RIDGES

 

Cover of Ridges

On our arrival in Sewanee, TN, we found three boxes of Ridges, a volume of my poetry and Don Thornton’s paintings produced by Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado. Fortunately, Sister Madeleine Mary, CSM of the Sisters of St. Mary here in Sewanee, TN, had rescued and taken our books into our home on Fairbanks Circle during heavy rain, and all was saved. Since then, I’ve been sending out copies to a few regular readers that I hope will respond to my most-favored book. I sincerely appreciate Dr. Mary Ann Wilson’s salute to the “…blending of natural and human, art and place in a loving tribute to a fellow artist and friend, seeing in those ridges ‘the mudflats of old sufferings…”

The reference is to a volume of poetry and paintings designed by Susan Entsminger, publisher and editor of Pinyon Publishing, whose own artistic talent showcases the work of Don Thornton’s paintings and that which I consider my ultimate book of poetry. I had transported Don’s paintings from New Iberia, Louisiana to Sewanee a year ago where they sat in a box for months until I was able to overcome ennui caused by the threat of Covid disease hovering around everyone in the world. Perhaps the disease itself made me wonder if I’d ever feel like writing again. Only Don’s beautiful paintings could have challenged me to bring his art into book form. And after I sat with his work daily for several months, the Chenier Plain became my place of inspiration.

 

As botanist Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan explained in Ridges, the term chenier (or cheniere) derives from the Cajun word chene for oak. The Mississippi Chenier Plain is an ecological feature composed of coastal ridges 12-18 miles wide and 6-20 feet in elevation. The oak ridges stretch 124 miles from Sabine Pass, Texas, to Southwest Point, Louisiana. This plain is a rich mixture of wetlands, uplands, and open water that developed 7000 to 3000 years BP when water levels stood 16-20 feet lower than at present. Sea level rise between 3000 and 2500 BP submerged the cheniers to the extent we see them today.

The special foreword by Darrell Bourque, Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2007-2011, explains that in Ridges, “each poem takes an artist-poet-teacher to the crossroads of being, that sacred ridged place where Thornton lived most profoundly, most honestly, most deeply…” This morning I rejoice as I re-read Bourque’s foreword and take another long look at the “blue, blue skies, the rosy sand in the mud flats, the yellow he assigned to love, the brooding skies too, the impending storms, the golden, fuchsia, lavender and purple sunsets, each detail springboard for Moore to attach to a life, a marriage, a vocation, the sacred, the obstinate, the tortured, the mendicant, the explorer…”

I am proud of this book, of Don, of Suzi, his wife; of Vickie, who photographed the paintings, of Darrell and his grace-filled poetic introduction to the book; and of Susan, who realized the importance of making Ridges available to poets, biographers, and nature lovers. I hope that Ridges finds a prominent place in Louisiana history and culture as it found its precious place in my love of the Louisiana landscape through the eyes of master artist Don Thornton.

Here is “Blue Skies,” a poem and accompanying painting from Ridges:

 

 Blue Skies

That blue sky so close to the water,

a mirage of ridges behind,

was clear enough to banish bad spirits;

he could hear Ella Fitzgerald …

no, it was Willie Nelson …

singing “Blue Skies” that day.


The scattered frequency

moved his eyes into calmer light,

thoughts cleared of apparitions,

the mud flats of old sufferings,

and the wind, a mouth for Spirit,

created verse void of form within.

 

Oaks on the ridge swayed

while he drifted in the boat,

soon fell asleep

in the color of blue,

awakened to music dissolving,

      his soul spinning on a tuning fork.

Order books by emailing me at deaconwriter@gmail.com or snail mailing at PO Box 3124, Sewanee, TN 37375. 

MIGRARÉ

I looked for my CD of “In A Persian Market” by William Ketelbey this morning so I could play it while I wrote about Darrell Bourque’s newest book of poetry, migraré,  because the volume is a beautiful collection of ghazals evoking memories of my sojourn in Persia during the 1970’s. However, I did not find the CD and had to rely on the music playing in my mind as I re-read the arresting couplets that accompany Bill Gingles’s abstract art.

