THE NEW POETRY OF LAMENT

Blood Dazzler. By Patricia Smith. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2008. Pp. 90. $16.00.

Jealous Witness. By Andrei Codrescu. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2008. Pp. 128. $19.95.

Saltwater Empire. By Raymond McDaniel. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2008. Pp. 130. $16.00.

There is no redemption in the Hurricane Katrina story. These three poets, employing the markedly different styles of confessionalism, surrealism, and language poetry, seem to arrive at a similar muteness in the face of the inept human management of the crisis and its aftermath, even as their lament is couched in the tradition of assailing natural forces. The anger in this protest expects to find no credible listener. It accepts the smallness of human existence and human response when the flood rises too high, when the gods decide that the time has come for a potent, rebellious, indifferent city to sink. Cataclysms do not necessarily make for great poetry, at least not in the short run; there is yet to be a memorable literary response to 9/11, the event still eluding poets seven years after the fact, as though it had been a fictional apocalypse, not a real one. (Perhaps this is so because poets would have to confront the evils of empire to come truly to grips with that day.) But the tragedy of New Orleans, because it unfolded in visuals that were more comprehensible to the imagination (technology breaking down, rather than technology reengineered for demonic purposes), has been more fruitful in that respect. We can find pint-sized villains of our choosing, and bash them, or we can bemoan nature, which requires no political ideology. Where fire failed, water has delivered. The risk is to fit the event into a ready-made structure of myth, rather than one of historical necessity, a risk all three books easily overcome. Blood Dazzler is the most outstanding collection here—indeed, it is one of the most significant volumes of poetry to be published yet in the new century—and it is against its complete realization that other efforts in this genre must be measured. The three collections are not so much elegies for New Orleans—or the myth of New Orleans—as compendiums of sorrow, a sorrow so deep it seems to have eluded the usual American optimism in the face of adversity. These poets are consistently and unremittingly wise in the way we were wise for fleeting moments during the unfolding of the disaster.

In her previous collections, Life According to Motown (Tia Chucha, 1991), Big Towns, Big Talk (Zoland, 1992), Close to Death (Zoland, 1993), and Teahouse of the Almighty (Coffee House, 2006), former Boston Globe reporter Patricia Smith took up the expected depredations of African-American urban life, particularly for the male—dealing with gangs, imprisonment, drugs, AIDS, and random violence—in a variant of social confessionalism. She recounted the arrest of her teenaged son and the killing of her father, with a shot fired at the back of his head, at sixty-two. Often the poems were sparked by headlines of mayhem, addressed to Motown celebrities, or went at the empirical data of urban misery, almost with a sociologist’s hatchet. The language in these poems, unfortunately, was rarely taut. Perhaps naturally for a journalist, Smith seemed keen to fulfill her descriptive quota, lest she be interrogated by some tenacious editor: preoccupation with the who, why, what, when, and where bred too much information, too much verbal energy, where less might have been more. The lines were sometimes inordinately relaxed for the urgent nature of the headline, the tone leery of too close an identification with the subject, causing a curious pacification in the reader. As though aware of the risks of topical poetry, Smith divided Close to Death in four sections, “Close,” “Closer,” “Closest,” and “Closed,” moving from diffuse addresses to Little Richard, Richard Pryor, Ray Charles, Rodney King, Mike Tyson, and Smokey Robinson in the first two sections, to more successful poems in the final two sections, bringing the matter closer to home, particularly the death of her father, in shorter, more imagistically taut, more cryptic renditions. “What I Would Have Told Oprah, Had She Asked,” told from the point of view of Michael Jackson, is the first poem in Smith’s oeuvre foreshadowing the success she will have in adopting personas in Blood Dazzler, as is the tautness of “Newborn, July 3, 1976” and “Squashed Moon.” Published thirteen years after Close to Death, Treehouse of the Almighty unfortunately reverted to some of Smith’s weaker tendencies, the poet overanxious to find subjects to connect and juxtapose in order to yield the desired amount of righteous discomfort; here one thinks of forced efforts like “10 Ways to Get Ray Charles and Ronald Reagan into the Same Poem” or “My Million Fathers, Still Here Past.”

