Though I am no Duke of Earl
You are my chatelaine
I love the way the world
Drives you insane
Flashbacks first. Doing this cartwheel in a New Orleans park at midnight early last year, where that dark tree resembles a smoke cloud or the soul of a missing dragon in what became into a Radu-riven collage. Looping early Frank Black on the drive down the month before. Walking through various fountains. Sharing beers in an abandoned church near a warehouse. Laughing and walking until my legs hurt in that wonderful that says “you have been walking all day because there is so much to see and if you see down the world stops”.
Between trains, buses, and automobiles, I’ve visited NOLA at least 11 times in the past two years and have grown rather fond of the city, its food, its tree-gnarled sidewalks, its breezes and colors and music and endless nights.
My Heresies comes out on April 29th, which means I won’t be reading or doing any signings at NOLA Poetry Festival. Instead, I will take the opportunity to yap yap yapppp with minds whose company I prefer to my own words. Please for the love of gods and heirloom tomatoes, please come say hi if you see me. Please tell me to stop talking!
If, by chance, you are interested in hearing me yap about my favorite subject (some variation on my usual theme of poetry being life, and life being poetry) alongside other poets whom I admire, this, too, is possible.
The “Sacred and Somatic” Panel will send you home with a list of writing exercises to generate that particular profanation that hovers between ecstasy and nothingness, which seems like the perfect way to prepare for the birthday of Samuel Beckett on April 13th (and yes, I am bringing his plays because it would wretched to miss a chance to do a Beckett line-reading near a tree or a statue or a mural in New Orleans).
How often our words are the ghosts of those we've lost.
So many moments are filled with their endings.
— Richard Jackson, “In the Time of the Living”
May you not rest in peace.
Don't rest, be
waiting always.
— Eugen Jebeleanu, “Without Respite”