Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide

By Catharine Savage Brosman and Olivia McNeely Pass

Louisiana has long been recognized for its production of talented writers, and its poets in particular have shined. From the early poetry of the state to the work crafted in the present day, Louisiana has nurtured and exported a rich and diverse poetic tradition. In Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide authors Catharine Savage Brosman and Olivia McNeely Pass assess the achievements of Louisiana poets from the past hundred years who, Brosman and Pass assert, deserve both public notice and careful critical examination.

Louisiana Poets presents the careers and works of writers whose verse is closely connected to the peoples, history, and landscapes of Louisiana or whose upbringing or artistic development occurred in the state. Brosman and Pass chose poets based on the scope, abundance, and excellence of their work; their critical reception; and the local and national standing of the writer and work. The book treats a wide range of forty poets—from national bestsellers to local celebrities—detailing their histories and output.

Intended to be of broad interest and easy to consult, Louisiana Poets showcases the corpus of Louisiana poetry alongside its current profile. Brosman and Pass have created a guide that provides a way for readers to discover, savor, and celebrate poets who have been inspired in and by the Pelican State.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Apr 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496822130

Catharine Savage Brosman

Catharine Savage Brosman is professor emerita of French at Tulane University. She is author of Louisiana Creole Literature: A Historical Study and Mississippi Poets: A Literary Guide, and coauthor (with Olivia McNeely Pass) of Louisiana Poets: A Literary Guide, all published by University Press of Mississippi. She has also authored numerous books of French literary history and criticism; three volumes of nonfiction prose; fifteen collections of poetry; and a collection of short fiction, An Aesthetic Education and Other Stories.

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INTRODUCTION

I. THE ROLE OF POETRY

Poetry is central to human culture. Neither incidental, nor a mere decoration, it has an important function. Robert Penn Warren considered it as the extreme resource of language-knowledge, of language being (Bedient 3). Its place in American artistic and civic culture is extensive. Not only the nation as a whole but also states, cities, and some counties have poet laureates; as Billy Collins observed, the country is crawling with them. Poetry is cultivated in schools, universities, prisons, libraries. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the largest national conference of writers, which counts among its nearly fifty thousand individual and institutional members a large number of poets, underwrites 125 writers’ conferences and centers and itself puts on, according to Wikipedia, the largest literary conference in North America, where poetry plays a major role. The annual West Chester University Poetry Conference, founded in 1995 with Dana Gioia as codirector, is billed on its site as the nation’s premier all-poetry writing conference; it supports traditional craft writing. Book publishers small and large, as well as magazines, journals, online publications, radio shows, and modest newsletters, include poetry in their output, and certain bookstores specialize in the genre. Readings, slams, and short courses are popular, and poetry societies attract many members.

That much of this vast production appears, to many observers, mediocre underlines its popular attractiveness; it is readily accessible, fast-food fare. The awarding of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature to Bob Dylan gave additional cachet to poetry with popular appeal. (The revelation by Andrea Pitzer that his acceptance speech had been substantially plagiarized added another popular, or freewheeling, dimension to his profile.) The fashion has become a wildfire, and one can speak now of instapoets, who publish in print but also put out their work on internet platforms such as Twitter. Rupi Kaur’s books have sold millions of copies, thanks to her internet fame and the simple, direct content and brevity of her lines. This recognition is at variance with standards of high art, still widely honored, from earlier periods. In 2017 Michael Robbins’s book Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music brought into focus various critical problems arising from treating the genres together, notably the problem of applying criteria connected with the fine arts to products, known worldwide, that are often deliberately antagonistic to such art. Among the poets examined here are exemplars of both types, appealing to popular taste and cultivated taste. Each seeks, in various ways, a good for which language is the medium.

