Review of Niyi Osundare's City Without People

Review:  Niyi Osundare's City Without People (Black Widow Press, 2011)

Note: This review was originally published in Entrepôt (Vol. 2, Oct 2011).

Dr. Niyi Osundare will be the featured reader Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at the 1718 Series held at the Columns Hotel. The series begins rather promptly at 7 and is usually SRO, so get there early for a seat. The readings are usually followed by a Q & A with the author.

http://1718aneworleansreadingseries.blogspot.com/

City Without People: The Katrina Poems by Niyi Osundare

(Black Widow press, 2011) 137 Pgs.

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Niyi Osundare’s City Without People: The Katrina Poems is a narrative journey from the first moments that the water breached the levees to the traumatic experience of the author and his wife trapped in their attic to the slow journey back to some sense of normalcy.  Instead of a straight shot chronologically though, these poems vacillate from the first terrible hours followed by the one year anniversary and then back to earlier experiences. In this way, they capture the way memory holds a seemingly endless amount of hours and experiences in a brief recollected interlude. This movement in time as well reflects the book’s attempt to capture the ebb and flow of fear and anger as well as passion and hope in the years following Katrina.  These poems then are arranged strongly around the tone and the emotion expressed in each section. It allows the poet to not only examine the various reactions to this event, but it also plumbs the depths of the poet’s personal experience as survivor, evacuee, displaced professor, New Orleans citizen, and as part of a Nigerian community in New Orleans that is displaced after the storm. Osundare’s Nigerian background and cultural milieu allow him the opportunity to translate this event through his African heritage. In cultural signals and codes, Osundare brings his own particular blend of Nigerian influence to this historical New Orleans event. It’s this blending of cultures, this looking back to the familiar in the midst of chaos, that brings such a unique voice to this topic. In addition, Osundare’s ability to range from anger to quiet desperation amid heartbreaking images and then soar back to such heights of optimism and resilience makes this book one of the most important books to emerge from the Katrina debacle. Unlike earlier books, this collection benefits from the author’s deliberate need to process and collect his thoughts and responses. The reader receives not one overwhelming sense of raw or heated emotions, but instead passes through the ever-changing sense of response and recovery that takes years to really name and comprehend.

       

     The initial section to this collection “WATER,    WATER!...” opens with the subtle line, “It all began as a whisper among/ The leaves.” The poem titled “The Lake Came to My House” is just the beginning of several difficult poems in this section that recount the disastrous damage that the water inflicted upon the city of New Orleans. The poem ends with the same subtle tone that belies the vast trauma embedded within the lines: “The day the Lake came down my street/ And took my house away.” Osundare easily moves from narrative lyrics to stark lines that have imagistic overtones and then to more formally rhymed and metered lines. His penchant for song is evident in poems like “Katrina Anthem” which begins “Ka ka Katrina” and then continues out in quatrains composed of rhymed couplets beating out a rhythm as tense and pitched as the misery and distress that forms the subject:

                       

Blood on your hands, skulls in your fridge

                        You swamp the river and swallow the bridge

                        In your crowded kitchen a foul fleshfeast

                        Fit for the monster and the hellish beast

In stark contrast to this melodic, albeit dark poem, is the poem that is the title piece for the book, “City Without People.” Here Osundare delivers a straight punch, no rhyme or song, but instead the bleak report from the voice of the witness: “The trees are dead/ The birds are gone/The grass is scorched” and later, the questions: “Tell me/ What do you call a house/ Without walls?” One of the powerful aspects of this book is Osundare’s ability to return again and again in various forms and tones to this subject. In one poem where the reader finds despair; there will be another that sings of rebirth. It’s an inconstancy that perfectly reflects the chaotic nature of responding and surviving a catastrophe. In the midst of resilience, the author finds himself angry and distraught and then in the next moment, “the sexy serenade of the sax-o-phone” rises breathing new hope into the lines.

Osundare’s poems as well cover vast topics brought about by the disaster from the negative response of outsiders who loudly criticized the city’s rebuilding to the “Katrina refugee” moniker to the disaster tours that descended into destroyed neighborhoods for tourists; this book in a sense becomes a catalogue, a reminder of not only the city’s event but the fallout from that event and how the nation responded.  As the unacknowledged legislator, Osundare pokes fun of these notions while also cutting to the quick of the issue. In “Disastourism” he warns: “Careful now,/ Dear Tourist/ Mind the bristling bones/ Beneath your sole.” In other words, take care where you walk for in these empty hulls are the souls of a city, and what does it say of your own heart to drive by in a bus pointing a camera at this destruction.  Osundare points out that to uncap the lens of our own view would mean accepting that this could have been prevented and that any region protected by levees could be another “New Orleans” story.