In Blood Dazzler, Smith has become a thrilling new poet, whose likes we haven’t encountered in years, perhaps decades. Perhaps she feels liberated from the onerous descriptive task because the images of the death of New Orleans are still so fresh, singed in our collective imagination for the foreseeable future. Or more likely, she has concluded that to make us want to care is really not the point of successful political poetry, but rather to make us simply see the absurd relationships between the components of such a tragedy. We see the callous outlines of the cosmic joke, overwhelming everyone from the president down to a lowly dog, and everything in between. There are crystalline moments in history when human beings revert to a rather enlightened primitivism—and Hurricane Katrina was such a moment. The news itself was an ongoing statement on its own irrelevance. The key political figures were caricatures before they were derided by comedians. The survivors at the Convention Center found themselves caught in a theater of cruelty. Katrina itself exceeded its role as named storm to become transcendent myth. The meteorologists, the levee engineers, the rescuers, FEMA, the police, all found reality escaping from their grasp and were thus unable to gloss over the manifest primitivism. Thankfully, Smith is free to poke her head into the lightened crevices of the barren façade of civilization, illuminated by mass death. Repetition in subtle variation, not blunt exposition as charm, becomes her poetic modus operandi. The talisman is to venture farther into personification than she has dared to go before; she is not necessarily committed to strict representation, since reality was fungible and transformative in those few days as it rarely is. Her primary technique is to repeat at intervals a few threads of the story—the words of the announcer on the television, the dog tied to a tree and left to its fate by its owners, the situation at the convention center—to intensify the inevitability.

Her most effective, repeated personification is that of Hurricane Katrina itself. As the news advisories tell of a hurricane forming, in “5 p.m., Tuesday, August 23, 2005,” we are present at the moment of creation:

She almost overdoes it, but stops just short. From nebulous precreation, to formation and immediate articulation of the ego, to petulant woman reveling in chaos—these are not so much evolutionary transformations as abruptly discrete series in a predestined tragedy. We can stop worrying about what gets us from Point A to Point B—precisely the strength of political poetry, when it works. In the next poem, “11 a.m., Wednesday, August 24, 2005,” with the naming of the storm, Katrina is coming into her own: “The difference in a given name. What the calling, / the hard K, does to the steel of me, / how suddenly and surely it grants me / pulse, petulance.” Then, in “5 p.m., Thursday, August 25, 2005,” the increased craving to swallow: “It [my eye] doesn’t care about pain, is eons away / from the ego’s thump, doesn’t hesitate / to scan the stark, adjust for distance, / unravel the world for no reason at all, except that it // hungers.” Escalating need, the desire to absorb all, omnipresence, omnipotence, insatiability, the craving to be worshiped—God and the state share also these characteristics of domination. The Katrina personification works because it is the sort of attitude an Eastern European subject might have displayed toward omnipotence during the days of the Iron Curtain—at once wise and befuddled, wary and resigned. Smith’s language is visually acute because she doesn’t need to explain anything.

