Five Years After Katrina: What Right Have I To Mourn? (2)

Posted 28 August, 2010 in Politics & Activism

A few months back my first book of poetry was published. It includes a poem called “Charity,” which gives a snapshot of a nurse in New Orleans as Katrina approached that city five years ago. When my book came out, I read that poem at a gathering of poets who had work published by the same press.

Later in the day, I overheard a poet from New Orleans talking about the fact that several non-NOLA poets had read Katrina or New Orleans poems, and this poet wasn’t particularly happy about that. A couple weeks later, at another poetry event, this poet mentioned that many New Orleans writers had struggled mightily after Katrina while non-native writers were publishing books and poems and essays about Katrina and New Orleans. The poet suggested that this was a form of theft – the non-NOLA writers were taking money and opportunity away from New Orleans writers.

I said on that day that I thought all artists – and all people, for that matter – had a right to make art about the things they feel strongly about. In my case, although I’ve sold some of my books, the total number is so small that it’s very difficult for me to believe that my tiny book with one Katrina poem is taking food off the table of anyone from New Orleans.

I can’t think of any public event that has had as deep an impact on me as Katrina and the subsequent engineering failures that flooded New Orleans. (Please note that I although I use “Katrina” as shorthand for the disaster, I’m fully aware that it wasn’t the storm that caused the flooding – it was the failure of the man-made structures that were installed to protect the city.)

I did a lot of crying at the end of August and the beginning of September in 2005. Like many Americans, I spent hours in front of the TV trying to understand what was happening in New Orleans. I also spent a lot of time on the phone with my friend Satoru Ohashi, a trumpeter I’d known since I was an exchange student in Japan in 1991-92. Satoru lived in New Orleans and was scheduled to start a graduate program in jazz performance in the fall as part of the Louis Armstrong Quintet at the University of New Orleans. Now he was staying with a family member of the founder of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band several hours north of New Orleans and trying to figure out what to do next. UNO wasn’t going to be opening up anytime soon and he needed to be in school to stay in this country. I was living in Rochester, NY, at the time and was working with friends on the faculty at the Eastman School of Music there to see whether they could help him.

A few days after Katrina hit, Rochester held its annual Labor Day parade. I worked for a labor union at the time that had many members in the hotels and casinos of New Orleans. I printed up thousands of flyers with information about the union’s Katrina relief fund and passed those flyers out (with the help of a fellow employee) to everyone in the parade and to the crowds along the route. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

I was a political radical long before Katrina, but the government response to the disaster was still worse than I could have imagined. As I watched our leaders leave an entire city to die, I felt as though the final veil had been pulled from my eyes and I finally saw this country for what it had become. Yes, millions of people contributed money to the relief effort, and thousands traveled to New Orleans to assist in the relief and recovery efforts. But as the waters rose and dead bodies floated through the streets, our government seemed unable and unwilling to help its own people. Sure, we didn’t care much for the civilian casualties we were inflicting in Afghanistan and Iraq, but our own citizens? How could this be happening?

Where were you when MLK or JFK or RFK were assassinated? When Armstrong walked on the moon? When Pearl Harbor was attacked? Those are the questions that have defined generations of Americans. For some people, 9/11 is the contemporary moment that changed everything. Certainly our nation has never been the same, and our downward slide shows no signs of halting anytime soon.

For me, though, Katrina is the defining public moment in my life. It is the clear demarcation line before which I had some shreds of confidence in our government’s unwillingness to let its own people perish on their own soil. After Katrina, that confidence – tenuous as it had been – was gone. I felt as if the ground beneath my feet had shifted and I couldn’t quite catch my balance.

Five years later I wrote “Charity” and included it in a book of poems that otherwise have nothing to do with Katrina. The poem was also published (under a different title) in Blue Collar Review, a journal of working-class literature. I’ve also interviewed musicians from New Orleans on The Jazz Session, my online jazz interview show. Sometimes those interviews were explicitly about the storm and its aftermath (such as my interviews with Terence Blanchard and Andrew Lamb). At other times, what happened in August 2005 was present in the interviews or mentioned, but not the main topic of conversation. For the first two years of The Jazz Session, I featured a “Cause of the Month” and encouraged listeners to donate. Several of those causes were charities in New Orleans such as Musicians Village or the Tipitina Foundation.

As we commemorate the fifth anniversary of the storm and the human failures that devastated a city I’ve never set foot in, I still grapple with my place in the story that is New Orleans. I worry about being a cultural tourist, as suggested by the poet I mentioned above. But deep inside I know that’s not true. I don’t feel the way I feel because I want to make a buck or because it’s trendy to like New Orleans. I feel this way because what happened there happened to all of us. Because of all of us. We’re all New Orleanians now. And it isn’t over yet.