The book ends with a poignant interview between Niyi Osundare and Rebecca Antoine, which was collected in Antoine’s Voices Rising II: More Stories from the Katrina Narrative Project. It’s incredible after reading these poems, which attempt to encapsulate a series of swirling emotions and responses to disaster, to read this interview that clearly recounts Osunadare’s experience from the moment the levees broke to the point where he returns to New Orleans almost a year later. People from poems in the book acquire new depths as Osundare relates with wonder and appreciation all of the people who helped him and his family not only survive their harrowing entrapment in their flooded house but who continued to help them long after the water had receded and the city had become a fading news story. Osundare opens up a world interconnected by scholars and university colleagues who came to his aid as well as Nigerian community members and friends both here in America and in Africa who helped support him and his family at this time. Osudare’s ties to Nigeria and to the country of his childhood are largely represented in this book that talks of his new home. In song and in references, in the call and response and in the chant, there are, in the bones of these poems, beliefs in homes that span oceans and in communities not bound by geography. From the preface, Osundare says, “I sing of a city which insists on its own right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  This is a book about people: People filled with the need to raise their voices against the silence.  

New Orleans Recipes: Big Easy BBQ Shrimp

Easy BBQ Shrimp:

There's no BBQ in New Orleans BBQ Shrimp. It is super fattening and delicious for dipping copious amounts of french bread in. 

Take about 1-2 lbs of shrimp, pull off the heads but leave the shell and tails on, rinse under water

In a separate bowl, melt 3 sticks butter

add about 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire Sauce

about 2/3 of Abita Amber Beer or another beer that's got a good flavor

For this dish, I added Prudhomme's Seafood Magic

Lots of Black Pepper

and a dash of Mexican Vanilla

Season to taste as you like

(You can also add Hot Sauce, garlic, paprika, cayenne)

You can let the shrimp soak in the liquid for a bit. 

I just toss the shrimp in the pan, pour the sauce over and cover with tin foil. 

Bake at 300 in the oven.

Be careful not to overcook. It dries out the shrimp and makes it hard to peel. The shrimp should look pink and not have any more translucent flesh parts under the shell. 

Yum. Peel to eat shrimp and dip bread in all the sauce.

Also, here's a shot of some fresh broccoli and cauliflower from our garden, so you can eat your shrimp 

and get your good veggies too. 

Readings: Nicole Peyrafitte and Pierre Joris

Nicole Peyrafitte and Pierre Joris read Thursday, February 23rd at the Gold Mine Saloon as part of the 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series. 

It was a touching reunion of poet and place as last time both poets were here in New Orleans was in 2005 just months after the storm. Scheduled to read in late August '05 with our series, Nicole and Pierre  instead came in November of '05 to perform and to document and bear witness to the damage caused to the New Orleans community. Along with their son, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte (now an accomplished young film maker) they took to the decimated streets of New Orleans recording and photographing and most importantly talking to people about their experiences in post Katrina New Orleans. They traveled to the "white goods" dump far out in New Orleans east and spoke to workers and captured astonishing video of the mass destruction of a city's appliances. View video here. 

Their return to Louisiana marks a continuation of their dedication to interviewing, recording, and doing the work of the poet in the form of giving voice and bearing witness to the trauma in the world. They will be spending the rest of their trip traveling through southern Louisiana speaking to residents affected by the Gulf Oil Spill and BP's clean up efforts. Here in New Orleans they began this task by interviewing Buras activist Kindra Arnesen, mother and wife to a commercial fisherman who was one of the first to speak out about BP's insidious way of handling the spill and the community. Even in the wake of her family's sickness and need to be detoxed, including her two young children, she continues to fight and speak out about BP's blatant destruction of the coast, its waters and animals, and its communities. 

As I sat there watching Nicole and Pierre interview Kindra, I remembered the feeling of having someone listen and the urgency of the world outside of our sphere of residents and those affected to be privy to what we knew on the "inside" living as we were in the wake of destruction. This is what poetry does: it is the lifeline that continues to speak up long after the people who fight grow weary. It is the living document that roots itself into consciousness in the wake of seemingly endless lies fueled by corruption and greed. In the end, it thwarts silence and the death of what we seem to be screaming into the abyss. 

Nicole Peyrafitte performing excerpts from her Bi-Continental Chowder at 17 Poets!

This is going to be one hell of a text to engage with, hopefully sooner than later!