To some degree, poetry, especially in popular modes, has become a public function and a performance art, dependent on audiences. Poets who appear in public play an invaluable role in honoring and transmitting the art and may become better known than those in the ivory tower. Such extraliterary considerations have often played a role in establishing and maintaining, and occasionally revising, reputations. According to Hans-Robert Jauss, in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, the literary work always exists in a triangular relationship involving the author, the original context of production, and the reading public. This public is extraneous to the text, but what it views as important becomes part of the continued public existence of the work, subject, as the readership changes, to different valuations and interpretations. Extraliterary factors favoring writers may include social standing, personality, mores, unrelated achievements, early promise, early death, long life, work uncovered late, literary clannishness, racial and sexual identification, and political positions. (Disparate examples such as Robert Lowell’s publicly refusing an invitation to an arts festival at the Johnson White House and Maya Angelou’s reading at the first W. J. Clinton inauguration come to mind.) Factors working against literary success are harder to assess, but in earlier centuries they included, obviously, sex, race, and economic situation. One change in valuation of discourse is visible in the importance now given to oral history.

II. POETRY, HAPPINESS, AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

Wallace Stevens asserted in Adagia that the purpose of poetry is to contribute to man’s happiness. It is not a matter of hedonism or the aestheticism of art for art’s sake. While beauty, however understood, may seem for certain poets their highest, if not sole, aim, it is always accompanied by an aura, invisible but present, pointing to something beyond, a superior good, truth, or other raison d’être. By its very existence and characteristics, poetry is pleasureful, thus meaningful, even when its matter involves foreboding, regret, pain, sorrow, or horror. William Faulkner was persuaded that the purpose of poetry was to uplift man’s heart (The Faulkner Reader x). Jack Heflin wrote of being seized by the pleasures of poetry … happy to have found something much larger than myself that would direct my passion and compassion (e-mail, November 14, 2016). Even poets who consider their craft chiefly as a means to social change invest themselves in it and find value there going beyond sheer activism.

The matter turns, to be sure, on the perception of happiness. It may be simple, the little joys that compose a satisfying existence, or it may be much deeper—what Aristotle had in mind as the result of a life well lived, the evidence of well-being and the fruit of well-formed character and ethical choices. Poetry is at once a sign and a medium for such happiness; it can invest our lives with meaning, as Ava Leavell Haymon said (Sherman 24). William Carlos Williams observed in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (Pictures from Brueghel 161–62) that getting the news from despised poems was difficult; yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there. The absence of happiness marks much poetry, however, often contrasted ironically or bitterly to surrounding contentment. It must be allowed, moreover, that for some poets, the search is more important than the result—the happiness of pursuit; deep satisfaction may be found chiefly in the activity itself (idea, effort). The pursuit of poetry as contentment may be correlated to misery. Yeats acknowledged that if he had been happy, he would have lived, whereas instead he wrote. Angst, including theological uncertainty, may be central to creation. As for others’ happiness, numerous poets studied here have reimagined historical sufferings and have viewed their art as an arm in the struggle for recognition of rights and redressing of injustices.

Thus poetry involves the moral imagination—the faculty that allows for recognition and appreciation of beauty, truth, and goodness. Russell Kirk, borrowing the term from Burke, wrote of the wardrobe of the moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies. It is the power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events … especially the higher form of this power exercised in poetry and art. It aspires to the right order in the soul. As illustrating this moral imagination, Kirk cited Faulkner, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost. It is not a question of overt didacticism but one of imaginative persuasion, whether by positive example or some antimodel. Such moral imagination endeavors to cast over the actual, that atmosphere from the realms of the ideal, which … is neither inconsistent with intellectual truthfulness nor unfriendly to the great policies of human society (Kirk 46–47). As R. V. Young observed, The imagination must be enriched and fully active in order to be moral (Ave atque vale 5).

Hence the importance of good poetry. Matthew Arnold wrote that the power of poetry was interpretive, the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them (13). Warren wrote in his Democracy and Poetry, What poetry most significantly celebrates is the capacity of man to face the deep, dark inwardness of his nature and his fate (Grimshaw 9). The products of the moral imagination produce fulfillment for readers by what they allow the ear, eye, and mind to experience in a superior, searching mode. The lesson suggested by such experience may be that even as it expresses and communicates the materials of life in their greater truth, poetry transforms them, leading creators and readers alike better to enjoy life, or better to endure it, in Samuel Johnson’s words.

