Sherry Chandler

Stories of Katrina

All summer we have had our eyes on the Gulf shore. So now that the well is capped and we are trying to get some kind of honest assessment of the damage, I hope we don’t lose focus, decide the thing is over, as we have done with Katrina.

Five years since that hurricane, and the still the extent of the damage has not been gaged.

I want to draw your attention to some stories about Katrina.

Natasha Trethewey, a poet whose work I admire a great deal, was on Fresh Air on Wednesday to talk about her new memoir Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Univ Georgia Press). She speaks of her grandmother’s death and burial in a church that had not yet been rebuilt and how the aftermath of Katrina ruined her brother. You can here a podcast and read an excerpt of the book at the link. The excerpt begins like this:

Somewhere in the post-Katrina damage and disarray of my grandmother’s house is a photograph of Joe and me — our arms around each other’s shoulders. We are at a long-gone nightclub in Gulfport, The Terrace Lounge, standing before the photographer’s airbrushed scrim — a border of dice and playing cards around us. Just above our heads the words High Rollers, in cursive, embellished — if I am remembering this right— with tiny starbursts. It is 1992, the year the first casino arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and, with it, a new language meant to invoke images of high-stakes players in exclusive poker games, luxurious suites on the penthouse floor, valet parking and expensive cars lined up in a glorious display of excess. Scenes from a glamorous casino someplace like Monte Carlo or Las Vegas — nothing like the gravel parking lot outside the club, the empty lot beyond it, and the small, run-down houses on either side, each with a chained-up dog barking into the night.

The role of casinos in the overdevelopment of the Gulf Coast is one that we need to remember. Trethewey makes it obvious that, though the casinos may have brought prosperity to some, they did only harm to the part of Gulfport where her family lived, that part of the disaster was natural but part was man-made.

When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as “Little Vietnam” because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders — as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden. Even now, it is a place that outsiders assume to be dangerous or insignificant — run-down and low income, a stark contrast to the glittering landscape of the post-Katrina beachfront with its bright lights and neon bouncing off the casinos onto the water. Were North Gulfport not along the main thoroughfare, making it necessary to drive through to get to the beach, it might be easily forgotten.

The poet Raymond McDaniel, who grew up in Florida, has also written a post-Katrina collection, Saltwater Empire (Coffee House Press, 2008). In the writing of it, McDaniel made use of oral histories of Katrina survivors collected and archived on the web at Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster and Oral History & Memory Project.

I haven’t read the book but what I pick up from context is that the “found” poem constructed from these oral histories is only a part of the collection, a poem in several parts that serves as a framing device.

But McDaniel didn’t get permission to use these clips and the poet Abe Louise Young, who worked in collecting the histories, thinks that he has done a great wrong by appropriating the stories of those survivors, who had made it very plain that they wanted control of their own stories since they had control of so little else. McDaniel argues that, because the archive is open access, it has become public domain.

The Poetry Foundation has posted two essays, one from Young: The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I. What are the ethics of poetic appropriation?

And one from McDaniel: The Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part I. IReflections on found poetry and the creative process.

Because I write historical poetry and because I am interested in questions of ownership on the web, I find the two essays of high interest and recommend that you take a look at them and at the comments they’ve elicited.

Does the quality of the poetry excuse the appropriation? Was it appropriation? Why didn’t McDaniel ask permission? Even just as a courtesy?

I also suggest that you explore the oral histories themselves at the archive Alive in Truth. They will make your heart ache all over again.

The danger of poets

A bit ago I was discussing David Biespiel’s article descrying the fact that American poets don’t engage in politics. In response, Jeff Hess of Have Coffee, Will Write sent along this link to an article in The Independent, Two men the junta could not silence:

When Burmese authorities sentenced the popular comedian and artist Zarganar to spend 59 years in jail, they must have hoped to silence a man known for criticising the junta. Yet, though the man celebrated for his films, plays and poetry was dispatched to a jail far from his family’s home in Rangoon, it appears that life behind bars has not reduced either his creative powers or his willingness to speak out.

In recent weeks, a newly crafted poem – brief but powerful – has been smuggled out of jail and passed to friends of the 49-year-old artist. It reads:

“It’s lucky my forehead is flat
Since my arm must often rest there
Beneath it shines a light I must invite
From a moon I cannot see
In Myitkyina.”

