Poems for New Orleans

Each of us who lived through Katrina has a story. There are amillion possible narratives of personal loss, anger, and grief. Itseems ironic, then, that Ed Sanders, the Beat poet from New York City,author of Tales of Beatnik Glory and co-founder of the Fugs, who wasnot personally affected by the storm, would be the one to produce theepic spoken word CD, Poems for New Orleans.

These poems, read in Sanders’ mellifluous voice and accompanied byMark Bingham’s musical score, lack what almost every other narrative ofthe city’s decimation has had: an “I.” The first person pronoun entersthese poems only when Sanders assumes the voice of another, or of thecity itself. But perhaps it is because Sanders has no personal Katrinaexperience to relate that he can tell the story as a tragedy ofhistory, a tragedy of a city, a nation, and a people.

The first poem and longest piece tells the story of the Battle ofNew Orleans focusing on Lemoine Lebage, a Haitian émigré schooled inthe ideals of the French Revolution who joined Andrew Jackson’s motleycrew of militias for the battle. He was wounded and, according to thepoem, treated on the battlefield by Marie Laveau. The poem fastforwards to Grace Lebage, “his great-great-great-great granddaughter”and her frustrated attempt to save the family home. Her struggle withthe now familiar bureaucratic roadblocks and governmental callousnessbecomes the symbol of all of our struggles to bounce back from thestorm.

Sanders’ tragedy has a classic tinge. He refers to the Greektragedian Aeschylus, and the flood becomes the Waters of Poseidon. Theredneck trucker who, on a drunken whim, drives to Hope, Arkansas andliberates a load of FEMA trailers from bureaucratic gridlock, has aBull of Minos (the Minotaur) on the grill of his truck. Post-stormviolence and rape invokes the myth of Ajax and Cassandra. Theseallusions lend the story a timelessness that reveals the tragedy in itstrue scope, so much larger than any individual’s place in it.

Still, the crowning achievement of the work may be Mark Bingham’sscore. Spoken word often features musical accompaniment, but Bingham’swork on Poems for New Orleans surely sets a new standard for the hybridgenre. The composition seamlessly weaves in Dixieland, jazz, brass andeven a Stravinsky-like orchestral theme that depicts the approach ofthe storm. Sanders’ work, in the tradition of the Beats, eschewsregular meter and rhyme, but Bingham finds its irregular music at everyturn, creating a fabric of New Orleanian musical motifs that seem,sometimes, filtered through a watery distortion. It is as if the city,on confronting the possibility of its end, sees its history pass by ina surreal pastiche.

It’s too bad that no New Orleans writer has produced aKatrina-related work of the scope of Poems for New Orleans. But, afterthe political and financial betrayal by the rest of the nation, it isgratifying to receive this homage from a poet of Sanders’ talent andstature. Poems for New Orleans is as heartfelt and ambitious a projectas has come out of the storm, and perhaps those of us who have our ownstories to tell can learn something from a poet who records, withempathy and sensitivity, the story of city and a culture, rather thanan individual.

By Bill Lavender

http://www.offbeat.com