III. POETRY, ITS ROOTS, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The ultimate wellsprings of poems are the deep selves of their creators. Warren, as quoted in the preface, believed that all poetry was fundamentally autobiographical, and thus to separate poets from their lives was not possible. Poets may choose the identification of their true selves as their chief work, a lifetime enterprise. The writing they thereby produce may be visibly autobiographical or more subtle. One particular source of literary creation is a person’s sense of strangeness or not belonging—what Germans call das Unheimliche. As Edmund Wilson indicated in The Wound and the Bow, this sense of estrangement or inferiority is like the wound of Philoctetes—whether concealed or horribly perceptible. Byron, who suffered the humiliation of his deformity, is a case in point (Grosskurth 20). Various handicaps of birth and circumstance, as well as character, displayed by the poets examined here, constituting difference and disadvantage, are part of their poetic selves and work.

Readers should likewise note the role of religious belief and experience among many poets featured here. Faith may be a background presence—or may be disguised or repressed—but for numerous figures it is foregrounded, an agent in their understanding of the world and their art. Whether on a Christian foundation—Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Assembly of God, and other evangelical churches—or Jewish or Buddhist, poetry may be a companion to, or an outgrowth of, the spiritual life, an invitation to piety. For believers, poetry may be associated with a particular sort of happiness, a transcendent one. No one illustrates better than Stella Nesanovich and John Finlay how, in skilled hands, verse can express the most subtle and moving of religious impulses, showing the kinship of the spiritual life with words.

The particular geographic, topographical, and climatic conditions of Louisiana have influenced, sometimes dictated, human responses. Montesquieu was among the first Europeans to identify a correlation between climate and cultural products (in L’Esprit des lois, 1748). In the context of nineteenth-century determinism, Taine echoed and expanded the insight by the formula la race, le milieu, le moment—ethnicity, surroundings, and time (Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 1863). Similarities with distant peoples and their products cannot disguise local peculiarities of land, behavior, and achievements. In the twenty-first century, thoughtful observers, including poets examined in this study, continue to identify the determinative effects of place.

The topographical profile of Louisiana is singular. Damp and boggy, it is marked by countless rivers, bayous, and lakes, where water can be more important than land; the skies are often water laden. Land and water meld to marsh, / sky and earth to horizon, as Albert Belisle Davis observed in Culs-de-sac (What They Wrote on the Bathhouse Walls). Water, said Alison Pelegrin, is a natural marker in my life, so I guess it makes sense that it saturates so many poems (Feifer). Water transportation has shaped industry and agriculture; flooding has repeatedly threatened prosperity and lives. The greatest continental waterway, the Mississippi, forms part of the Louisiana border, then cuts southeast through the remainder of the state. Various smaller rivers and bayous featured in literature, some still navigable, shape the territory and create riparian landscapes. Not to be overlooked is the historical importance of hurricanes and flooding, from a storm that struck New Orleans in 1722, evoked in an early poem, to destructive storms of 1856 and 1912 (and many lesser ones), to the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, then the major hurricanes Camille (1969) and Katrina (2005). A corollary of hurricanes, lamented in poems from the nineteenth century until today, is land loss, whether barrier islands or coastal marshes.

Natural and human environments direct the imagination; minds are shaped by surroundings. Despite casting their nets widely, in terms of topics, tones, and versification, many poets examined here are rooted in their territory, its features and history, and its heritage, even with its historical wrongs and unsavory features. Those in exile, such as Alvin Aubert, Sheryl St. Germain, and Sybil Kein, remain attached, at least in their literary work, to their home and its traditions. Like most of those for whom they write, artists in the state and especially poets seem to oppose, instinctively, dissolution of traditions, atomization of collectivities, and serialization of experience. As their poems show over and over, Louisiana’s cities, even the largest, are not anonymous, impersonal, monotone; and small towns, such as those in Acadiana, have strong historical and civil character, as Davis’s verse shows. The sense of community standards for writing—a subtle factor—arises from the neighborhood, the bayou; it is not imposed. Andrei Codrescu has spoken of finding in Louisiana the love for living language that was sucked out of most places by television and urban discomfort (Alien Candor 19).