New Orleans, the city, is only a marginal presence in Blood Dazzler, unlike in Codrescu’s collection, perhaps because Codrescu, the long-time resident, has already seen New Orleans as a tragedy awaiting its moment, visualizing New Orleans as a doomed interloper among cities. Smith’s attitude is that a colossal injustice was done to the people of New Orleans; but the brazen impossibility of the city’s location itself doesn’t bother her in the same way. In “Man on the TV Say,” futile instructions come the way of New Orleans residents: “Go, he say. Pick up y’all black asses and run. / Leave your house with its splinters and pocked roof, / leave the pork chops drifting in grease and onion, / leave the whining dog, your one good watch, / that purple church hat, the mirrors.” In “Inconvenient,” to a more prosperous segment of city residents, the instruction to “Go” is merely a “nuisance”: “Best to consider this whole mess a holiday, / a simple trade, one home for its vacation version. / Best to cram our luggage into the idling Lincoln / and wait while my husband revels in busywork . . .” In “Won’t Be But a Minute,” the folly of time—how it seems elastic and immeasurable before mortality—is situated in the destiny of the dog: “Tie Luther B to that cypress. He gon’ be all right. / That dog done been rained on before, / he done been here a day or two by hisself before, / and we sho’ can’t take him.” In a civilized state of mind, we make calculations precisely like this, counting on the predictability of the all-seeing apparatus that governs matters at all times. Later, in “The Dawn of Luther B’s Best Day,” the dog is in touch with something of cosmic ineptitude: “All that’s reachin’ for him now is the sky, the God daddy, / pressing down fast, cracks of purple in its fingers.” Later still, in “Luther B Rides out the Storm,” the dog speculates: “Bet there’s daybreaks stackin’ up behind those clouds, / regular, with quiet moons behind, all rowed up, ready.” Humans and animals are counting on the passage of time to yield the other end of the fulcrum, but sometimes time doesn’t return to its originating place. In these poems, Smith isn’t straining in the least, which allows the voices of the afflicted to come through sharply, something the news never does.

Bureaucracy is a colossal joke, whose public figures are personified as ciphers. “In Gettin’ His Twang On,” “The President strums the vessel’s flat face, / his stance ossifying, his dead eyes fixed / on the numb, escaping chord.” On August 30, 2005, the president was literally fiddling as the city sank, and the poem is effective not for lampooning the hapless forty-third President but for simply situating him in the middle of the collective insanity. Reality becomes its own zany, real-time comedic commentary (H. L. Hix deployed this tactic to great effectiveness recently in God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse) in “What to Tweak,” where a Michael Brown FEMA underling sends a panicked e-mail to his boss (quoted in italics in the poem), interspersed with Smith’s commentary about what the bureaucratese actually hides:

It is unlikely that the FEMA employee would have been capable of such “poetic” rendering of the unfolding disaster. The poem works because Smith is unafraid to project humanistic thought onto the bureaucrat, just as she is willing to invest Katrina with an angry woman’s wrath. In the next poem, “Michael Brown,” the FEMA director’s own thought is rendered: “All men should be instructed / to run past mirrors, / our eyes should never reach for us, / should never create image to be answered.” Similarly, in “The President Flies Over,” the leader meditates: “... This is my // country as it was gifted me—victimless, vast.” Clearly, such a speculation would be beyond his powers, but the incongruity is a matter of poetic empathy—this is how the president ought to have been thinking, at the very least. Similarly, the Superdome speaks: “Glittering and monstrous, I was defined by a man’s hand, / my tight musculature coiled beneath plaster and glass. / I was never their church, although I disguised myself as shelter / and relentlessly tested their faith.” The poet has the responsibility to let the mute and inanimate speak—hence the president and the Superdome, in language that appears to absolve them of responsibility, but that is all right, since we know we cannot assign responsibility and be done with it.

When Smith takes up individual tragedies, like that of Ethel Freeman, whose body sat for days in a wheelchair outside the Convention Center, in “Ethel’s Sestina” and “Didn’t Need No Music, Neither” or “34,” about the thirty-four elderly people who didn’t evacuate a nursing home, rendered in thirty-four short sections, her imagination is clipped by reality and wanders into the mystical unknowable, not the documentable quotidian, unlike the tendency in her earlier collections. So in “34” Speaker 6 thinks: “Clumps of earth in the rising and me / too weathered to birth a howl. / I sleep in small shatters. I climb / the bitten left wall of my heart. / In all the places I fall, / it is dry.” This restraint hadn’t prevailed in her previous work. In the aftermath, in “Looking for Bodies,” which might easily have tempted her to overdescribe, again she holds back: “Slowly push the door open with your foot / because wood that has been wet for so long / gives to touch, imitates flesh.” The same is true in “Golden Rule Days,” about schoolchildren adjusting to new communities: “They keep touching him. They keep touching / him, as if they expect his surface to suddenly / wilt, as if they could actually feel the water / sloshing in place of a heart.” What has been done to people has transformed their very humanity, reduced them to desperate aliens on roofs and in convention centers, simplified them as criminal looters and willing refugees, yielding images that cross the line between the real and the unreal. The journalist in Smith is in abeyance before this blurring.