Bourque uses this ancient form of poetry familiar to readers of Rumi and Hafez, two poets with whom I became fascinated while living in Persia, and in this collection, he addresses the subject of immigration — migraré or “I will move”( in Spanish), referring to mass movements of people either for survival, or for life-threatening reasons, or as messengers called to divine purposes.

Bourque “moves into” the ghazals through the medium of ekphrasis wherein a poet creates a poem by looking at images and builds around “tensions, composition, line, color, and the theater created in expressionistic artworks,” according to Bourque. 

Bourque derives his poems from his experience involving the Immigration Team from Narrative 4, a story exchange program designed to foster empathy and break down barriers among students worldwide, equipping them to improve their communities and the world. Storytellers from around the world met in Arnaudville, Louisiana, where Bourque encountered carriers of the ghazal. He seems to be continually inspired by experiences that explore the histories of people deeply affected by separation and immigration; e.g., his own ancestry dating back to the 19th century when Acadians were expelled from France and Acadie. In a passionate “Foreword,” he writes that humans “must be vigilant and not separate themselves from each other in destructive and debilitating ways…”

Readers enter the sphere of Bourque’s ghazals with poems like “Division Stream,” which I felt was among the finest in this collection and featured his great-grandmother. Lines like 

…When great imperceptibles come to live with you

and you cannot travel far enough to get away, you swim daily in your division stream… 

Taken as a whole, the ghazal impresses readers with Bourque’s philosophical gifts translated (maybe migrated) into poetic form. 

She arrived one day with a small satchel and all her belongings and no husband.

What took him from her she couldn’t even begin to know. Death’s a division stream… 

However, ever the master of sensuality, he describes his great-grandmother’s separations as: 

turn[ing] to clabbers and soft cheeses spread on biscuits in the morning,

with mayhaw jellies and blackberries she picked while praying into the division stream… 

Bourque really “gets with it,” in contemporary language, as he launches into “Sun Choir” (Christ the King Bellevue Choir): 

I sit in one of the back rows with my wife, near Henry Amos. We couldn’t be higher.

There are no names on pews here. I hum. My wife sings out. It, too, is her sun choir. 

I once sat next to both of them at a celebration honoring his wife’s glass work in a triptych of this church and felt the dynamism of the sun choir, so this ghazal resonated with me, and I well understood his line: 

She sings trouble over trouble every Sunday…

The poem reminded me of Rumi’s 

The sunbeam fell upon the wall;

the wall received a borrowed splendor.

Why set your heart on a piece of turf…

When I lived in the sun-baked desert of Khuzestan Province in Persia, I longed to see water: bayou, river, even the aqua blue waters of the Persian Gulf and painted a wall in the dining room of our home a deep blue. I was taken back to that time of blueness when I read Bourque’s “Second Self,” his description of Vermeer’s blue as a way of “finding ways to second self… one self seeking another self…” My own immersion in a blue wall in Ahwaz, Iran led to a self seeking another self in that mysterious mideastern environment to which I had migrated. Expatriates to any country will identify with this ghazal.

Space forces me into brevity, but I hasten to say that migraré is Bourque’s finest gift of poetry, a meditative, mystical work that will “move” readers into the divine afflatus sans forced migration, arriving through phrasings of the same tone as the mystical Persian poets. It’s a beautiful entry into contemplative practice. As I told Darrell after reading migraré “Move over, Rumi.”

As readers can see, the review is not a definitive, scholarly treatment of a beautiful book from Louisiana’s most masterful poet, but it is an appreciative salute to Louisiana’s best ambassador for the mission of celebrating difference. 

Darrell Bourque is professor emeritus in English (University of Louisiana, Lafayette) and former Poet Laureate of Louisiana. He received the 2014 Louisiana Book Festival Writer Award and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities 2019 Humanist of the Year Award, as well as the Dr. James Oliver-Monsignor Sigur Award by the Louisiana Council on Human Relations for his Social Justice work for minorities and the marginalized.