IV. REGIONALISM

Good poetry is inevitably regional, wrote Dave Smith (Hunting Men 4). Nearly everything one needs or wants to know and grasp is available, originally, in the particular—the small, modest circle of nature or human life—as long as one pays attention, looking, listening, tasting. From observation, selection, and verbal transformations, produced by emotion and imagination, poets and their kin (poetic philosophers and novelists) conceive and express wider insights. Even poetry of the self—the dominant strain throughout the twentieth century and now the twenty-first—need not be solipsistic; the personal lyric can be meaningful for others, as its structure and style (even when experimental) reach beyond what prose can do. Despite today’s emphasis on globalism and the superficial international culture that has originated from it, the local remains the cradle of achievement. William Carlos Williams remarked that the classic is the local fully realized, words marked by a place (Imaginations 358). He prefaced Paterson by writing of a local pride. To make a start, out of particulars / and make them general. The poets considered here have cultivated their own poetic soil, like Virgil, or their city environment—in particular, rich vernaculars. Much writing examined here sounds singular; it could not have sprung up elsewhere.

Yet regional writers often have little standing, and regions themselves may be despised. A hundred years ago, East Coast intellectuals and literary critics launched a sustained attack on regional cultures as barren, worthless, even retrograde; the counterarguments that were voiced from the South, Midwest, and Southwest remain necessary today, when the coastal cultures dominate the center far more than before. In his preface to Faulkner’s The Marble Faun, Phil Stone quoted George Moore to the effect that all universal art became great by first being provincial. William Gilmore Simms observed of his book The Wigwam and the Cabin that the material was "local, sectional—and to be national in literature, one must needs be sectional (his italics). In 1932, Mary Austin, suspicious of East Coast intellectualism, attacked the premise that regional writing was inferior to some standard, unquestioned, usually unstated. There is, she argued, such a thing as the truth of the land. A regional culture is the sum, expressed in ways of living and thinking, of the mutual adaptation of a land and its people (her italics) (474). Lon Tinkle asserted that the regional is our concrete, not abstract, level of existence, our richest sense of life" (xiii).

The impression of unimportance that poetry treated here leaves may be misleading, owing to this tenacious tendency, which skews reputation, to consider the regional as provincial, perhaps through what Stephen Miller called Manhattanism. In a different setting, critics might herald what they overlook. Circles of writers, publishers, critics, and reviewers may be narrow, and New York and San Francisco partake of their own kind of provincialism. Mark Royden Winchell observed that American poets tend to be part of a coterie confined to poets and other would-be poets (Pictures into Words 40). Even poetic form can prejudice reviewers: X. J. Kennedy remarked on the cartel of silence that confronts formalist poets. Today, linguistic constructs filled with anger and righteous indignation, denying metaphoric or discursive logic, incorporating unfamiliar foreign terms, or using sexual and scatological images, often trump coherent and tasteful work, viewed as elitist and thus unacceptable. James Dickey called such constructs yowling, and not very good yowling at that. There is a vast difference between the extremes of Rimbaud, a genius who screamed, and Allen Ginsberg, an ordinary and somewhat pretentious man who screams (5–6). Finally, as literary history has shown time and again, the center may change: those at the periphery find that, through changing tastes, their accomplishments have contributed to a new aesthetic, by which their work is recognized as superior.

V. POETRY AND COMMUNITY IN LOUISIANA

Community is a powerful word and experience for Louisiana poets. Notwithstanding marked differences between north and south, Bible Belt Louisiana and Roman Catholic parishes, urban complexes and the country, there is a strong sense of commonality and togetherness among a close-knit literary kin who share … a profoundly beautiful and unique area of the United States (Wright, Anthology 4). The ruthlessness that characterizes often both the writing and the behavior of poets elsewhere is less widespread. This sense of community is not, however, without cracks, and often in tension with the need to flee, illustrated by figures as diverse as Warren, St. Germain, Mona Lisa Saloy, and John William Corrington.