Nicole's humor shines through as she creates a sacred song in the long tradition of oral poets who sang the glories of the body and celebrated the mysteries of fertility and life. Peyrafitte creates a stage presence that travels from sandy shores to tramp about in Olson's words to refute Freud and then asks the audience to laugh, to poke fun at in the highest gesture of understanding: that we embrace and get comfortable in our skins, that we understand the deep mystery and the long history that we wade into when we use (& misuse) language. 

Pierre Joris' long poem weaving a line in the sand across continents and amid questions

from war to the inability to decipher the knowledge that is parceled out via the media

to the empathy sprung from embracing the language and the geography of the "other"

and the mirages we struggle against.

I've been deeply intrigued with a new collection of essays about Joris and his poetry and poetics ever since he put the book in my hand. Cartographies of the In-Between is a comprehensive examination of a life in letters from translator to poet to bridge between various schools of poetry emanating in a Nomadic poetics to anthologist and mentor. I've just finished the first section "Filiations" which includes an essay by Jennifer Moxley which takes a close look at Canto Diurno #1 as well as Joris' relationship with "hearth" and "home" in his poetry. I was moved to return his Canto Diurno in its entirety as I have it in his Selected Poems: Poasis. Instead of looking back at the patriarchal influences as this essay does, (and quite thoroughly), I find myself interested in looking forward to how this poem manifests itself in future poems: the idea of capturing a day of poetry as we see in later works like Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day or in an expanded length of time such as the experimental diaryesque prose of Lyn Heijinian's My Life. I wonder how we could trace forward a matrilineal line emerging from Joris' "shaking off the fathers." Franca Bellarsi has an informative essay drawing parallels as well as divergent paths in the works of the Beats, some translated by Joris, and Joris' own work and future poetics practice. Christopher Rizzo examines the use of culture in both Olson and Joris' poems ( and to some degree Duncan, as well)  and how Joris' poetics is influenced by, but in many ways not contained by Olson's declarations of projection and "page as field" poetics. Rizzo also examines how his role of translator informs his poetics reinforcing the view of the vernacular and language at any level as the "rhizomatic" force that enters the body and spreads out navigated by experience and place rather than by any steady teleological movement.  Dale Smith looks at Joris' book A Single Minded Bestiary: Common Fox using this text as a springboard to examine Joris' use of the totem animal, the function of translation and self in between countries, the influences of Dorn and Creeley, and Joris' role as a "social imaginary." This first section ends with an interview between Joris and editor Peter Cockelbergh which helps to clarify and ground some of the previous essays. In this form, we get to hear from the poet, some of his thoughts on lineage especially in regards to early influences as well as his emphasis on "breath" and how this informs his use of the term "rhizomatic" in terms of his poetics. 

Cartographies of the In-Between


Contributors:
Louis Armand, Tony Baker, Franca Bellarsi, Mohammed Bennis, Charles Bernstein, Nicole Brossard, Geert Buelens, Clive Bush, Corina Ciocarlie, Peter Cockelbergh, Clayton Eshleman, Allen Fisher, Christine Hume, Robert Kelly, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Jennifer Moxley, Carrie Noland, Alice Notley, Marjorie Perloff, Nicole Peyrafitte, Jean Portante, Christopher Rizzo, Jerome Rothenberg, Dale Smith, Habib Tengour.

About the editor:
Writer, scholar and translator, Peter Cockelbergh studied at the universities of Antwerp and Leuven (Belgium), at the EHESS in Paris, and is currently working on a Ph.D. at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt (Germany). For a number of years, he has been reading, writing on and translating Pierre Joris's poetry and essays (into Dutch, French & English), and has recently worked on the author's papers and archives. 

Reading Danielle Vogel’s Narrative & Nest

Reading Danielle Vogel’s Narrative & Nest: Pre-Natal Architectures and Narrative Rituals

I read it in the bathtub. The children are away for the night and my husband is working. The dog sits on the mat next to the tub. The water is scented. I read it in the bathtub, submerged naked body –under waters cloudy.

I read every word from the first page, rights reserved, sculptures by, design and typesetting. I believe the voice talking to me from the page. I have to move from the pictures to the voice. I have to have something to hold on to. The voice as I imagine Danielle’s voice but also not Danielle’s voice as if she were talking to me disembodied as the voice is disembodied, as I am not hearing a sound, but it has the shape of sound. In my head, it has the curve of sound, it has the weight of safety, and it has the feel of a place I trust. I have the need to hear the voice tell me about writing, I have the need and maybe because I know nothing. Do I know nothing? What do I know?