Tamping down the representational quotient has never been a problem for Andrei Codrescu, provocateur, gadfly to the New York School, Transylvanian exile with the deep accent known to NPR listeners, and skilled practitioner of a tangential surrealism Kirby Olson, in Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America (McFarland, 2005), has called Investigative Poetry. He escaped Romania in 1966 to become Americanized overnight to enrich the New York, San Francisco, and finally New Orleans poetry scenes, as though transitions were a redundancy for this man of many talents. Perennially overlooked by critics, Codrescu, with his wry, semi-absurdist, powerless feuilletons transcribed to radio, might well be the poet’s voice most familiar to Americans. While his essay collections, particularly Zombification: Essays from NPR (St. Martin’s, 1995) and The Devil Never Stops & Other Essays (St. Martin’s, 2000), did as much as anything to reinforce the myth of New Orleans as an ideal location for the outsider, in Jealous Witness he must come to terms with the realization of his worst fears for the city. His first collection, License to Carry a Gun, where he let loose the lively characters of Julio Hernandez, Peter Boone, and Alice Henderson-Codrescu, set the standard for an irreverent transmogrification that has persisted unchanged through such significant poems as “Comrade Past and Mister Present” (from the eponymous collection of 1986) and “Mnemogasoline” (from 1993’s Belligerence), down through the cycle of poems called “il maoismo” (first written in 1971 and appearing in print now in Jealous Witness). Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970–1995 (Black Sparrow, 1996) stands up well in the modern surrealist canon, as Codrescu’s corrosive intellect, confronting the American wasteland, never gives the reader an easy way out. Codrescu’s distinct tone—some might call it his weakness—is his unshakably urbane manner, which gives the impression somehow that no calamity on earth can shake his detached demeanor, immersed in sedate textual warfare and washed-up psychological doctrines. Where Smith seems to rush to write a poem in response to every headline announcing racial injustice, Codrescu’s is a seen-it-all, done-it-all Eastern European exile mentality that forestalls disasters by living them out beforehand. In other words, can anything bother him—let alone boggle him?

Our answer is in Jealous Witness, where in the section dedicated to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, “maelstrom: songs of storm and exile,” in eighteen heartbroken poems something irrevocable finally besets Codrescu’s demeanor, so that we have a lament that exceeds its own brief to become a spiritual odyssey through endings. How does the poet elegize the beloved dead city, whose every uncategorizable quirk was fodder for the poet’s surreal juxtapositions? When the city itself stands fragmented, collateralized, ruined, is the surreal poet’s work finished? In the prologue poem, “before the storm: geographers in new orleans,” the thankless task geographers must attempt in the face of ever-changing maps is analogous to the poet’s own task in introducing shifting maps of desire for our perusal: “So, geographers, I commend you for being in this / city that refuses to conform to anything that is known about it,” a city “waging a guerilla war against definition and conclusive mapping” which it “will continue to do so until the city is either taken back or / abandoned / by the river.” To envision this region Codrescu offers four principles: 1. “Proprioception or Olson’s Poetics, as developed by Olson in his long poem, ‘Maximus,’ and his essays on Melville, ‘Human Universe,’ and ‘Projective Verse,’ at the end of the 1950s.” 2. “Mysteries as revealed in the Mysteries of New Orleans by Baron von Reizenstein, completed in 1853 . . .” 3. “Surregionalism, as coined by philosopher Max Cafard, which holds: “For every logic there is a Region. To mention those of particular interest to us, the Surregionalists: Ecoregions, Georegions, Psychoregions, Mythoregions, Ethnoregions, Socioregions, and Bioregions.” So “In Surregionalism we have a vision of New Orleans as a place both emptied by its geography and history to accommodate new bodies and reimaginings, and a creative matrix that is a near-perfect rhizome, an über-potato.” 4. These principles interact—“The mysteries of New Orleans participate in the surregional world as fully empowered tentacles”—to lead to the final principle, “T.A.Z., Temporary Autonomous Zones, coined by the Sufi scholar and poet Hakim Bey”: “T.A.Z. exist almost everywhere and can show up anywhere, because they are nomadic, but they are particularly fond of New Orleans because it is the most T.A.Z.-hospitable city in America and, consequently, some of our T.A.Z. have become nearly sedentary.” Codrescu adds, “I call the T.A.Z. of New Orleans Narcississipi . . .”