Recommended Listening: Citizen Radio (0)

Posted 26 August, 2010 in Politics & Activism, Radio

Highly recommended political commentary, interviews and comedy from Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny.

Two of my poems featured at Poets For Living Waters (2)

Posted 18 August, 2010 in My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

I’m pleased to announce that “The Last Piece Of Ice Under The Sky” and “deepwater horizon” are now featured at Poets For Living Waters, a poetic response to the oil crisis in the Gulf.

Another poem published! (0)

Posted 16 July, 2010 in My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

My poem “deepwater horizon” was published yesterday in State of Emergency: Chicago Poets Address The Gulf Crisis. You can read it here.

POEM: deepwater horizon (6)

Posted 10 June, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

Listen to this poem using the player above.

deepwater horizon

ironic, choosing a name
implying distant vision
when the one thing you
can’t do is see

white belly bobs
pointing at the sun
like the face of a flower
or a tree seeking nourishment

but the sun has set
on this day of days
the long night has begun
under a blanket of oil

the Cayuhoga burned
at least thirteen times
oozing not flowing, said Time
magazine with its barrels of ink

the word “gulf” comes from
kolpos, a Greek word meaning
bosom, the chest, the repository
of emotion and intimacy

now we surround the heart
of the world with the heavy ooze
of consumption, the debilitating murk
of driving by yourself with the radio on

nineteen million barrels
each and every day
seven hundred ninety-eight million gallons
each and every day

and that’s just one country
one nation living the dream
the chosen people of a god
who created the dinosaurs

solely to power our factories
propel our cars, fuel our
wildest fantasies, a pornography
of petroleum delights

you can’t get it off unless
you scrape it off with a tool
something no bird can manage
no fish can finagle

it’s like napalm without the fire
smothering, covering
a deadly skin that can’t be shed
can’t be burned off

in Los Angeles, in New York,
in New Orleans, in Chicago,
in towns you’ve never visited
in towns I’ll never see

a man, a woman, a kid with
a new license
looks at his sneakers, her bike
the bus schedule

and grabs the keys instead
turns the engine over
hears the oil-fueled explosion
then turns up the radio

POEM: This pervasive inequality that we call choice (3)

Posted 14 April, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

Listen to this poem using the player above.

I enjoy the visual work of Joanne Johns, whose blog I highly recommend. Today’s offering is in that spirit. As for the text: When you include multiple links in a Facebook status update, a window pops up asking you to type in two words to prove that you’re human and not a spambot. I’ve been saving those words for a while now, and this poem uses all of the words I’ve saved, plus some others thrown in for good measure. The title of the poem comes from a quotation from Melissa Harris-Lacewell, whose work I respect very much.

Click the image to see a larger version.

POEM: Another Song For Occupations (8)

Posted 13 April, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

Listen to this poem using the player above. The music is “Down By The Salley Gardens,” performed on tin whistle by Jason Crane.

Another Song For Occupations

Walt didn’t mean invaders
he meant good work, done well
not camo-clad crusaders
turning Gaza into hell

not Kabul and not Baghdad
or next to Kandahar
a mother or a granddad
when is the bridge too far?

Walt thought of driving carts
of crossing on the ferry
hat doffed to gentler arts
eating, drinking, merry

not strafed by chuckling guns
the toys of discontent
not being forced to run
or tortured to repent

Walt never dreamt of walls
cutting parent off from child
obscuring blood relations
casting friends into the wild

although he’d been through war time
had soothed the soldiers’ pains
he’d thought that there’d be more time
to reap those hard-won gains

but now the jobs he spoke of
are gone, sailed overseas
Walt’s song for occupations
has faded on the breeze

POEM: Oh Lord (9)

Posted 10 April, 2010 in Atheism, Audio Poems, Jazz, Music, My poems, Poetry, Politics & Activism

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Oh Lord

Don’t Let Them Drop That Atomic Bomb On Me
When Charles wrote that,
the (magic) mushroom
seemed like a very real possibility.
Like there could be a day
when there were no more days,
when spring would jump
straight to winter
and the switch would get stuck.

Now his words sound quaint and old-timey,
like interring the Japanese
or smallpox blankets
or the city of gold that was exchanged
for dark flesh. Like bomber blackouts
on the West Coast and ships
in Davey Jones’ locker,
sent there by folks flapping their gums.

We don’t worry ’bout that no more.
We have seen the enemy and they are winning.
With friends like we’ve got, it’s just as well
Dastardly Dan leaves that girl tied to the tracks.
She’d better pray the train kills her,
because her insurance won’t cover just
losing a limb or two. That’s an act of God,
they’ll say. The Big Guy doesn’t like it
when you don’t pay your rent.

« Previous