“This is what happen when the book is not yet possible” (Vogel 2).

I hear the voice ask its own questions, did I have the questions or did the voice prepare me to have the questions. I’m thinking about tactile, about fingers, about the edge and the slip. I think about the past. I think about bones, why here it feels like muscles and tendons, like a slippery sinew but in my page, in my voice, it’s all bone. It’s hard. I think I don’t want to hear the voice, I think I don’t want to believe the voice; if the voice can’t be believed, if then... maybe there is too much water. I feel the anxiety of failing. Is it my failure or is language failing?

“that in trauma, the floor is pulled out from under the voice” (Vogel 6)

You think it’s not there, but it’s always there. And in this case, I am in and always in the water.

“the tight, but ductile gloss” (Vogel 7)

I don’t think of birds when I look at the pictures. I think of vomit. I think of something being forced out, the helplessness and the panic. I think of breasts full of milk, so full that the nipple emits a stream high into the air that peaks and then whimpers out. I think about bodies excreting babies and shit and I think about bodies being forced to take in, being filled. I think about openings and what exits and enters. But I don’t think about birds. I read about nests, the voice tells me about nests, about how they are built and sizes and distances. I don’t feel bird-like. I feel robbed of the language on the torn paper, as if they hold a clue, as if they bridge the space between the nest and the body littered with its holes, that can’t be shut up, that complicate…but I can’t piece them together, they’ve been torn out, they’ve been torn from me and then I can’t reach them. They just dangle there. I think about how they feel falling out. I think about pulling.

Pg  8 is a color photograph of a dozen empty vessels, their mouths are empty and ragged. Not smooth like a clay pitcher, they’re pinched like ripped paper, they’re popped open like aliens have emerged, they’re like balloons with the air leaked out and frozen at the moment when the latex bursts under the pressure. I think of wombs.

I put the book down on the seat next to the tub now. I look at those bare, naked vessels with their needy mouths and I think about wombs cut open to let babies out and then sewn back. I think about my body with its scars and how I say when I say I had a C-section, again, and again, and again, how I feel the need to justify it, how I feel somewhere what is that, like shame. But it makes no sense. The body does what it does, and the terrible love pulled out there, it’s complicated. The body eats and eats sorrow, it swallows love in days that flee from me. And then I put the book down because I can’t read anymore.

And then I think, as I’m crying, about the narrative of how I would write what is happening and then language is there to put the boat right, to pull the stopper and to step away. I am thinking about how the voice is narrating and how I am narrating and how this living voice at this moment is narrating its own thoughts and how I inhabit this stopped voice and the distance between us and about mud and clay and the shapes of letters. I think I have never looked for clay. I think I’ve spent many days as a child under bridges near canals. I remember the duck shit but never the nests.  

“Every nest, like the body and manuscript, has a problem it must move through: functionability “ (Vogel 16). I think about rituals, I’ve been thinking about ritual, public and communal rituals. Going to the river and writing an exquisite corpse and throwing it in the river in the vessel of an empty wine bottle. I thought about writing Danielle a letter, a private confession. But it felt like a trick, in the face of the honesty of the text, in the place of the vulnerability of the text. Where was I failing? Could I be there too?

“the contortion” (Vogel 19)

I get out of the tub after I finish the book and I take pictures of the rituals I have set for myself. To bathe, to rest, to drink hot tea, to be in the hour in language, like a sea you wave out on, who finds you and to where. I always feel like a fraud, like an interloper. I can’t stop coming to language but I think it’s laughing behind my back. I think I could fall better, maybe now in the thread of this, I can unclench.  It means something to me to be in the world with this voice, the voice that makes and takes the time to say these things. It means something to know that there are eyes and hands and bodies in the spaces here, near and far, and they are watching and thinking, dear keepers of the sacred spaces where we lie down and say: this is what I have to offer.

2/18/12

I’ve been investigating the book as an architecture of the body—and the body as an architecture for the book. This collection explores a manuscript, pre-completion. Each ceramic swallow-like nest, pod, and hive performs as a dwelling for excerpts from my manuscripts-in-progress. 
—Danielle Vogel

Order Danielle Vogel's Narrative & Nest

Poets at "The Mardi Gras": A retro"spectacle"

Poet Paul Chasse (who left us too soon) with wife Beth Chasse

Poets Jonathan Kline and Gina Ferrara

Poets Skip Fox and Christian Bök

How'd they get all those beads?

