Prodigal Blog

I haven't posted anything since the end of my tenure as a Fulbright in Moncton, but I guess it is time to refigure my blog to accommodate that change. Here is the relevant personal information:

On June 20th I married my lover, Linda Rigamer, in New Orleans. Three days later we drove across the country to our new home in Ithaca, New York. We've been here since.

Now I am living through summer with new interests and old projects. I am working on translating some Acadian poetry for The New Orleans Review. I am working on revising Evangeline. Considering writing the third part. "Studying" professional wrestling as a cultural and significant art/entertainment spectacular. Considering how I can integrate that in poetry and/or everyday life. Considering watching The Dark Knight again. Every night this week. Until it closes. Cooking often. Figuring out what to do with a dearth of closets. Being either with my wife or alone.

Busy enough. Orientation for Cornell will start on the 25th of August, so as much as I want/need a job, options for a month long job are limited at best in tiny Ithaca.

So what of my blog? I had a reasonable idea with the cultures of Acadie and Cajana in their present form as a demonstration of Ruin Value. Although I am sure I didn't express that except cursorily. That's saved for my poetry and life. But of course, ruin can be applied to anything. The evolution of revolutionary democracy to today's circus of politics. Poetry as demassified and worthless cultural relic. The shift from long, boring scientific wrestling bouts to the high-flying sports entertainment/totem worship ceremony of today.

These things and more, friends and citizens.

Frye Jam

As promised, here are some videos from Saturday night's reading.


This first one is of me performing "Offshore."


This second video is two poems: "Canto Incorruptible" (performed in French) and "New Orleans" (which is the final show-stopper, in English, and begins at about 2:19).

Both videos were shot by Lee Thompson.

Mixing Memory and Desire (brief)

Last night Chuck threw a party for me. We ate Fricot, Bouillée, and Poutine à Troux. You know you're finished when they throw a party for you. And with a few revisions on my final report, the Fulbright committee will know I'm finished too.

I am looking forward to meeting and talking with friends for hours and drinking and laughing and most of all being with Linda again. I'm afraid this hermitage up north has made me socially awkward and that I won't be able to talk to someone outside of the context of the "cultural artist" topic.

Later this week is the Northrop Frye, as I've mentioned. I'll be interviewed and perform readings. I will give Acadie a taste of what's to come.

This I know is a slightly more personal and laconic post. The theory and intellectually melodramatic questions were I know getting out of hand, and it's hard to think that way all the time. In truth, I don't think about culture or art all the time. Mostly I think on specific instances of communications, bits of correspondence, waiting for the time--the era--to pass, missing home, wishing I were with others/away from others, being nostalgic for the future.

Evangeline is being revised and guess the title for the section about Louisiana:

Elegies for a Paradis Terrestre.

Final cantica: the lyric essay

So I think I am going to try to finish Evangeline in lyrical essays instead of poems. This way, it puts pressure off of living up to some of the dramatic lines that so tore me apart in the first two cycles, allows me to incorporate more factual and cultural information, and gives me a new form to practice.

Part of this reason is me shying away from the confessional in my work, but still incorporating personal stories and images that I directly witnessed. The first part of the manuscript is largely lyric cantos directed at a lover, whether that lover be place or person, with the knowledge of exile still delayed. The second part is more of a travelogue in verse, attempting to destroy the sense of rootedness established in the first. Both use images and bits of language culled from my life and imagination and remain more or less stylized accounts of sex and nostalgia as applicable to geography.

But this last section has to be something different. My emotional connection to Acadie is largely artificial. I've lived there since August, suffered the inwardness of poetry and of regression. Now I am travelling, in transit, once more. Acadie is not my home. It is my foil but also it is a type of redemption for me--an extended long, dark night of the soul. I think it has outgrown my line breaks and imagined encounters, and especially, outgrown my memory.

Next Wednesday, I will be in Ann Arbor for U of Mich's admitted MFA student's "weekend." That Saturday I will be back in Moncton for the final four-week hitch, which will culminate in several readings during the Northrop Frye Festival. Then I will be through with my obligation to Acadie.

