Ambition value

Yesterday I went to a writers' meeting in Grand Barachois with Lee Thompson. There I met many people I had met already with the addition of the great Acadian artist and poet Roméo Savoie. We read our own work, etc. I read my poem titled "Ruin Value" which obviously touches on that same concept of architecture.

This was excellent because Roméo was himself an architect before he became a famous Acadian figure. He said that Acadie created a ghetto for itself. That it will be a hundred years or so before the culture can move beyond the issue of the culture. He is the first Acadian to present this mindset to me, that culture is irrelevant, that the only thing that matters is life--not the homeland, not the language, not the cultural artifacts dressed out to confirm any lingering stereotypes from outsiders.

Meeting him and of course Herménégilde has been a breath of fresh air here. Because they understand more acutely the ambition of the artist. In the end, ambition is the real question. The ambition to communicate and reach the Other.

People don't write for themselves, solely. If anyone tells you this and then shows you his manuscript, he is looking for acceptance, one form of communication. He wants to show you this extension of himself, something he came up with. The qualifications of "personal" writing are a facade. Of course. But the point is that artists are trying to say something.

But this something is less important than you think. It is more in the manner, the style, and the technique of the communication. The concept is well less important than the execution. To quote J. Robert Lennon, "You can write anything you want, just don't write it shittily."

There was incidentally a bit of contention this week over a "movement" of new minimalist writers. I don't want to go too far into it, but most of the writing itself is unreadable and laughably self-conscious in an adolescent, look how cool I am kind of way. But the real problem with this writing was not topic (which though banal cannot be bad in and of itself) but with the lame prose and conceited, ironic tone.

In any case, I am 12 days until I leave Canada for good. In the meantime, I have to figure out what I am going to tell high school kids during my school visits for the Northrup Frye festival and pack and see what I want to see before I go. Linda will be here in 10 days for my readings and to help me pack.

Culture Wars

Culture. What is that? My friend and landlord, who by day is a psychologist, claims that it is "a system of laws to check instinct." But this is conflating culture with institutions--which is no surprise from my friend, who "hates" them all, especially Organized Religion. But there is also his culture--upper middle class academic/professional, atheist, permissive, purveyor of both fine and folk art. There is also my culture(s). Cajun, yeah yeah yeah. But moreso, I'm a twenty-something writer, cultural (at least) Catholic, permissive, consumer. I dabble in many arts and am well "versed" in many subjects. I avoid opinions I find distasteful--racist, mysogynistic, homophobic, conservative. Both of us has "culture."

But you could say the same with any demographic, and now I'm conflating "culture" with "demographic group." (I can't help but think that's what culture is now, sorry.) But maybe I should look more toward what separates humans and animals. I don't buy the feel-good idea that animals somehow have culture, one of the defining things, I think, that cleaves that chasm between us and Those Others Who Live. One great big advance that humans made in evolutionary history is of course the capacity to engage in symbolic discourse.

Symbols. Signs for something else. Is this what culture is? In Cajana, there is of course the music, symbolic wailing and complaints not unlike Medieval French poetry. There is also symbols that have come to represent the people--the crawfish, the bayou, the French language, etc. There is also literature.

But for my purposes, can there be any culture? I am an artist. And as I've stated before, I am not doing this just to be the world's biggest Cajun. I really don't think I'm that exotic. And continuing in my writing and in my reading, what is there but culture? What is there that but what has nothing to do with culture?

Culture may be something only valuable to the two jobs offered by an MFA in creative arts: artists and marketing people. But maybe when either is address directly, the only thing that can happen is a war of generalizations (read tautologies) and the dehumanization of the individual. New postmodern dictum: you can have a culture / but have it slant.

Shoeless on Claiborne

Among other things, last night, I picked up a hitch-hiker at three in the morning. Before you get hysterical, let me explain.

I was leaving the apartment to pick Linda up from the casino. There was almost no one out: the night of Good Friday, the early morning darkness finally winning over the ambient city-light. At the bus station at the corner of Broadway and Claiborne, there was a ghostly figure. She had no shoes on. She wore a cocktail dress. Her eyes were coal smudges onto her face. There was no indication, other than her standing and breathing, as to whether or not she was alive.