We perceive a tragic resignation in this discursive poem, imagine Codrescu as finally having met his better in Katrina, but in fact the poem was written in 2004. So we reread it, picking out signs of creative resistance in the face of gaudy sloth. Then we realize that to ask, Can this poet write the appropriate elegy?, is not the right question. The “maelstrom” poems are arguably Codrescu’s best work ever, stripped as he is of his usual garb of urbane sophistication, lowering himself to the status of one of the afflicted residents, letting the reality wash over him without the filter of irony. These are perhaps the least surrealist poems in Codrescu’s oeuvre—reality itself had become sufficiently surrealist for a while. Where Smith, the usually strictly representational poet, succeeds by taking unprecedented imaginative leaps, Codrescu retreats from the gamesmanship to let the images of disaster speak for themselves. The two poets have both moved in uncharacteristic directions for themselves. Here is a typical poem from the “maelstrom” section, “the wind family: the insurance company question: wind or water?”:

The images are both transparent and mute. The poet’s well-known exuberance is nowhere in sight. He accepts the personal to have become political in ways he could never have anticipated in the merely anomic and greedy 1990s. Dark Transylvanian monsters have come to inhabit his city of carefree love, and physical survival has once again become the paramount issue. What is left behind tallies as greater loss than what has not been retained, as the calculus of loss is forever altered in favor of the material and the tangible. There is danger and threat, and the people have no means of confronting it. The city’s internal map, its psychic coordinates, have altered for good. The ground has shifted from under the poet’s feet—we feel the high-flying reminiscences of the New York School era, saturated with the sacrilegious aura of art, to be impossible under such basic conditions of struggle and darkness. The lament is for the free space of irresponsible action—Codrescu’s T.A.Z.’s—not necessarily for the callous indifference of the state with respect to one of its most ignored and maligned cities, a fact of life we don’t expect to rile the Romanian exile.

Codrescu’s dirge is packaged in concise lines, reinforced in their brutal clearness by insistent repetition and refusal to bleed into their neighbors. For instance, “the mold song” includes: “I never shoulda kept around / . . . I’m giving myself to the mold / . . . I knew that one day I’d be sorry / I’m not wearing a mask / I’m not wearing any gloves / I feel stupid I feel cold / I’m giving myself to the mold / halloween and suicide rolled in one.” Smith had her flooded citizens clamoring for help on rooftops, as we all saw on television, but Codrescu has a poem called “what to do with your goat in a drowning world” (not a dog), where “circling helicopters circling helicopters / will take me but not my goat.” No ark is sufficient enough for the effort to save the drowned city. The flood must be accepted in the mythical terms it presented itself in (compare this with Smith, whose effort is to elaborate, to elongate the myth to ensure that we never forget it), so that the goat becomes not the absurdist element we might expect from the title but a stand-in for humanity itself—we are like dogs and cats and goats, in our smallness before the flood. The helicopters are beside the point. The goat is all. Similarly, the images of looting (were there really such images?) have become paradigmatic of Katrina’s aftermath. Whereas Smith’s “Loot” arrived in the context of her collection as neither accusatory nor exculpatory, Codrescu’s “looting wal-mart” is an elegy for survivalism gone haywire, concluding: “how quickly they forgot how they didn’t want a wal-mart here / but now that they’ve looted wal-mart / we want the national guard here / they’ve looted wal-mart and took everybody’s memory / they’ve looted wal-mart and left us our history.” In this poem, Codrescu’s characteristic alienation from the state’s agencies of repression is deflected through the more brutal prism of the state’s complete failure. There is a hint here that where there is no state there is no civilization either; he won’t buy into the law-and-order myth, not Codrescu, but the looting is not beside the point. In “the coffee house philosophers,” “let’s watch my house float (or, lawyers having p.t.s.d. sex),” and “mother quarter,” strangers share the artificial, fleeting bond disasters like Katrina bring out, except that the bonds are really greater, unsuturable separations. The logic of the city’s careful spatio-economic separations, the elite French Quarter in a class by itself, has become transparent again, as Codrescu announces in “mother quarter”: “I’ve pulled away from the USA / and set my anchor in the Quarter / right here in la vie en rose café.”