The Real Meaning of Poetry, with temperature and supreme fictions

So in New Orleans, the temperature is very high. I would say hot, being that Sunday when I left Moncton it was snow-storming. Not an awful snow storm however. Spring is here.

Two days ago, I was in Dartmouth, Massachussetts giving lecture/readings on my poetics and Cajun poetics and Southern poetics--which provided an interesting/bizarre experience for me and my audience, who were, as you may have guessed, barely a few years younger than me.

The first class I spoke in was a Southern Literature course, where I discussed some of the main issues of the American South in poetry, i.e. sense of loss, bewilderment with contemporary society but a longing toward it, sublimity in nature qua token of a past long gone. Then I read my section of Evangeline about leaving the South. I talked about how Komunyakaa and Ammons left the South. I talked about how postmodern poetics require that the poet be at once the ambassador of a specific cultural element but must remain elliptical in his relationship to said culture. Etc. Etc. In any case, the students were impressed when I referred to the Acadian diaspora as le grand dérangement and my characterization of Pigeon Forge in Tennessee. Which could be, as one student described, "wicked hot!"

The second class was Culture and Language, to which I addressed the obvious Cajun elephant in the room. Everything was quiet, etc, until I read the entirety of my Rougarou sequence, which as you may know, is a murder mystery/epic poem told mostly from the perspective of a young gay male prostitute. The class was hushed and engaged. They even debated among themselves the ambiguous outcome of the end and their favorite voice (between the working boy narrator and the extratemporal Rougarou). Students came up to me afterward to compliment me for giving them something entertaining and touching. Students who maybe never read poetry were enthralled by a poem with admittedly hard-sell qualities (controversial characters, huge length, etc). And while the offers from U Mich and Cornell are flattering, validating, and chanceux (and the "apologies from other schools disappointing), this is really what poetry is about. Touching. Moving. Thrilling. And for this reason, I am proud to be part of a literary tradition.

The final class was more informal with me discussing the creation of a Supreme Fiction from the shards of modernism, ruin value, and Cajun culture and history. The course title was Advanced Writing and Thinking. I read from both completed sections of Evangeline and essentially answered questions about craft and poetics.

Now I am living the high life in New Orleans--visiting and wedding planning and eating. A welcome change, believe me, after being in total transit for almost 100 hours in the last two weeks.

The weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful

It's time to boast a little. I've had possibly the best poetry two weeks I can imagine:

I gave my reading at the Attic Owl, which was a success. Everyone was very receptive and entertained, I think, even though I may have read a little too long. Even two professors from the university came and enjoyed themselves.

I met Linda in New York, where we went to the AWP bookfair and met with friends. I got a lot of good information from journals and got to see some Bucknellians after too long a delay. Most importantly, I got to see Linda.

I finished the second cantica of Evangeline.

While in New York, I received an email from the co-director of the Northrop Frye festival, which is the biggest literary event in Atlantic Canada. He invited me to do two readings and a school visit, for which I will be paid.

I received another email there from The Louisiana Review, who will be publishing two poems of mine ("Feu-Follet" and "Searching for the Grave of Walt Whitman") this spring.

Linda and I returned to Moncton where I received a message from Ken McClane. I was cooking a Cajun feast and could not answer the phone. Mr. McClane is on the creative writing faculty at Cornell University and called to notify me that I was accepted as 1 of 4 poets in the MFA program with full funding (tuition and stipend) and a two year lectureship after I graduate. Cornell is the most selective school in the country and consistently ranks at the top of the list for every criterion. There is almost no way that Linda and I won't be moving to Ithaca right after the wedding.

This will make this semester travel more quickly Thank God. I will visit Ithaca in three weeks. Then I will see Linda in New Orleans right before Holy Week. After Easter, I'll have less than a month in Canada. This leaves me with little time to finish the rest of Evangeline, but that's fine. I probably need a little more distance from Moncton to really write about it, as I did with New Orleans, Chauvin, and America.