THE VOICE WITHIN THE VOICE

Most mornings in fair weather (often not so fair in spring and summer in Louisiana), Darrell Bourque, Louisiana’s premier poet, can be found writing the lines to a new poem while walking an old path near his home in Church Point, Louisiana. He’s a master of what poets call “voice,” often entering into the voice of some lesser-known figure who has made a significant contribution to the culture and history of his/her native state. 

Bourque’s latest book, From the Other Side, is beautifully illustrated with the art of Bill Gingles, a Shreveport artist, and features poems about Henriette Delille, a former New Orleans religious figure. During the 19th century, Delille organized a group of devout Christian women called the Sisters of the Holy Family to nurse the sick, care for and teach indigent and illiterate Black and Creole children, as well as immigrating adults who settled in the French Quarter of New Orleans. This group was formally recognized in 1942 by St. Augustine Church in the Treme of New Orleans, and Delille, who died in 1862, was first deemed Servant of God in 1988, then advanced to Venerable in the process of canonization by the Roman Catholic Church. Her inclusion in the process continues — the next two steps are beatification and canonization.

Darrell Bourque and his wife, Karen, became interested in this passionate and empathetic nun several years ago — an interest which culminated in Karen designing and rendering a glass triptych for a window of Christ the King Roman Catholic Mission Church in Bellevue near the Bourque’s home in Church Point, Louisiana. The recent publication of Darrell’s book of poetry, From the Other Side: Henriette Delille followed last month’s dedication of this window. 

Although Henriette Delille spoke French (as does Bourque), Bourque captured her voice in what he terms persona sonnets in English within From the Other Side, an impassioned voice that speaks of orphans and the uneducated on the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans — a voice derived from Bourque’s meditations on the images and colors in Gingles’ paintings; e.g.,:

What If You Dreamed

                    …We teach 

                    reading here the way we teach children to sing. Old

                    women wander from arches to see what this reach

                    

                    will reach. We start with the names of flowers sold

                    on the streets in the Quarter & the Marigny, peach-

                    colored, pink & red & blue-dyed flowers, white gold

                   

                    flowers named how they are named: Daisy, Bream,

                    Belle, Violet, Hyacinth & Myrtle, William, Iris, Reed, 

                    Sorrel & Olive, Lillie & Camellia, Rose, Red & Gleem.

                    We start with who they are & go to what they need.

One of my favorites, All the Time, is accompanied by Gingles’ painting by that name, an acrylic panel including scarlet forms resembling poppies in which Bourque presents Delille’s voice speaking about the work of the Sisters of the Holy Family: 

                       …We moved quietly from one need to another need

                       as we found it. We brought things inside our houses, kept our candles lit,

                       We let the world be the world, let the heart be heart, let creed be creed. 

This is one among many poems in the volume that show Bourque’s ability to achieve what A. E. Housman called “not the thing said but a way of saying it.”

Another poem in which Bourque imagines Delille speaking of her dedication to work with children of the New Orleans streets is the poignant:

The Difference Island 

              …My wings

              are who I am. They flew me to this difference island where I am no more

              a trace or line. We crossed bayous & bays & lakes & rivulets as fine as lace

              to this other world beyond geographies where I knew what I had to live for,

              the poor despised, the cipher bought and sold, what I saw in an orphan’s face.

Bourque used the titles of Gingles’ paintings for all of the poems in this volume and points to the language of the paintings as influencing the language of his poems. “Without these paintings I know I could not have accessed this particular set of poems spoken by the powerful and holy human being Henriette Delille is,” he writes in the acknowledgements to From the Other Side. I would add that Bourque’s deft gift of imagining the voice within the voice (“…What’s just beyond the tree leans on what we never knew we knew…”) influences the reader’s understanding of “the other side”and the art that takes us there. 

The Sisters of the Holy Family continue to carry out Delille’s mission in retirement homes, schools, and other sacred service organizations in New Orleans, Shreveport, Galveston, Little Rock, Washington, DC, in California, in Belize, and in Africa. Delille’s original prayer penned in French was a simple but cogent one: “I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.”

