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A Poetic Journey with Writers in New Orleans
By Rudolph Lewis
Strange indeed how events converge,
come together to create significance and meaning. For me that is the
artistry of New Orleans, and the role it has played in my life.
In the beginning for me, it was only a place of escape, to
which I ran away from troubles of intimacy, from the responsibility and turbulence of an
awkward and failing marriage. That was in the early 1970s; then I was in my
early twenties with still much to discover about living in the
world, though possessed by decided opinions about life situations, views
mostly acquired and gathered from my rural upbringing in southeaster
Virginia.
At odds with my young wife, while courting an older
and married woman in the college community of Charles Village (Baltimore),
sitting at her dining room table, her
Siamese lurking about, I heard Muddy waters singing about getting a mojo hand
and I believed he was urging me on, so I sold or gave away all I had, which wasn't
much, bought a bus ticket and journeyed to New Orleans to find the
happiness I sought and the power I seemingly lacked to direct my life.
Nawlins then, I believe, had its
desired effect on me, but mostly on a subconscious level. I stayed in flop rooms
for derelicts and vagabonds in the Canal Street district for five dollars a night and
spent most of my time in the French Quarter learning how to drink beer,
checking out the sights, and the sensuality of the native women. I
wandered and wondered and soon within a couple of weeks ran out of money
and then borrowed funds to return to Baltimore to resume my
quarrel with my wife and a doomed marriage.
New Orleans remained a place of
fantasy, not fully realized, until I returned there in the mid 1980s, to teach
writing and literature at the University of New Orleans. Like a very
large village, New Orleans, I found, was exceedingly easy
and friendly and I fell among a great
number of poets, writers, and visual artists. Maybe this ready
acceptance came about
because, as in Africa and other Third World countries, the educated
are
valued and given due appreciation in New
Orleans. Some of these artists were natives;
others, like myself, had come there for the romance and mystery that is
New Orleans.
On this trip I had more mobility, a '78 orange Volkswagen, automatic
shift, and found a place more suitable than the flop house I had a
decade before found my rest. For awhile I lived in an apartment in one of those white clapboard
houses New Orleans is known for, west of and not too far from the Canal
Street district. It was a working class neighborhood. Maybe it was on a
street called Baudin. Later, I moved into a more middle-class, furnished
apartment with a bed with a mirror for its ceiling, on the corner
of Royal Street just above the Quarter in the 9th Ward, and then later,
into what had been a fish market, which Ahmose Zu-Bolton,
Yusef
Komunyakaa,
and I attempted to remodel and develop into an independent community
arts center. And when Yusef left town, he asked me to move into his
house at 818 Piety, where for awhile I lived with Mona Lisa Saloy, who had just recently returned home to New Orleans from
her spiritual journey in California.
So it was in New Orleans I first developed an appreciation for flesh
and blood poets and for the writing of poetry. Of course, I studied
poetry and rhetoric in my five years of university studies in the
English department at College Park,
Maryland, where I wrote essays on various poets and poems. I even lived for
awhile with Sibbie O'Sullivan who got her graduate degree by
writing a volume of poems. But none of that struck me as serious and
worthy of my undivided attention. My life had been one of rhetoric and
polemics, politics and social struggle. The poem Sibbie wrote of me or for me (I am not sure which), when I was about
to leave for Africa, became valuable for me only after I returned from
New Orleans. I found it among my papers boxed away.
* * * *
All these adventures--my places of residence, the community arts
center, my relationship with women, my teaching at UNO--are of little
import for this writing. But rather, it is the effect that a number
of writers had on me, that has left an indelible mark, that is the
subject I am trying to get at so that I can provide an explanation for
the dominance of writers of Louisiana in my poetic vision and why they
play such an important role in the development of ChickenBones: A
Journal.
During the two years I was in New Orleans in the mid
1980s, most of my time was spent with six writers/poets, namely,
Gillian Conoley, who helped me to put together Cricket: Poems & Other
Jazz, a ragamuffin pamphlet of poems and graphics (appeared in three
issues);
Lee Meitzen Grue, whose poetry
workshop I attended often and who first published my poems and essays;
my sweet
Mona Lisa Saloy, whose distancing indifference caused me to leave Louisiana
sooner than I had desired; Yictove, whose voice
and artistic talent has yet to be fully exploited and exposed and whose
mother made me a gift of Selassie photos; Ahmose Zu-Bolton, whose
unpaid debt to me of five hundred dollars and lunchtime drinking led to
a bloody battle and an ending of friendships; and, finally, but not the
least of these, Yusef
Komunyakaa,
like an older brother (for awhile we were inseparable) and indeed my
poetic mentor.
To this list of six I must add a seventh, the ghost of
Marcus Bruce Christian, to whom this site is partially dedicated. A
decade before I arrived Christian taught at UNO in the English and
the history departments and his family after his death dedicated his papers to the
archives there. My
teaching at UNO inadvertently led to my exploration of Christian and his writings. I copied at great
length what was in the archives. Yusef assisted me in pulling out from his
thousands of poems what we believed were the best of the lot. I copied diary
notes, letters and poems. I have lugged his work around with me in boxes
for the last seventeen years.
