An Oral Tradition to Live By
Editor's Column from LCV Spring 2008 (March 5, 2008)

Woven deeply into the Louisiana culture and character is the powerful tradition of the spoken word and oral expression, the wedding of word and music, spirit and rhythm. Perched as we are precariously on the edge of the continent, now more consciously than ever, our words and song have served as our secular invocations, balm to troubled souls, our language of hope. The evocative verses of our poet laureates, first the powerful cadences of the Creole siren Brenda Marie Osbey, and most recently our newly installed descendent of Acadians, Darrell Bourque, have steered us to the spirit of the place, enabled us to keep faith with our ancestors and antecedents, to treasure our historic and symbolic places like Congo Square and Tremé and the cheniers and bayous, binding us together with verse like the soil with the tenuous weave of marshgrass and desire.

Inspired by the words and images of Darrell Bourque's volume The Blue Boat, its very structure of poems laid like the spine of keel and ribs of thwarts to support its glide through the shallows and the depths, I launched my own kayak one recent dusk into the still and sheen of the waters of Bayou St. John where like Darrell's boy "he could lose himself completely in some blue hinge-point where blue of water and of sky mingled in each other on the horizon where they met, a spot not unlike a spot in angel's wings." As I glided from the graceful galleried houses lining the bank into this remnant of nature nestled in the heart of the human and historic ville, the sun set below the oaks bordering the bayou, the fleece and tendrils of clouds set aflame from beneath like a firebird illuminated and immolated, like the phoenix of our hope. As the sun completed its descent as if nature was deploying the vivid palette of blues, reds, and yellows of an Elemore Morgan landscape, the clouds turned sooty black as the day's combustion concluded, colors replaced by reflections, the aqueous, terrestrial and celestial melding into one. Like Darrell's boy of the poem, "he turns from the horizon; his oars his own new wings."

Another Source of Voice
A few blocks off the bayou, the venerable Rock and Bowl dance hall is a cacophony of sound, the sound system all screech and echo, the din of voices from the bar and lanes, where the cracked and pitted balls pound to their own mad indifferent rhythm, nearly drowning out the music from the cramped stage at the end of room, the floor thrumming like a living membrane beneath the pounding feet. Snooks Eaglin, a Shriner's fez perched on his head above his twinkling eyes alongside Eddie Bo, his head a knob of polished ebony and his face a carved and stoic icon, is welded to his guitar, his fingers like a pulse pumping blood by habit and force of nature. The music is old and worn but familiar, not the clear spring water of the source, but muddied over time and translation, the sound system so bad it's like listening to Shakespeare over a string stretched between two tin cans, but the link and bond between player and audience is sincere and compelling, the bodies swaying in the current leaving the world outside as a distant as a galaxy.

The present incarnation of another Louisiana tradition, these saintly avatars of music, the veined mahogany hands coaxing notes and chords as from the stretched sinews of an ibex, the music swirling like their horns, long patient riffs, like the stoop and step, pluck and place of the fields, the beat like hoes thumping rhythmic and hard against the red clay in the blare of light, their eyes though tired and sad, sweet, too, like warm fruit, their laughter deep like a gourd when a sane man would cry giving measure and reason to why hips thrust and breath, pent and sharp, long sounds the cadence of life and renewal and with these songs the denial of death and loss.

Shoring Fragments Against Our Ruin
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins," T.S. Eliot once concluded in his monumental poem "The Wasteland," an assemblage of the shards and allusions of a civilization under assault from modernity and the erosion of shared and elevating values, a resonance we can hear played around us like a dissonant chorus. Like him we cleave to our own words, both derived from the rich flow of our traditional streams, and those forged anew by poets, according to the ancient Greeks, the only makers of things conjured newly into existence by humankind. Darrell Bourque, our own Poet Laureate, commemorates the power of conjuring words this way in "Light at the Edge of Water":
"This is the dumb thirst canvases have for wet paint.
This is the holy thirst drawing us to the water's edge."
In such words reside our best hope.

—Michael Sartisky, Editor-In-Chief