Another Gina Ferrara pic from a later year and Nancy Dixon

Tony Torn and Poet Lee Ann Brown

Poets Ed Sanders and Dave Brinks at Zulu hashing out their plan for coconut success

Poet Bill Myers 

Poet Bill Lavender

Happy Mardi Gras, Ya'll

Poems via Post & Twitter

The wonderful editors over at Ugly Duckling Presse have sent me some beautiful new letterpress chapbooks including Lev Rubinstein's Thirty Five New Pages, Corina Copp's Pro Magenta and Michael Ford's Where We Expect to See You Soon.

Ugly Duckling Presse not only makes gorgeous chaps, but they have one of the sweetest sites for literary presses on the web. You should check it out, and they are now streaming podcasts of readings. In fact, I'm listening to one now as I type this, which isn't working out so well as I can't concentrate on the poems. I like the idea of poetry just streaming through the brain synapses.

Look for a review of Michael Ford's chapbook in the March Issue (issue 7) of 

Entrepôt. Michael Ford's second collection Olympia Street is available from Trembling Pillow Press. 

Also, Poet Carrie Murphy, a poet I only know through the medium of Twitter, and I are currently writing a collaborative poem via email to celebrate February poetry month. Carrie has a food blog over at Plums in the Icebox and you can follow her on Twitter where she is currently linking a poem a day until March 8th @carriemurph.

When we finish this little experiment, I'll post the fruits of our labors here.

Tonight at 17 Poets! Join us to celebrate the life and legacy of Eluard Burt with performances from Eric Burt, Dave Brinks, Felice Guimont, Cyril and Gayneille Neville, and many others. Show starts shortly after 8.

www.17poets.com

17 Poets! Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events At 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series

Gold Mine Saloon, 701 Dauphine, New Orleans, LA 

Poetry in the French Quarter Since 2003

Every Thursday, 8PM

www.17poets.com

Poets Dave Brinks and Bill Lavender, Mardi Gras, 2008

February 9: Bill Lavender signs and reads from his new book Memory Wing 
(Black Widow Press, 2011)

Flautist Eluard Burt,  March 2006

February 16th: Musical Performances and Tributes to flautist and mentor Eluard Burt,

with readings and performances by Kichea Burt, Dave Brinks, Lee Meitzen Grue, 

Eric Burt, Cyril Neville, Gayneille Neville, and

more.  

 Nicole Peyrafitte, 2005

Pierre Joris, 2005

John Sinclair, 2006

February 23: John Sinclair performs with his Blues Scholars, Performance by

Albany poets Pierre Joris and Nicole Peyrafitte

March 1: Poet Rodger Kamenetz

March 8: Poets Arturo Pfister and Valentine Pierce

March 15th: NYC Poet Bill Zavatsky and  Dr. Jerry Ward, Jr.

March 22: TBA

March 29: Fiction Writer Moira Crone reads and signs her new book from 
UNO Press, The Not Yet

April 5: jazz beat poet ruth weiss

April 12: Bruce Andrews

April 19th: Baton Rouge Poet Chris Shipman reads and signs his new book

 along with poet Vincent Celluci

April 26: Maxine Cassin Tribute

More Dates Coming Soon. All features followed by the open mic. 

All images copyright 17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series and Megan Burns.

Poetry Readings, Rivers, & Memory's Passage

Dave and I will be reading tomorrow night over in Baton Rouge.

Details: River Writers presents poets DAVE BRINKS and MEGAN BURNS at 8pm on Tuesday January 31st at Boudreaux and Thibodeaux’s downtown Baton Rouge! Boudreaux & Thibodeaux's 214 3rd St # 2D, 8PM






In other news: 
17 Poets! Literary and Performance Series starts back up Feb. 9th with a reading and book signing by Bill Lavender from his new book Memory Wing (Black Widow Press).

www.17poets.com

We have a fantastic line up of poets coming to read this season at 17 Poets! Dave will be sending out the announcement for the season via our email list soon. If you want to join our list, you can go to our website and fill out the join our email list form. 

The next issue of Entrepôt, a double issue, will also be available Feb. 9 at 17 Poets!

as well as available online from tremblingpillowpress.com 

and at select book stores. 

And here is my book recommendation of the day: Richard Froude's newest collection The Passenger from Skylight Press came in the mail. Not only does it have one of the best covers of 2012, but right in line with Froude's previous collection Fabric, this book weaves lines, words and time round and round into a skein of complex memories and remembrances, some yours, some Froude's. The title refers to you, and Froude is your guide taking you into the field of mathematical impossibilities and traipsing into the auras of those once inhabited by the likes of Prévert and Artaud. It's a fantastic journey: you will need to wing your eyes and hold on tight.