If in Biblical lament, an indifferent God is the target of the desperate supplicant, for Codrescu it is the remote authority figure, reduced to his true dimensions (for Smith, the president and Michael Brown have to be helped to a largeness of spirit they do not possess in fact). In “the town meeting” Codrescu lends poignancy to the complaint with stark repetition: “mr mayor I knew your mama . . . mr mayor we went to school together . . . mr mayor I voted for you . . . mr mayor I sang at your party and all my children too . . . mr mayor mr mayor we were born here . . . mr mayor mr mayor tell the president.” New Orleans might have been proud of its culture before the flood but it is philistine Baton Rouge that becomes the savior, in “tale of two cities”: “they have empty roads and big huge houses / in that hicksville baton rouge / we’ve got us characters and civilization / our cathouses and bars are known in all the nation / but that was before the deluge / when we redefined civilization / they welcomed us in baton rouge.” We see here yet another stripping of the layers of self-protection of the sophisticated literary exile, yet another prostration of his dominant intellectual self to the gods of appeasement. Codrescu’s lament is effective in its own way because it accepts no beginnings and ends—unlike conceptions of it that root it in a momentary lapse in bureaucratic efficiency (levee breakdowns or the cavalry failing to show up, in Mayor Nagin’s words). The city will never come back, Codrescu knows, even as in “from the window at molly’s,” the poet sings, “the city’s coming back I feel it.” In “new orleans limbo,” Codrescu mourns, “when it happens all of a sudden / it takes a while to realize you’re dead / you keep eating that étoufée / wondering why it don’t get any smaller.” He does make an effort to extricate himself from the eternal limbo, in the other sections of the book marked by his surrealist maneuverings, “jealous witness” and “some poets,” but is it too much to remark that there is a slightly self-conscious quality to it, when self-consciousness has never been one of Codrescu’s tendencies?

The rap against language poetry is that its self-consciousness gets in the way of coherent critique, despite its declared aim of subverting established meanings. There is always the danger that language can become so much the subject of avant-garde poetry that only surfaces can be accessed. In his first book, Murder [a violet] (Coffee House, 2004), McDaniel wrote an unpinnable narrative, about a nun who is an assassin (or is she?), rendered in nonsequential fragments; one could enter the text at any point and it would make no difference. A great deal of surface elegance and verbal smoothness typifies this kind of poetry, and that is what McDaniel brings to Saltwater Empire as well. Here he is dealing not with imagined nuns and their cloistered doings, but a public event whose beginning, middle, and end are supposedly well-known. Can language poetry suggest new ways of looking at the event and its significance that traditional verse can’t? Is it a match for the brutality of racial injustice and bureaucratic indifference? Certain images about the people who were affected are fixed in our mind: can these images be subverted? If not, there would be little rationale for attempting to deal with Katrina in nontraditional verse. McDaniel had apparently been thinking about the Gulf Coast before Katrina, as reflected in the many non-Katrina poems in Saltwater Empire. Without the narrative scaffold of traditional verse, the meaning of the vast historical and geographical labyrinth in which he enmeshes Katrina can only be vaguely perceived. An archetypal concern with water and flood dominates Saltwater Empire; it is difficult to stop admiring the sheen of the words and focus on whatever context McDaniel is trying to work into the picture. What is the context? That the waters of the Gulf Coast are harbingers of tragic doom? If there is history here, it is too submerged in play with words to constitute any offensive meaning. As usual, language poetry has set a task of redefinition of conventional wisdom it probably knows is too difficult.

