maybe that's just the kind of evasive maneuver that goes along with not understanding exactly what the research will tell me, and where this project and its attendant paper airplanes will land. 

So here you go, small world, a sneak peak at the quarry from which I will mine my foundation of :

Virtue at the Coffee House: Poetry and Performance Across America

Dr. George Guida

Participant Survey

The following survey should take 15-20 minutes to complete, and will provide valuable data for a study of poetry in performance across America. Any publications or productions resulting from this research will attribute the answers you provide only if you grant consent (See the accompanying consent form).


Name______________________________________

Date_______________

Gender:  male [  ] female [  ]     transgendered [   ]


Age Group:  18-25 [  ] 26-33  [  ] 34-40 [   ] 41-48  [  ] 49-55 [  ]

55-62 [  ] 63-70 [  ] 71-79 [  ] 80+ [  ]

Exact Age (in years) [Optional]: _____________


In what city and state were you raised?_________________________________________


In what city and state do you currently reside?___________________________________


How long have you lived in your current city and state? (Please check one.)

0-3 years [  ]   3-7 years [  ] 8-12 years [  ]    13-19 years [  ]     20 + years  [  ]

Lifelong Resident [  ]


Do you write creatively?

Yes  [  ] No  [  ]



What do you write? (You may indicate more than one genre.)

poetry [  ] fiction [  ] drama [  ] non-fiction [  ]

other [  ] (Please specify)_________________________________




How often do you write creative work?

every day [  ]   several times per week [  ] once per week [  ]   several times per month [   ]

less often than monthly [  ] rarely [  ]


How long have you been writing creative work?

less than 1 year [  ] 1-3 years [  ] 3-7 years [  ]  8-12 years [  ]  13-19 years [  ]

20+ years [  ] since childhood [  ]


At what age did you begin writing? _____________


Do you read or perform your work in public?

Yes [  ] No [  ]


On the average, how often do you read or perform your work in public?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]


Where have you read or performed your work?

poetry club [  ]     other clubs (music, comedy, dinner) [  ]   theater [  ]

coffee house [  ] libraries [  ] college or university [  ] school [  ]

community center [  ] poetry festival [  ]

other venue [  ] (please specify)_________________________________


At which type of venue have you read or performed your work most often?
(Please choose from the options in the previous questions)



Do you attend readings and performances of creative writing in which you are not taking part?

Yes [  ] No [  ]


How often do you attend readings and performances in which you are not taking part?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]


Where do you most often attend poetry events in which you are not taking part?

poetry club [  ]     other clubs (music, comedy, dinner) [  ]   theater [  ]

coffee house [  ] libraries [  ] college or university [  ] school [  ]

community center [  ] poetry festival [  ]

other venue [  ] (please specify)_________________________________


What types of readings or performances in which you are not taking part do you attend most often?

open mic [  ] poetry feature with an open mic [  ] poetry feature [  ]

group poetry reading [  ] benefit poetry reading [  ] group poetry reading [  ]

poetry festival [  ] event combining poetry with music or other artistic genre [  ]


How often you share your creative writing online?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]   never [  ]

On what Web site(s) or in what other online venue(s) do you  context?

Websites_______________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Social Media Sites________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Blogs________________________________________________________________________________


How often you share your creative writing by email?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]   never [  ]


How often do you read other writers' unpublished creative work on line?

several times per week [  ] once per week [  ] several times per month  [  ]

once per month [  ]   less often than once per month [  ] rarely [  ]   never [  ]


How important a role does creative writing play in your life?

very important [  ] important [  ] somewhat important [  ]

somewhat unimportant [  ] unimportant [  ]

(Please briefly comment on its importance.)













How important a role does reading or performance play in your life?

very important [  ] important [  ] somewhat important [  ]

somewhat unimportant [  ] unimportant [  ]

(Please briefly comment on its importance.)






How important a role do you believe public readings and performances of creative writing play in the life of your community [town, neighborhood, group, other community]?

very important [  ] important [  ] somewhat important [  ]

somewhat unimportant [  ] unimportant [  ]

(Please briefly comment on its importance.)






Do you use public readings and performances of your work as a way to gauge its success or to improve it?

always [  ] often [  ] sometimes [  ] occasionally [  ] never [  ]

(Please briefly comment on your use of readings and performances for this purpose.)













How much have public readings and performances of your own work influenced the substance or style of your creative writing?

a lot [  ] somewhat [  ] a little [  ] not at all [  ]

(Please briefly comment on this influence.)









How much have public readings and performances by other writers influenced your creative writing?

a lot [  ] somewhat [  ] a little [  ] not at all [  ]

(Please briefly comment on this influence.)









Why do you read or perform your work in public? (You may choose more than one answer.)

to gain acknowledgement for my work [  ]   to enjoy sharing my work with an audience [  ]

to gain inspiration from other poets [  ] to discuss poetry with other poets [  ]

to network with other poets [  ] to feel a part of a community [  ] (Please specify

the type of community—group of poets, neighborhood, town, other community)____________________________________________________________________





Do you identify with any particular group(s) of poets, writers or artists? (If so, please identify this group by its name or its association with a certain venue, location or endeavor.)

Yes [  ] No [  ]

Name of Group__________________________________________________________________



Please take a few moments to comment on your experience of performing poetry or watching poetry performed. Why do you read or perform your work in public? What have been your best and worst experiences on the poetry scene? What have you gained or lost from these experiences?