Order from yellowflagpress.com or darrellbourque@gmail.com. 

LOUISIANA’S POET MAGNIFIQUE

If readers can obtain a copy of the latest 64 Parishes magazine, published by The Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, the article featuring Darrell Bourque, 2019 Humanist of the Year, written by Chris Turner-Neal with photographs by Akasha Rabut, is cause for celebration. I first saw the stunning cover of this magazine during our last lunch two weeks ago with Darrell and Karen before we left Louisiana for our second home in Tennessee. We’d just accompanied the Bourques to Christ the King Church for which Karen had created a glass triptych honoring Henriette Delille and were doing our pre-lunch briefing before enjoying barbecue.  Henriette Delille, a religious "humanist," has been presented for sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church in honor of her former work with the indigent in New Orleans, and From the Other Side, Henriette Delille, Darrell's book of poetry about her, is presently in press.

I loved the photograph of the leonine face of this poet who has been telling stories about southwest Louisiana in his passionate and profound voice during the forty years I’ve been his friend and enjoyed his mentoring. A former Louisiana Poet Laureate, Darrell also received the 2014 Louisiana Book Festival Writer Award and the ULL Center for Louisiana Studies James Rivers Award, among other recent awards and honors. At a reading in Grand Coteau I asked his wife Karen if there were any awards left that could be bestowed on him and then answered my own question with “The Humanist of the Year Award.” 

Darrell served as the first Friends of the Humanities Honor Professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, once directed the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program there, and was president of the National Association for Humanities Education. He also served as project director for a reading series in Lafayette featuring Louisiana African-American writers and calls himself a “kind of social activist” in the article written by Chris Turner-Neal — a modest remark about his work honoring the music, history and culture of Acadians, Creoles, and blacks in his native region. 

My history with Darrell can be traced back to an interview with him when I was a feature writer for the Daily Iberian in New Iberia, Louisiana during the 80’s, and he loaned me a copy of the manuscript for Burnt Water Suite, providing me  background for work that became his second book of poetry. I was asked to introduce Darrell at a poetry reading in New Iberia when this book was still in manuscript form, and I knew then that I was listening to an authentic voice, one that mirrored the Cajun culture in a mystical and musical way that hasn’t been duplicated by any of Louisiana’s finest poets. 

He has encouraged and supported the work of many “wannabe” and established poets with warmth and sincerity throughout the forty years I’ve known him. Each time I declare that I won’t write poetry again, he laughs and says he looks forward to reading my latest. Each time I received an unwarranted criticism from a fellow student in a Creative Writing class Darrell taught, he’d chide me for not having confidence in my work and urge me to move on.

This morning I re-read the ten books he has written that I carried with me to Sewanee and finally decided that my re-examinations of his work only impressed me further, and his true, original voice would remain one of those soul-stirring invitations to honor our common humanity. I also know that the recent Humanist Award isn’t the tip of the iceberg —he still has to be named Poet Laureate of the United States. You rock, Darrell Bourque!

ART, KING CAKES, AND CATAWBA TREES…

Glasswork by Karen Bourque commemorating Henriette DeLille

Those of us who have passed the 80-year old mark will remember Sunday afternoon drives through rural countryside as a way to end a week peacefully. At times I’m treated to such a drive across the prairie of southwestern Louisiana near Church Point, Louisiana. Usually the drive follows lunch in the home of Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana poet laureate, and his wife Karen, an outstanding glass artist. Yesterday, we scheduled the drive, not only to ramble through the countryside but to view Karen’s recently-installed glass pieces honoring Henriette DeLille in three windows of Christ the King Roman Catholic Mission in Bellevue, just down the road from the Bourque’s home.

Henriette DeLille (1812-1862), a French-speaking woman of West African descent, was brought up in the French Quarter of New Orleans as a free woman of color who received education in music, literature, and nursing and was also a member of the system of placage in which mixed race women became kept women of wealthy white planters. During the 1830’s, DeLille began to break away from this system of social mores, became a nun, and eventually formed the Sisters of the Holy Family, an order that provided education for the disenfranchised people of color, as well as care for the elderly, and which burgeoned into a worldwide mission for the poor that remains active today. 