The poem, which hints at the hardships endured by prisoners in Myitkyina jail in the far north of Burma, was received by Zarganar’s friend Htein Lin. The Burmese artist, a former political prisoner who now lives in the UK, not only translated the poem into English with the help of his British wife, but also produced a compelling illustration to accompany his friend’s lines. The striking image suggests his friend at the bars of his jail cell, his head pressed into his forearms. It is set against a backdrop of hands, reaching upwards.

Jeff is very interested in the question of Burma/Myanmar and has been blogging about it regularly for a long time. He says:

I don’t think the challenge in America is that our poets don’t engage in civil discourse. I think the challenge is that our general population simply can’t be bothered to read poetry.

I notice that Zargana is also a comedian, so that I wonder whether his function is more like that of Jon Stewart than John Ashbery. Or perhaps like Stephen Colbert, who will stoop to having poets on the Colbert Report.

Fifty-nine years is a long time. I wonder how many American poets would be willing to risk that.

Perspective

Via tinydoctor’s flying meme circus

Also, this via Have Coffee Will Write, If the spill were in the Bluegrass

And the sad sad story of the pelicans.

Poets for the Living Waters

Via Rocket Kids, Poets for the Living Waters Call for Work — Gulf Coast Poems:

Call for Work – Gulf Coast Poems Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the Gulf Oil Disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made ecological catastrophes in history.

The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.

Please submit 1-3 poems, a short bio, and credits for any previously published submissions to:
poetsforlivingwaters@yahoo.com

So far they have poems up by Franz Wright, Evie Shockley, Bill Marsh, and Kate Schapira. Company’s good.

Meanwhile, via Tamiko Beyer at the Kenyon Review blog, David Biespiel writes about poets and politics:

America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy. Because when I look at American poetry from the perspective of a fellow traveler, I see an art invested in various complex, fascinating, historical, and sometimes shop-worn literary debates. I see a twenty-first-century enterprise that’s thriving in the off-the-beaten-track corners of the nation’s cities and college towns. But at the same time that poetry’s various coteries are consumed with art-affirming debates over poetics and styles, American poetry and America’s poets remain amazingly inconsequential to the rest of the nation’s civic, democratic, political, and public life.

This divide between poet and civic life is bad for American poetry and bad for America, too.

This almost seems like a blame-the-victim article to me. As I think I’ve said before here, poets are like every other kind of protester (who isn’t a teabagger) in this country. They’ve been confined to a “free speech zone” and marginalized. The American political powers that be have realized that marginalization works better than suppression. Don’t fight the press, embed it. Don’t use water cannons on the protesters, let them holler themselves hoarse over in the little protesters ghetto. As Tamiko points out,

I find it ironic that Biespiel is, himself seemingly too insulated in his own poetry world to recognize the work of established poets such as Myung Mi Kim, the late June Jordan, Martín Espada, Patricia Smith, Joy Harjo, and Juliana Spahr (yes, mostly women and people of color). Not to mention the rich, exciting work of emerging poets who are unabashedly and unapologetically engaging in the poetics of politics – poets such as Craig Santos Perez, Ching-In Chen, Tara Betts are just a few that immediately come to mind.

. . .

The fact that Biespiel is not aware of – or perhaps does not count – these poets actually proves his point, I think. The truth is, poetry that actively seeks to engage in political dialog is unarguably marginalized by the gatekeepers and tastemakers of the literary establishment (who are, for the most part, white and male).

The question really is not “why aren’t poets more politically active?” as per the headline on the Huffington Post. There are plenty of great poets who are politically active both in their daily life and in their work. The question is “why are politically active poets not more widely recognized and appreciated?”

Anybody got an answer?

I think that we’re back to a question that keeps arising here — is there a way to use the internet to subvert the gatekeepers? Are the tastemakers still in control?

Stuff # 8

Lance Mannion asks What hath Reagan wrought?

. . . the economy has come to depend on two contradictory, stinking processes.

The first is that most American workers have to be paid shit to do jobs they hate but are terrified of losing with minimal benefits and no hope of raises or bonuses or advancement or a secure retirement.

The second is that American consumers have to spend more and more every year not just on the goods and services they need but on useless crap they don’t need, don’t really want, and can’t really afford.

By the way, I include among the useless crap they don’t need, don’t really want, and cant’ really afford big houses on an acre of land in suburbs more than a gallon of gas’s drive to and from anyplace they need to be.