You say you want a revolution?

The last I posted, if I recall, was about a hurricane, a storm, barrelling through Moncton, barrelling through my life, my work. And now, I am writing this on borrowed time in New Orleans. Don't worry: I will be back on my tour of duty later this week. It is probably forty to sixty degrees colder in Moncton right now than it is here. I would bet.

I honestly don't know what to say since I've last written. The last few months have given new meaning to the idea ruin value, at least for me. The idea of beautiful dissembling, the shards of a former reality shown to be nothing but dissimulations, just gaudy façades of a former, more idealistic era. I, of course, finished the first third of Evangeline. Now I write about the great exile North, a voluntary sequestering, a minor conquest, a minor treasure. I will begin the deconstruction of Acadie soon.

As far as travel goes, maybe I've lost myself in it. The idea of home doesn't quite exist the same way in French as it does in English. There is no direct translation with the nuance and aplomb of home. With the variegated images, the smell of vanilla, the warmth of flesh on flesh. Right now, it's as if I want to echo Duras's screenplay: ELLE: J'ai tout vu à Hiroshima. LUI: Non, tu n'as rien vu. I don't know anything.

Perhaps this is what le Grand Dérangement means afterall: the loss of knowledge, the annihilation of all the former myths you told about yourself, the endless and endless waiting for the next thing to define you, give you shelter, give you repose, devastate you. This will be the title for my second sequence in Evangeline, the part about driving to Canada: Le Grand Dérangement, the great upheaval, the great moving, the diaspora, the exile. You see, the difference in my telling is that the threat of exile is never from without, but from the self, the oblivion of the love relationship, and the comfort in thinking you know what the right thing to do is. The threat is volition.

If this is not indication enough, let me be clear: I am back in action.

Evangeline, virgin and martyr

There is an Acadian essay that begins with the sentence, Evangéline porte mal la mini-jupe (Evangeline wears a miniskirt poorly). She is the essence of holiness, you see, sanctified, what one would want the Acadians to be. The chosen people. Evangeline's white face is untouchable in the same way a magnolia bud is untouchable. You wouldn't want it to darken, be stained with the grime on your hands, the very filth of your skin-oil.

In Longfellow's poem, he shows the Acadians to be martyrs. All you Greek scholars will know that μαρτυρ or μαρτυρος does not mean to be persecuted, but to give witness. I wonder what the Acadians give witness to? What does Evangeline give witness to? Note this passage in the French translation:

Parfois elle venait, se croyant sans témoin,
Faible et lasse, s'asseoir au fond d'un cimitière.

(Sometimes she came, considering herself without witness,
weak and weary, to sit on the graveyard floor. [my translation])

This sentiment is not exactly the same in the original, which is:

Sometimes in the churchyards strayed, and gazed on the crosses and tombstones.

This admittedly is not Longfellow's finest verse. The difference is striking because the French version, which essentially brought about the renaissance acadienne in the 19th century, portrays Evangeline in despair. She is in despair because she looks only toward the past.

But it makes fine poetry, doesn't it, looking toward the past? This is the nostalgia of art, the regression I spoke of, passéisme. What else can we do in art?

I propose to force Evangeline into a miniskirt. I don't hide the fact that my poems are not about making anyone chaste. Maybe decadence is the only way to treat art. The realists sullied the delicious curves of Ingres. The impressionists distorted even these raw images. The modernists fragmented what was impressionistic. We've reached a point where it seems all art has been made or written. This is not true.

There will always be depravity and sentimentality. This is my currency. Art and literature has become too safe once again, obsessed with its own irony, its own cleverness. I deal only in the marginalia of relationships, torn papers kept to remember that lovers were once together, sexual awakening, liminality, the presence of the divine not trapped but freed in the confines of dirt and flesh. And so this is my Evangeline--a symbol of dolorous and ecstatic and shameful love, the passéisme of love. That is my μαρτυρια, my witness.