Many of those poems can be found on this site. With the assistance of
Xavier Review Press, a volume of fifty of these poems were published in
book form, under the title I AM NEW
ORLEANS & OTHER POEMS By Marcus
B. Christian (1999). The Times-Picayune spent a half
page in a favorable and glowing review. Dillard Today, the alumni
magazine of Dillard University, printed a shortened version of the
"Introduction," a seminal essay on Christian's poetics. The Louisiana Endowment also gave this book
of Christian poems a good but short review and its director Michael Sartisky sent
me a letter
of commendation.
Only five hundred copies of that work was printed and it is now out
of publication. Because of an inability to find a publisher that shared
my vision of Christian, ChickenBones: A Journal was created to provide a forum
for his work and so that he could remain before the public eye for a
continuing reassessment and so that those in the academy might be encouraged to
reinstate him in the canon of African-American literature. We remain hopeful
that more of his work can be put before the public, especially the one hundred
poems in my possession, and that within the
year.
During the mid 1980s, there were several other New Orleans writers
with whom I had brief contact, namely, James Borders, Tom Dent, and
Kalamu ya Salaam.. All three were familiar with Christian and gave me first
hand information about this poet/historian. Borders may have taken a
class with him. Tom Dent knew him as as child and wrote and important
essay on Christian that I have made use of in my own essay on
Christian's poetics. During this period, Kalamu was the executive
director of the New Orleans Jazz Fest (later taken over by Tom Dent),
and he was then working on the writing of haiku, one of which I published in
one issue of Cricket: Poems
& Other Jazz. He gave me "Haiku No. 30," which led
off this final issue.
* * * *
Of all these writers, Kalamu ya Salaam has been the one
whom I have been most closely engaged in the last several years and that is primarily the result of
his listserv e-drum, on which I have posted
a number of messages. I have kept abreast of
his travels and his speaking at conferences and his poetry readings across
the US and abroad. I have found his energy and insights striking and
extraordinary. His sacrifices with e-Drum, with its non-commercial
aspect, unique and important. He seemed not satisfied and content with the
status quo for he continues to reach out to create communities interested in the
activities of the black diaspora and the human condition in
general. I feel that he, more than anyone writing today, spoke to my own
interests, concerns, and ethics.
I had already placed a number of the fore mentioned
writers and their works on the site. But I did not have anything by Kalamu
and so I contacted him by email about posting some of his poems and some
of the work from two of his anthologies, namely,
360° A Revolution of Black Poets
(1998) and
From A Bend in the River (1998). Both books he gave me
while I was at an ALA conference in New Orleans (1999) at which he read a
number of his poems. He gave a thrilling presentation. It was the first
time I had heard him read, perform his poems. I discovered he's a master of the stage.
He gave me his consent about publishing some of his poems.
I asked him for a short bio that I could use with
the poems and he emailed the short bio
and his neo-griot piece. But Kalamu
was exceedingly gracious. He suggested I publish an interview of him as
well as the poems I wanted. I thought he already had an interview or was
going to send me an interview. But he insisted I interview him. I was a
bit overcome by such an opportunity. The idea of an interview via email
never occurred to me. He later emailed me much more than I asked for
and much more than I imagined I would get, including the 92-page
Art for Life (his very instructive poetic autobiography), and essays on
writing haiku and writing sonnets.
All of this was a bonanza extraordinaire. I had read
Kalamu briefly and sketchily. But here I was given a special treat. I dove
into these writings and sent him a set of preliminary questions. With a
few exchanges an interview arose, an
interview much longer than either of us had expected--about fourteen pages
or more. Still I was at a disadvantage because I was not familiar with the great
corpus that was his--thirty years of writing.
He sent me by post his book
What Is Life: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self(1994) and his new manuscript of
poems, "Nia: Haiku, Sonnets, and Sun Songs."
After a reading of these two works, Kalamu consented to additional
questions. Two more interviews began to
develop. The one on "Nia," the manuscript of poems, was completed and
approved. We had gone way beyond the two weeks I thought it would take to
complete the entire process. Over a month had elapsed. We both were
exhausted and overwhelmed. Kalamu became ill. I too was getting worst, as
far as health, with a sinus infection from cigar smoking and fluid in my
middle ear. The interview on the book of essays,
What Is Life? has yet to be completed. But we had more than enough to run, nearly 200 pages
of material. Kalamu had make ChickenBones: A Journal his literary
home.
* * * *
But I was still not done. During my interview process
with Kalamu, I recalled I did an interview with Yusef
at his home on Piety
in 1985. I pulled it out of the box, typed it up, and laid it out. I
conferred with Kalamu and asked did he have a problem with my running the
Yusef Interview concurrently with the ones I had done with him. He found no
problem. These two Louisiana writers, I believe, provide an
interesting contrast in background, styles, and philosophical
perspectives.
They are however equal in skill, talent, and
creativity. Kalamu, however, is much more diverse in his talents and
abilities and definitely more socially-oriented, that is, concerned about
bringing about revolutionary changes in this country, than Yusef, who
tends more toward a maintenance of the status quo with a few
modifications, here and there. There is much to learn from both. I have
also included, for sentimental reasons, material on
Tom Dent, who was
vital in Kalamu's development and important for me in my work on Marcus
Christian.
So there you have it. There is much to learn here
about the history and continuing development of African American
letters. I hope all will enjoy and profit from what we have pulled
together.
* * * *
*
updated 17 October 2007 |