Naturally, I looked away. Living in cities, you find this action easy, if a little embarrassing.

Out of my peripheral vision, I saw her arm jut out, thumb up. I was the only car on the road, but pretended she was not signaling for me. The light was red and I stayed there transfixed for an eternity. She looked at the dearth of oncoming traffic and crossed over to my little car in the middle lane.

Normally, I'd have waved her off. But she was frantic and young. I rolled down my window. "Can you please take me home?" I noticed the pallor and death stain from before was her mascara smudged about her face. "I'm a law student." "Please." I waited until I saw both her hands holding nothing. "Please."

I opened the door. I said, "My fiancée's going to kill me."

Turns out, she was more afraid than I was, though less of a coward. She cried and tried to make small talk. As far as I could tell, her story was true: her boyfriend left her on her 28th birthday, somehow stranding her on the side of Claiborne. When I dropped her off at the Garden District mansion she lived in, she was incredulous that she had no shoes.

--

Afterwards, I was exhilarated as I told Linda. But what I was thinking the whole time is this: why don't we stop for anyone? Often I see accidents or people with car trouble, and the most I do is feel guilty. Same goes for chairs in the middle of the road, abandoned animals, and certainly hitchhikers. Something's changed here. Maybe it's New Orleans, maybe it's America. But you don't stop anymore.

I think to myself, what if I hadn't stopped this time? But worse, what about all the times I haven't stopped?

In terms of culture, New Orleans bills itself as the big easy, right? A place where people can get along and help one another. Cajuns think this of themselves too. So does about any culture I can think of. But the truth of the matter is that something's gone awry. Nothing is safe. Except maybe the lone hitchhiker, a 28-year-old blonde in a cocktail dress sans shoes.

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.

Insécurité Linguistique

Today I watched a film called Éloge du chiac, which was basically a documentary featuring an argument between fourteen year olds (in 1969) over linguistic primacy in Moncton. I've mentioned chiac before, comme c'est un right weird way de parler si vous autres l'avez pas entendu. In Cajun English, there is, of course, a similar phenomenon: the mixture of English syntax with Cajun locutions, such as "Mais, I went to the bar me, and I got casséd." It is a less extreme version of some of the more pronounced forms of chiac here, yet like chiac, it is a source of both cultural pride and insecurity.

This ambivalence toward one's dialect creates a fierce communal situation which is one of the links between the Acadian and Cajun cultures. The people within both cultures strongly identify with their heritage-or at least make a strong showing for it. Many critics have descried the fact that Cajuns have more or less lost their French as evidence that they are assimilating into mainstream American culture. This is a harsh and ignorant stance.

Cultures evolve, and one cannot fault another for learning the language of the land in order to feed his or her family. But nevertheless, the Acadians qui parle chiac can teach the Cajuns something about dynamism.

For instance, the primary pro-chiac girl in the video, a Melançon, said, "Si je rencontre un français, je vais sortir mon bon français., pis chez nous autres, on parle du chiac. Pis s'il y a des anglophones, je peux parler tout en anglais. Ça montre qu'on est pas mal smart." (If I meet a francophone, I pull out my good French, and at home, we speak chiac. And if there are anglophones, I can speak completely in English. It shows us to be pretty smart.)

There is a code-switching that demonstrates that the culture is ready to play ball, but will not forget the intensity of the heritage experience, the secret language of the initiated.

This is interesting when it comes to regional poetry as well, because here à Moncton, many writers write in chiac or variations of Acadian French. Yet I have my own linguistic insecurity. I don't alter my orthography to math the phonetics of Cajun English. My syntax, yes. Do I throw in French words, occasionally. But whereas poets from Guy Arsenault to Georgette LeBlanc feel comfortable writing "ej" for "je" and "rinque" or "yinque" for "rien que," I will not write "dis" for "this." In English, this looks comical, sort of ridiculous, and nearly impossible for someone to take seriously on a poetic level. In Alma by Georgette LeBlanc, I see nothing of the over-quaintness of orthographically modified regional slang. But apparently, les québécois might, and almost certainly les français.