Still, the pleasure of the words is enough to salvage this collection, and offers perhaps a final necessary rounding of the episode as understood by Smith and Codrescu. Our tendency is to overinterpret from visual evidence. Katrina was so important because it was fully televised from beginning to end. What if it hadn’t been? Would our language, in talking about it, have been purer? (Would we even remember, or know about it, enough to mourn?) The language poet always seems at pains almost to exemplify the very ills his philosophical agenda confronts. Here is part of the opening poem, “Sea Level,” which immediately sets up expectations—including ours on behalf of the poet’s skill—that are doomed to come up short:

In defense, it might be said that the surfeit of images, madly building on each other, is intentional, to point out the prolix redundancy of language, both ordinary and poetic, which in a way serves to bridge the gap between the two levels of consciousness, subarticulate and articulate. In opposition, it might be said that this is replication of the mass media’s lack of concentration, attention deficit disorder set up as the first condition of comprehension. The general philosophical idea—the remainder portion of a larger thing, which constitutes its dangerous essence—is swamped under the beauty of the words. For Smith and Codrescu, reality is odd enough; for McDaniel it is the language used to embody reality that constitutes the sum of the fascination and intrigue. Katrina is a mystery to be solved for him; for the other two poets there is no mystery. What really happened, the younger poet wonders, in sophisticated naïveté; how could it not have happened, the two older poets prophecy, after the fact.

Compare “Alternate Recordings of Stormy Weather” with Smith’s “Siblings,” where Katrina hysterically outstrips the other named storms of the 2005 season. McDaniel’s poem is less interested in the singular hurricane than in the general nature of tempests: “Our earth disuses her fossils in flood. / Her limited force is still a demon. // A tempest is certain serpentine. / A tempest is awful appetite.” We are being pushed to think of the mournful commentary (even aesthetic) following Katrina as somehow being compromised, since the nature of the tragedy vastly exceeds such limited responses. It is essential to McDaniel’s metaphysics that nothing remain too localized, or else it becomes infected with the demonology of specification, the bane of small thinking. In “bacchus,” this attitude is manifest:

For Smith, New Orleans was a fairly decent city, destroyed by managerial incompetence, while for Codrescu, it finally succumbed to the inevitable end of the mythical city on the water; but for McDaniel New Orleans was a bit player in a cosmic push and pull where the components are so dispersed, so diffuse, they cannot be brought together close enough for analysis—though, of course, he will try to connect the dots. In “Swamp Thing,” whatever civilizational façade the new South has acquired is revealed to be a nonstarter: “The lord left the mountains and the deserts / to take the whole of Apalachicola in his mouth, / rattle the oysters under his tongue / and crack the shells between his teeth, / spit out Dixie Beer and a fine sheet of grit, / a million glass beads, / the teawater a tannic mantra.” The swamp thing is the antithesis of the rooftop yeller, it wants to live in stagnant water, mud and murk bring out the liveliest in it. In “First Person Shooters” (compared to Smith and Codrescu’s poems about looting), the act of violence is prettified to the point of nostalgia, removed from the specificity of Katrina’s aftermath, made a metaphysical condition of all summers, everywhere in the South: “We shoot at the city’s sum, aim at everything. / We vault the sea wall, we strip / . . . ravenous, raucous, we turn our heads in time, we tune. / Solar shine, that, corona’s tone a cure.” As though to compensate for the soft-focus vagueness, the following poem, “Pacifism,” is about an unrepentant killer: “for I fucking fucking felt like it / posse, deputy, sad-ass superhero: my provisional micro-society / . . . honest officer I’ve never taken pleasure in the suffering of others / but god bless my icy delight at your shattering, charlatan.” We are tantalizingly close here to the stereotype of the South’s dispersed, knee-jerk violence; at some point metaphysics can merge with metanarrative, become conveniently lopsided in favor of the easy. The advantage of straight realism (something not open to language poetry), is that it makes the individual event specific enough not to allow potentially intolerant or exclusive generalizations. Whereas Smith and Codrescu are awed by the waters of Katrina, McDaniel is hypnotized by water itself, as in “Single States”: “Waves hum down—sound indistinguishable / from stone—stones pulled through my hands. / Water—equally stone and glass—/ infinite count of shot.”