Since I’m about to blame Ronald Reagan for everything that’s wrong with the economy and the American Dream of owning a big house on an acre of land in a suburb several gallons of gas away from everyplace people need to be began in earnest just after World War II when Reagan was still a New Deal Democrat, I should explain why I’m also blaming him for this. And I’ll do that in another post. But for now I can sum it up in three letters—S-U-V.

Meanwhile, writing about The Tea Party Jacobins in The NY Review of Books, Mark Lilla says:

The Reagan revolution was a success, in the sense that it shifted political attention in this country from social equality to economic growth. But like all revolutions that achieve their aims, it is now a spent force.

What then is going on? Something pretty unsettling:

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.

Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

I found this analysis of our current situation thought-provoking in that it made me step back from my own particular prejudices and look at the Tea Party thing — and in fact our whole current political situation — in a slightly different light.

I recommend that you read it.

To pontificate a little, while Rand-Paul bashing is fun, I worry that those of us on the liberal side have too much of a tendency to strike the obvious target, the one that lets us divide ourselves into us good guys and them bad guys. Not saying that Paul is anything but a political opportunist. Just that, like Sarah Palin, he gets way too much attention for what he’s accomplished.

As Lilla says,

We know that the country is divided today, because people say it is divided. In politics, thinking makes it so.

Meanwhile, the modern alchemists of the DNA map have managed to scare me more than Rand Paul: Scientists Create Synthetic Organism

Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said

But it’s okay. The House is going to hold hearings. They’ll make sure we’re safe.

Here’s from The Guardian:

Craig Venter, the pioneering US geneticist behind the experiment, said the achievement heralds the dawn of a new era in which new life is made to benefit humanity, starting with bacteria that churn out biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and even manufacture vaccines.

Somebody send this man a copy of Frankenstein.

From scientists playing God, the God himself — in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has written a long review of several books about the historical Jesus: What Did Jesus Do?. I read the article with great interest because I’m fascinated by Jesus scholarship. What I want to pass on here, though, is this rather fascinating passage on the nature of myth-making:

Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fuelled by a set of cult beliefs—a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death—about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus—he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. (As if to prove this point, just the other week came news of suppressed chapters of Haley’s “Autobiography,” which, according to Malcolm’s daughter, “showed too much of my father’s humanity.”)

Mid-May at our house is

nicely focussed turnips

(and a blade of grass, but what the heck!)

slightly out of focus moths

and an equally out of focus indigo bunting (it was a dull day and a moving target)

And of course the primary election, which is possibly in worse focus than these photos. Salon has Rand Paul not just winning Kentucky’s Senatorial election but also a prime candidate for the 2010 presidential run. Well, there’s not much I can do about that, one way or the other, being registered as a Democrat. But I do intend to cast my vote. And I urge all my fellow Kentuckians to do the same. Our choices aren’t inspiring but it’s what we got.

The view from [near] Daniel Boone’s grave

My friend Ernie Stamper has shared these photos that he took yesterday from the cliff above the Kentucky River overlooking Frankfort, our state capitol.

Daniel Boone is buried on this cliff. Although Daniel shook the dust of Kentucky from his sandals in some disgust in 1799, his remains were dug up from their original burial site near Defiance, Missouri in 1845. Developers in Frankfort brought Daniel and Rebecca “home” to be re-interred in this cliff-side grave with considerable pomp — a great parade of Masons (some claim Daniel was a Mason), Oddfellows, militias and original settlers — and speechifying.

Accusations have been made of some chicanery in getting the family permission for this move and some in Missouri claim the Kentuckians didn’t get the right set of bones and Daniel still lies with them.

In this photo you can see the Capitol:

This one looks, I believe, up the river:

and the next two look down the river at the old downtown. The Capitol building would be to the left. The nearer bridge was later shut down for fear of floating debris:

Situated in a narrow valley between cliffs and beside a river, Frankfort is somewhat accustomed to being flooded. One of the tensest scenes in Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow has Jayber trying to cross a bridge in Frankfort during the 1937 flood.

The little town of Monterey, in Owen County where I grew up, is also accustomed to floods but according to MSNBC, this one may be one of the worst. The river crested yesterday at 42.6 feet, 11 feet above flood level . It is not expected to recede to normal levels until Saturday.

Nothing to compare to Nashville, but the floods have been bad enough here in Kentucky. Seventy of our 120 counties have declared flood emergencies and four people have died.

Some perspective here.

Ernie Stamper’s photos are available at this link.