Karen’s beautiful stained glass windows (one large centerpiece window and two smaller pieces in windows on each side of the centerpiece) are a tribute to The Venerable Delille, in which Karen created images of the Holy Trinity using vivid blues, greens, and a brilliant red symbolizing DeLille’s heart and Christ’s love. Golden rays above the center image represent God, and the Host and chalice in the center suggest a vision of Christ and his love for creation. Although the stained glass windows proved to be difficult to photograph, Vickie Sullivan captured the imagery well in the light that illuminated the lovely glass pieces Karen had been inspired to create. She says she feels privileged to share this art with others so they can “explore their own spirituality more deeply as they pass through a real world filled with challenge, trial, mystery, and miracle.” 

Darrell and I climbed the steps to the choir loft and looked down at the immaculate interior of this mission church which he says congregants maintain without outside help — cleaning, painting, and repairing when necessary. He has written a book of poetry commemorating Delille that is in press with Yellow Flag Press and will appear this year. I‘ve read the manuscript, and believe that the Delille commemorative book and another forthcoming one that contains his versions of ghazals accompanied by the art of Bill Gingles will be acknowledged as his finest works. 

Darrell was recently named Humanist of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and will be honored at a ceremony this spring. We’re always honored to break bread with the Bourques when we sojourn in Louisiana during the winter months and our visits are customarily celebrations. We’ll enjoy another visit because Darrell wrote this morning that he’d eaten a piece of the king cake we'd brought for dessert yesterday, and he bit into the baby (a plastic baby imbedded in the cake, and the person biting into a piece containing it has to serve the next cake during pre-Lenten days).

Catalpa trees photographed by Karen Bourque

On the ride back to the Bourque’s home, Darrell meandered by crawfish ponds that had once been rice fields and showed us his family’s former land, including a line of catawba trees on his grandfather’s property that had survived, several of which Karen photographed for Let the Trees Answer, a book of poetry I wrote last year. I’m sure you Louisiana fishermen know that these trees harbor a plethora of catawba worms, yellow creatures with black lines running down their back that make good fish bait. I’ve caught a gracious plenty of catfish using them, but they’re pretty squishy when you bait your hook!

The Amédé Ardoin Project

Amédé Ardoin
sculpture

Several hundred people honored Amédé Ardoin at the St. Landry Parish Visitor Center yesterday afternoon when a statue of this pioneer Creole musician, created by Sculptor Russell Whiting, was unveiled. The beautiful statue, made of carved steel in which Whiting used an oxy-gasoline torch, was inspired by the only known photograph of the talented La-La and Zydeco musician. It shows Ardoin standing on his accordion and holding a lemon that refers to the musician’s habit of carrying a lemon in his pocket to keep his high-pitched voice clear and strong.

Ardoin grew up near Eunice and Mamou and often played his accordion and sang for dances as a teenager. After joining up with the fiddler Dennis McGee, he made some of the earliest recordings from Acadiana for Columbia records, a total of 30 recordings. Stories of his death vary, but the best-known version is a tragic one that tells of a summer night when Ardoin performed for a barn dance somewhere in St. Landry parish, and a white woman handed him a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his face. Following the dance, he was beaten and run over many times by a Model A Ford driven by white men who objected to his exchange with the white woman. He was discovered lying in a ditch the following day and later admitted to the State mental hospital in Pineville, Louisiana where he died on November 3, 1942. He was buried in an unmarked grave.

A woman who was standing next to me at the unveiling told me that she was attending the commemorative ceremony because she felt that the event honoring Ardoin was a form of justice, and she had come to the Visitors Center to support the cause. The speakers included former poet laureate Darrell Bourque and Patricia Cravens who were prime movers of the Amédé Ardoin Project, a project that will continue to include a scholarship initiative supporting young artists who wish to study with Louisiana La-La and Zydeco musicians.