Six poems titled “Convention Centers of the New World” create a jarring effect, interspersed throughout the rest of the collection, as though to point out the futility of McDaniel’s larger project, hinting at some inarticulate violence of the region that makes Katrina almost a sidebar. McDaniel explains that the text of these poems is drawn from an oral history project, the poems having been assembled by recombining some of these histories (the archives are at www.aliveintruth.org). This sort of recombination is a characteristic language poetry move, usually to illustrate that language codes are arbitrary in the extreme, that what results from shuffling sentences is no less coherent than the presumed original sequence. The effect of these poems, in mournful vernacular, is to highlight the arbitrariness of McDaniel’s avant-garde vernacular, in effect flattening them both (precisely McDaniel’s aim, one would think). “This had to happen. The hurricane had to happen. / This was the way the Lord had to clean New Orleans up,” says one of these poems. Interestingly, this forced rationalization may not be too far from how Smith and Codrescu think. Another of these poems starts: “They got too many hotels up on the one end of Canal Street. / It don’t make no sense.” Yet another says: “They was lying. There was never no buses, they was lying. / They was just making us tired. They had us in there to kill us.” The last of these poems contains these lines: “Will the pieces ever get put together? / Will I be spending the rest of my life in the past? / . . . I just feel like, the government has really, really failed us. / It’s just unreal. // I think it go all the way back. / But it’s like the evilness in New Orleans, it go all the way back.” In a sense, the “Convention Centers of the New World” poems are the narrative conveyed to us by the mainstream media, with beginning (New Orleans deserved it somehow), middle (the government failed to come to help), and end (the pieces are being put together). Their presence strengthens the effectiveness of McDaniel’s unearthly other poems, making us wonder, as in “Code Noir,” what he means by lines like: “. . . The backstage hush / of The Tempest (“their theatre / is quite savage”), its sets of jetsam. // Slept thirty years to dismiss / this audience, this black book, // all that is not their speech, / oxygen bought with hurricanes.”

New Orleans has disappeared. Or has it? These three poets, with their vastly different styles, bring distinct answers to the question. Smith has elevated her previously journalistic concerns to the point where she has set up a new myth of New Orleans, where the city that was lost persists in superhuman elements, a magic of survival and will that breaks the usual bounds separating human and inhuman. Codrescu always had a myth of New Orleans; confronted with its sudden, unexpected end he mutes his poetry to an elegy of the small facts, the fridges lining the boulevards, the Dracula he had fled having found him out in his remotest of exiles harboring the smallest of possessions. McDaniel is interested in a myth larger than the myth of New Orleans or Katrina, a metamyth to encompass all of the South, the Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, all the warm waters prone to sudden bursts of natural violence, to deflect attention to how we render the myth, and to suggest that it’s up to each of us to formulate it according to our innermost tendencies. Codrescu, speaking of the marginalized state of poetry, in “The North American Combine,” one of the essays from his outstanding collection (bearing comparison to the best of Umberto Eco), The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape (Addison-Wesley, 1990; reissued by Ruminator, 2001), writes: “Poetry is an art of the outside, where it best flourishes. . . . It is becoming imperative to restore both grandeur and honesty, always an impossible task. . . . This is . . . a time choked in the weeds of academic and civilian formalism.” The Outside—typified in the myth of New Orleans as a lawless city gambling on its own existence day by day, because of the sheer fact of its physical location, yet breeding innovative art and thought in a place immune to the law-and-order impetus of the conservative revolution—had to visibly disappear, for these three poets to coin new myths about its relevance. The New Orleans Klezmer AllStars, in the CD accompanying Codrescu’s book, sing the Katrina poems to mournful extremes, and although there is no CD with the Smith book, for a sample of her performance ability, check out “Siblings” at her website ([www.wordwoman.ws/]). New Orleans lives.