That the community involves historically based ethnic diversity, a source of pride, has important consequences for writing in the state. Notwithstanding racial and religious differences, persecution, and current as well as historical resentment, the wide range of ethnic backgrounds evinced by Louisiana poets has been a source of strength. Particularly to be stressed are the Acadians and the free people of color, two minority groups whose historical and cultural presence, nearly unique in the United States, has marked and continues to mark the literary arts in the state.

Certain writers might even consider their local ties as part of their DNA. Some, culturally speaking, could not thrive elsewhere. Warren, though he moved north, is widely quoted as having said, After Louisiana, nothing seems real. St. Germain, in endorsing Pelegrin’s Hurricane Party, wrote of the surreal reality of being Louisiana. Strong local connections flourish despite vast social and economic changes—or perhaps because of such changes; and poets, like other artists, can be especially protective of their culture when it is assaulted. Numerous titles point to local places and features: Second Line Home (Saloy); Jazz Funeral (Julie Kane); Côte Blanche (Martha Serpas); Big Muddy River of Stars and Hurricane Party (Pelegrin); Beyond the Chandeleurs and Bonfires on the Levee (David Middleton); Virginia Patout’s Parish (Davis).

Among cityscapes, one thinks of the picturesque French Quarter, brought out by Tennessee Williams; the Seventh Ward and the Tremé, in New Orleans, and their community life, emphasized by Saloy and Brenda Marie Osbey; the bohemian neighborhood around the Maple Street Bar, evoked by Kane; Magazine Street, brought to life by Catharine Savage Brosman. One thinks also, with less pleasure, of chemical plant odors in Bogalusa, which Yusef Komunyakaa recalls, and the sprawl around Baton Rouge and oppressiveness of its oil refineries, felt in Pinkie Gordon Lane’s poetry. Characteristic landscapes include the sugarcane fields of south Louisiana, featured by Middleton, among others. To these settings are added the waterways—bayous (Pelegrin, Davis, Darrell Bourque, Jack Bedell); the fragile Louisiana coastline (Serpas); the Mississippi River (Kane); the False River (Brosman); the lakes and the Gulf Coast and its offshore oil fields (Peter Cooley). One must not forget the wide and damp Louisiana skies, stretched over prairie and city. These settings often shaped poets’ youth and that of their friends and children, nurtured their happiness, and witnessed pain, destruction, death.

Many poems studied here are informed explicitly by loyalty to inherited tradition, perhaps akin to that rage for order that Stevens identified in The Idea of Order at Key West (Palm 98). Yet place, in the down-home sense, is not everything, and the topical reach of Louisiana poetry is often broad. One thinks of Warren’s Audubon: A Vision, of Komunyakaa’s poems on Vietnam and the Vietnam Memorial—as of Bob Kaufman’s beatnik constructions, Rodger Kamenetz’s imaginative explorations of two religious traditions, and poems set in farther locales by Tennessee Williams and Haymon. And poetic tradition does not mean stodgy imitation of predecessors. By the mid-twentieth century, the expatriate Kaufman and the southern loyalist Corrington departed from established forms to devise striking free verse. Formal variety among Louisiana poets ranges from such bold free verse, to conventional free verse, widely used, to individually crafted forms, sui generis, as in Bourque’s peculiar sonnets, and verse by new formalists, such as Kane, Middleton, and Jennifer Reeser. What Percy Lubbock wrote in connection with fiction applies likewise to verse: The best form is that which makes the most of its subject (40).