Russell Whiting, sculptor,
at the unveiling

Russell Whiting says of his Ardoin commemorative that he found the photograph of Ardoin endearing and identified with him as an artist who wanted his creations to survive. Whiting began his career as a metal worker in the oil industry, and his highly original work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. in private and public sculpture gardens. 

Poet Bourque displayed his book, if you abandon me, comment je vas faire, An Amédé Ardoin Songbook, published by Yellow Flag Press and now in its twelfth printing. He invited the audience to donate $10 for the book, which will support the Amédé Ardoin Project and urged communities and individuals to plant a lemon tree or grove in honor of Ardoin. Information about the lemon tree project can be obtained at darrellbourque@gmail.com or patriciacravins@gmail.com.

Although a few dark clouds hovered over the event, the rain did not fall on the unveiling, and Amédé Ardoin was “brought home” during a silent, respectful moment, followed by a celebratory Bal de Dimache Apres Midi.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan

EVELYN UNDERHILL’S CHRISTMAS GIFT

My friend, the poet Darrell Bourque, often closes his messages to me with a few words that provoke profound thought or the beginning lines of a poem, and they simmer in my mind until I allow myself to sit down, often at the busiest part of the day, to write about what he has provoked. Just yesterday, Darrell closed his e-mail with the words: “I am hoping for a quiet, uneventful Christmas; the baby Jesus slipping back peacefully and sublimely into our lives at midnight…” 

There it was — the invitation to shuck off unrest and the hecktivity of Christmas preparations and welcome the Incarnation of God. I re-read Darrell’s words, then went to the bookshelves, and the perfect reading for that respite from the “halls of folly”seemed to drop into my hands: Advent with Evelyn Underhill edited by Christopher L. Webber. I sat down while the lunch dishes churned in the dishwasher and treated myself to the work of Underhill, an Anglican mystic popular during the 1940’s. Underhill is an old friend, via the influence of my godmother Dora back in the 60’s, and is known as a kind of pioneer in the revival of interest in the spiritual life. A retreat master who helped people deepen their lives through prayer, meditation, reading of the mystics, and charitable acts, she had more than a few words to relate about “the baby Jesus slipping back peacefully and sublimely into our lives…”

Underhill said that Reality is being offered to us in the “simplest, homeliest way — emerging right into our ordinary life. A baby — just that.” [And isn’t that what Darrell said?] “We are not told that the Blessed Virgin Mary saw the angels or heard the Gloria in the air. Her initiation had been quite different, like a quiet voice speaking in our deepest prayer — ‘The Lord is with thee. Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ Humble self-abandonment is quite enough to give us God.’”

Well, there it is…an invitation to dismiss what Underhill calls “craving, clutching, and fussing on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual — even on the religious—plane…Being, not wanting, having and doing, is the essence of a spiritual life…”

Most of these quotations are derived from Light of Christ within the cover of The Fruits of the Spirit, a worn copy of which always accompanies my moves from Louisiana to Tennessee and return, and Christopher Webber seems to have been inspired by many of the same passages I’ve marked in my falling-apart edition of this book. Underhill writes that the people of our time are variously helpless, distracted, and rebellious, “unable to interpret that which is happening, and full of apprehension about that which is to come, largely because they have lost this sure hold on the eternal; which gives to each life meaning and direction…I do not mean this is a mere escape from our problems and dangers, a slinking away from the actual to enjoy the eternal. I mean an acceptance and living out of the actual, in its homeliest details and its utmost demands …with that peculiar sense of ultimate security which only a hold on the eternal brings…”

A concluding comment from Underhill to which Darrell alluded in his wish to live out a quiet uneventful Christmas: “…We are required to go on quietly, making root…docile to the great slow rhythm of life. When we see no startling marks of our own religious progress or our usefulness to God, it is well to remember the baby in the stable and the little boy in the streets of Nazareth. The very life was there present, which was to change the whole history of the human race…the hidden Will of God…”

Peace and Joy to readers all.