I still feel a need to both embody and rupture my culture, my psyche, my poetics in this. For right now, I need other anglophones to take me seriously, and so I

Valentines and Cultural Success

This afternoon I witnessed an extraordinary event: the release of a book by David Adams Richards at the gallérie d'art à l'université de Moncton. Besides the author in question, the matriarch of Acadian letters, Antonine Maillet, was there and said kind things about him. She called for the amicable coexistence of the two literary traditions in New Brunswick, one English and the other French, noting that she herself needed the work of someone like David Adams Richards.

Mr. Richards, what one would describe as a poetic realist, gave an interesting account of humanity, of not placing oneself apart from it, and to not become lost in a world of books so much so that you ignore the humanity of others. This, I feel, is indeed a very important point. And the magnanimity of Tante Tonine was astounding, especially for someone so learned and so iconic. May I note here that Richards lives now in Toronto (not in his hometown of Miramichi) and Tonine lives in Montreal (if I am not mistaken).

This brings me to my real point--the role of the writer who leaves and further, the role of the writer in his community after he meets with success.

I personally have left Louisiana in many ways. I don't plan on living there for at least the next four years, and who's to say from there. I'd like to think I'll move back to be close to my families and culture, but for right now, I am content to be away. Furthermore, I will not attempt to fashion my oeuvre as a closed, ethnic work. But does this mean I've betrayed my culture?

I'd hope not, but I am doubtful. I already see the phenomenon of people undercutting the success of their own here in Moncton. It almost seems as if people would rather the artist to never rise to more success than a single community can give. For instance, the musician Zachary Richard is derided a bit (not necessarily vehemently) in Louisiana whereas Acadians here love him. Although people may say it is his arrogance (which I cannot comment on having never met him), I believe that it is more his attitude of I am an artist who will not be bound by even my own culture. I personally think his renditions of the Cajun standards, while not reflective of the folklorist version of our heritage we sell to tourists, are very interesting, as is his ability to produce new music.

There are many parallels here in Moncton: those who have reached fame and validation outside of Acadie who are now considered vendu (a sell-out). This I feel is awful. The success of artists outside of a close-knit community is the sign that the culture is making a lasting hold in the artistic tradition of the world--meaning that it will avoid what all art wants to avoid: being forgotten.

By the way, Happy Valentine's Day!

Regression as Poetics

Regression is the passéisme of the individual. Active nostalgia--maybe a kinder way of saying regression--is what fuels poetry. The corpus of any poem is littered by observations, memories, synesthesias, bits of conversation or language that have stuck. In the workshop, we would call these things images. Poetic creativity has nothing to do with creation, the spontaneous generation of language, but is really re-creation. It is the past, dressed up to be made presentable, enjoyable, cathartic, ruinous.

Perhaps this is a new phenomenon, with an origin in confessional poetry. The poet of today is obsessed with herself, even if this is not apparent from her work. Those images have to come from somewhere. We are no longer content, as readers, to deal with grand symbols, the metaphors of society, or historical tropes. This bores us. We want something shocking, moving, obliterating. At least we want cleverness.

This creates a bit of a problem for me in Moncton. I've written tons since I've been here, but nothing that takes into account the Acadian diaspora. All I've written about is homeland. Furthermore, I am obsessed with my own regression. I love reliving all of my emotional extremes, being hurt and elated all over again. I glorify the excreta of memories. This is my own sentimental scatology.

My project so far swirls around the schema of place. I've written poems with a day number and a place name, such as "Day One: Chauvin." I've covered a lot of ground. The aim is to finish in Moncton, or perhaps Port Royal, the former city (it is no longer as such) of my ancestors. In these poems, I am addressing the cities as lovers, and in doing so personify them, metamorph them into the bruised memories of lovers I've had in those places. Being with a poet is indeed a bad thing, because your life is now on display. Or at least the small details of your life: your movie ticket stubs, your birthday gifts, your manner of speaking, your flaws and infallibilities.

With the exception of one poem called Chicago, I haven't left Southern Louisiana. As my regression takes a firmer and more fatal hold, I may never.