VI. THREE LITERARY CENTERS OF LOUISIANA

Thomas Cutrer called Baton Rouge, the capital and home to Louisiana State University, Parnassus on the Mississippi. The city has been a literary center since the 1930s, when, after an aborted attempt at cooperation with the Southwest Review, based at Southern Methodist University, the Southern Review was founded at LSU (1935), with Huey Long’s support. Charles W. Pipkin, the dean of the graduate school, was named editor, but Warren and Cleanth Brooks, whom Warren had known at Vanderbilt and Oxford, were appointed managing editors and, in effect, acted as coeditors. The title was chosen to stress its regional and sectional piety (Bohner), but the review became national almost overnight, hailed as an important literary quarterly. Joseph Blotner quotes Time—not an authority on literature but often a measure of fame—as calling it superior to any other in the English language (150). The Southern Review ceased publication in 1942, under state financial pressures. More than twenty years later, a new series, similarly prestigious for many decades, appeared, under the dual editorship of Lewis P. Simpson and Donald E. Stanford. Subsequent editors have included James Olney and Dave Smith. The Department of English at LSU supports poetry by its creative writing program and sponsorship of readings. Additionally, on the program of the annual book festival, organized by the State Library, are dozens of poetry readings. Numerous figures examined here developed or pursued their art at LSU or elsewhere in the city. LSU Press, which has a national profile, is also an umbrella for local literary activity.

A second literary center is the twenty-two-parish area designated in 1971 by the Louisiana State Legislature as Acadiana and its three metropolitan clusters: Lake Charles, Lafayette, and Houma-Thibodaux. Lafayette occupies a special place as its hub. Following official marginalization in the past, Acadian French, or Cajun, culture, developed by French speakers in the eighteenth century, has acquired new vigor. The French endeavors are supported by the state and by foreign governments (Canadian provinces, Belgium, France). Poetry has flowered in English (state universities provide poets and audiences) but also in Acadian French.

New Orleans, the third center, has been, since the nineteenth century, the principal base of Louisiana letters and art. Literary traditions were established early, starting with poetry publications in French, occasionally English, by both Creoles of color and whites, locally and in Paris, in the 1830s and 1840s. Letters continued to flourish in both languages until the late nineteenth century (see Brosman, Louisiana Creole Literature). In the early twentieth century, the Double Dealer (1921–26), a monthly published in New Orleans, subtitled A National Magazine for the South, was among the outstanding American literary periodicals. The title came from Congreve’s drama of that name. Thomas Bonner Jr. has traced the magazine’s founding and influence (R. Kennedy 23–35). Its motto was I can deceive them both by speaking the truth, inspired in part—a bit of irony—by H. L. Mencken’s anti-Southern essay of 1917, The Sahara of the Bozart. The editors were Julius Weiss Friend and Basil Thompson, with Albert Goldstein and John McClure as associate editors. There were correspondents from Chicago and New York. With solid classical leanings, the original series nevertheless welcomed writing connected to the burgeoning modernist movement. It published work by novice and established writers, including Faulkner, Warren, Lafcadio Hearn, Amy Lowell, Thornton Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, Hamilton Basso, William Spratling, and Allen Tate. Lowell was not the only woman contributor. In the present century, an ill-timed print publication, Double Dealer Redux (2001–4), was almost certainly a victim of Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans universities have been active in supporting poetry. At Loyola in the late 1960s and early 1970s, supported by Corrington and under the editorship of Miller Williams, the New Orleans Review began to provide a forum for local poets. The Maple Leaf Bar, on Oak Street, in the Carrollton neighborhood, where Everette Maddox, Bill Lavender, Kane, and Ralph Adamo were sometime denizens, was and remains a poets’ dive; its Sunday afternoon readings, initiated by Maddox, to which poets passing through as well as all major local figures have been invited, are said to be the longest-running such series in America. (Maddox called Carrollton the Montmartre of New Orleans.) Organizations such as the Poetry Forum and First Backyard Poetry Theater, as well as the Contemporary Arts Center, have provided points of activity and congenial surroundings in which poets can develop and showcase their work. The NOMMO Literary Society, founded by Kalamu ya Salaam, and the Free Southern Theater, under the leadership of the late Thomas C. Dent, have provided special support to black Creole authors, who by some measures may constitute a school, or at least a cluster. Dent, who at one time was associated with the Umbra Workshop and the Black Arts movement in New York, also bequeathed an important collection of poetry books by black authors to the Amistad Center at Tulane.

