ROCKING AT CASA AZUL



Poets' paradise

 “You rock!” a friend on Facebook wrote to me yesterday. She was referring to my poetry reading with Brad Richard at Casa Azul Thursday evening, and I know Brad and I weren’t the only poets rocking and reading at this regularly-scheduled poetry night in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. The open mic featured three seasoned poets: former poet laureate Darrell Bourque, reading from his forthcoming book, Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie; poet Clare Martin, author of Eating the Heart First; and Patrice Melnick, owner of Casa Azul and a writer who is presently compiling her own collection of poetry. However, the performer who captured the limelight was Carol Rice, a budding poet who stole the show with her lyrics about a dead possum. It was a fun night, and I came away impressed with the work that Patrice Melnick is doing as director of the Festival of Words Cultural Arts Collective in this small town (pop. 1000) in south Louisiana.

Patrice calls her work with poets “The Casa Azul Series,” a program in its sixth year that has attracted poets from throughout south Louisiana and further afield. The program also draws an audience that participates in the poetry reading when Patrice passes around a piece of paper with an unfinished line on it, asking that members of the audience add to the line. Since the series at which I read was held on Valentine’s Day, the line for this occasion read, “My love is as…” and the hilarious poem was read at the conclusion of the reading by participant Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. The unfinished poem is a way of engaging the audience and furthers Patrice’s goal of building a community that supports poetry and the arts. She says that the engagement process has attracted professional and novice poets who read at open mic time, and it sometimes brings in poets who have never read their poetry for any occasion. Patrice has also established a documentary program, “Grand Coteau Voices: The Good, The Bad, The Complicated,” which features the stories of Grand Coteau citizens and provides a historical record of the townspeople’s lives. Chere Breaux began filming these stories in January, 2012.



Poets' stage at Casa Azul



Patrice migrated to Grand Coteau during a sabbatical from teaching English as an Associate Professor at Xavier University in New Orleans and moved to the “provinces” following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She was a former Peace Corps worker in the Central African Republic, worked at Pelican Publishing in New Orleans for several years, and has written a riveting memoir entitled Po-Boy Contraband, that includes chapters concerning her struggles with a debilitating disease and commentary about how important poetry, Reggae, Zydeco, the Neville Brothers, and other music has been in treating her illness. Concerning the music important to her, she writes in her first book, Turning Up the Volume: “Like drunks sliding quarters into a jukebox to draw out the voices of Patsy Cline, Lyle Lovett, Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson, Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas and Lucinda Williams; all those voices wail from the car radio, howl from the neon lit jukebox in the corner. Those voices call inside my head like richly-feathered, hungry owls…”



Patrice Melnick, poet, writer, director
of Festival of Words

 I appreciate the comment about my poetry reading from the friend who says I rock, but last Thursday I was just one voice holding forth in the back room of a small shop painted a vivid blue hue that sits on the main drag of Grand Coteau, Louisiana. Under the arching branches of old live oaks, Casa Azul rocks every Thursday evening, bringing in new and old poets, children and elderly participants who are happy to have a venue in bayou country for celebrating the work of the Muse.

Brava Patrice – keep on creating the space for us to rock!

FESTIVAL OF WORDS AT GRAND COTEAU

Saturday evening, while other literary enthusiasts enjoyed the highly-successful Flannery O’Connor Symposium organized by Dr. Mary Ann Wilson at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette this week-end, some of us attended sessions of the Festival of Words that culminated in readings by Louisiana poet laureate, Julie Kane, and award-winning author, Randall Kenan in the St. Charles Chapel (formerly Christ the King Church), Grand Coteau, Louisiana. Grand Coteau is a small town located on a ridge where ancient oaks create alleys and groves, and French, Acadian, Victorian, and Creole architecture is represented in the town’s residences and stores. It’s a lovely venue for literary and art festivals.

I recently wrote about the Festival of Words, a program taught by acclaimed authors in Creative Writing workshops to promote creativity and literacy. The program has a special focus on young people who frequently do readings at drive-by businesses, in schools, and at Casa Azul in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. The Saturday night readings attracted an adult crowd and must have had the saints reeling with laughter in that sacred space of the Chapel. Randall Kenan led off with a short story, “New York City,” followed by Julie Kane’s whimsical rhyming poetry from several of her books. Kane ‘s rendition of poems using some of Emily Dickinson’s first lines, which she finished in her own version of “I Heard A Fly Buzz When I Died,” “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” etc. brought down the house.

Julie Kane, a native of Boston, has been a resident of Louisiana for many years and teaches at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. She has been garnering awards that include a stint as Writer-in-Residence at Tulane University and Fulbright Scholar at Vilnius Pedagogical University, as well as a 2007 SIBA book Award Finalist, and her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, London Magazine, Feminist Studies and others. Kane’s repertoire includes Body and Soul and Rhythm and Booze,and she’s noted for her volume of poetry about post Katrina entitled Jazz Funeral.

An excerpt from Jazz Funeral entitled “The Terror of the Place:”

“Like Juliet reviving in the tomb,

you blink and blink and still your eyes behold

the walls of what was once a music room

grown over with great roses of black mold,

the grand piano caving in on shat-

tered legs as if a camel knelt to let

a tourist with a camera on its back…”

Randall Kenan grew up in Chinquapin, North Carolina and has been a finalist for the National Book critics Circle Award (1993), has been awarded the Mary Francis Hobson Medal for Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writer’s Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters ‘Prix de Rome, and many other recognitions for his writing about African Americans. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia University, Duke University, the University of Mississippi, the University of Memphis, and is now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of his non-fiction books, Walking on Water, is an interesting study of what it means to be black in America today. The book features Kenan’s travels throughout the U.S. during a six year period in which he interviewed 200 black Americans to provide material for “Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century.”

I’m a latecomer to the Festival of Words, but Saturday evening’s program convinced me that literature in south Louisiana is still alive and well, and programs like Festival of Words at Grand Coteau and the Flannery O’Connor Symposium at ULL continue to feature gifted writers and artists from within the borders of Cajun country and farther afield. My next field trip is slated for Arnaudville, Louisiana, a small town near Lafayette, where the same kind of cultural activity has been going on for several years. It’s good to be back in Acadiana and to be part of the joie de vivre characteristic of this part of the world.