The cultural climate of the city remains favorable for artists in all genres; the lively presence of jazz, nurtured by composers, performers, and listeners, has been an especially powerful inspiration. While some local poets have chosen exile, like nineteenth-century free people of color, new figures arrive, to try the climate, both meteorological and artistic. Many stay (some connected to local universities) and become, by association and by choice, New Orleanians. Painting and poetry are often conjoined felicitously; readers will be struck by the number of Louisiana poets who have collaborated with graphic artists or illustrated their own books. Faulkner House Books and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society are a focus for both local and visiting writers; the associated four-day annual festival called Words & Music is marketed nationally. The Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival celebrates the great playwright’s legacy and includes readings and discussions. The Garden District Book Shop, Maple Street Books (which has now closed), and Octavia Books have hosted readings and thus furnished more intimate occasions for promoting poetry. Local universities all foster the art by having writers-in-residence, professors of poetry, and visiting readers. The cultures of particular neighborhoods, with their churches, jazz funerals and other music, bars, galleries, street life, and sometimes ethnic cohesion, have nurtured poetry and acted as a magnet.

Is there a poetry characteristic of New Orleans? Perhaps. Kane’s title Rhythm & Booze suggests one typical mode, fostered by jazz and by the easygoing attitude toward alcohol consumption, itself favored by the significant Roman Catholic presence. Titles such as Red Beans and Ricely Yours (Saloy) and Let It Be a Dark Roux (St. Germain) underline the importance of food to New Orleans culture and the contributions of ethnic groups, as do many individual poems dealing with local history and specialties: the French Quarter (Mornings on Bourbon Street, by Williams); a jazz saxophonist, bread pudding, hot sauce (St. Germain); dining at Galatoire’s (Brosman); the Louisiana Purchase (Saloy). Anthologies of New Orleans writing and associated work bear titles such as Alluvial Cities, A Bend in the River, Big Easy, and Hurricane. A well-known sultriness in atmosphere, emphasized from the nineteenth century onward, may have favored a sexual emphasis in literature. Certain settings, including the neighborhoods already noted, as well as Back of Town and the Garden District, are sui generis; the voices from these quarters are not like those in the rest of the state and the nation as a whole. True, ports, ethnic neighborhoods, and music havens characterize certain other great American cities, but the history of New Orleans, where French predominated for nearly two centuries, and indelible traces of that history make it and its cultural products distinctive.

VII. RACIAL AND OTHER SOCIAL CONCERNS

The topic of the black experience, past and recent, in America is a major one. Poets of color writing now—like those distant predecessors represented in the history-making collection Les Cenelles: Choix de poésies indigènes (1845)—live necessarily with the burden of their race, in its slave heritage and its undisputed present challenges. And recent poets may be far angrier than their predecessors, or at least may express that anger more freely. Their lamentations, their accusations, have become existential—the very material of their being—and have assumed forms and tones beyond the boundaries of earlier poetic norms. The vein of happiness marking much other Louisiana writing may be strained or even missing. Feminist concerns and those expressed by writers of other nonmajority backgrounds (Sicilian, Irish, Acadian, Jewish, Native American) appear likewise in this study. To this variety are added diverse beliefs, opinions, and personal experiences, to the understanding of which, in their poetic form, the authors hope to have brought their own broad sympathies.

Yet while social and political concerns often enter into literature, neither the validity of a cause nor the passion with which it is embraced can be the measure of artistic achievement. Nor can absence of commitment to one cause or another be used to measure literary worth. A poet’s loyalty goes generally to poetry itself; Kaufman, outrageous to many, determined to change language, even the world, nonetheless remained chiefly a devotee of poetry and thereby qualified his own intentions. Flannery O’Connor is among the important figures who have remarked that tendentious literature, dedicated to social improvement, is inferior to writing that, though using the particular, reaches insights of broad value. Eudora Welty similarly argued that "the zeal to