FESTIVAL OF WORDS

Friday evening, we traveled to St. Landry Parish to hear readings by three writers featured in the 11th Annual Festival of Words and were entertained for two hours by Jack Bedell, Louisiana Poet Laureate; Cornelius Eady, a musical theatre poet; and novelist Ladee Hubbard. The trio held creative writing workshops and drive-by poetry readings on Friday and Saturday, November 2nd and 3rd, but I was only present for the Friday reading at Chicory’s Coffee and Cafe in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. We usually migrate from Sewanee, Tennessee to home in New Iberia, Louisiana just in time to attend the Festival, and I’m always amazed at the literary stars that Patrice Melnick, Director of the Festival, attracts.

The Festival of Words is supported by a galaxy of arts organizations: the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Office of Cultural Development, Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourist in cooperation with the Louisiana State Arts Council as administered by the Acadiana Center for the Arts, and partners with the Acadiana Writing Project, Grand Coteau Cultural Arts Foundation, the Thensted Center, Nunu’s Arts and Culture Collective, Lyrically Inclined, Chicory’s, Giles Automart, St. Landry Parish Tourism and Arts and Writing supporters from throughout the U.S.

The three presenters enjoyed equal time as writers from diverse backgrounds, but “A Words Worth” can only accommodate showcasing one from the trio, and I decided to create press for the Louisiana Poet Laureate, Jack Bedell. He’s an engaging poet who teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University where he edits Louisiana Literature and is director of the Louisiana Literature Press.

I was impressed by Bedell’s humility and what he calls his “simple lines” (from his inscription in No Brother, This Storm, the book I bought during break time at Chicory’s). An unassuming person, he was dressed casually, wore a baseball cap while he read, and delivered poems that reflected a devotion to family, capturing the audience with lyrics of grace and simplicity.

I particularly liked his voice in “First Kiss,” taken from No Brother, This Storm in which he displays his devotion to fatherhood through his daughter’s interest in baby frogs:

First Kiss

…She wants

to turn over every pot, pull back
the cover on the barbecue pit,
check each slat in the storm shutters.
She knows no crack is too small
for these frogs. They can flatten themselves
and get under anything. They fold their bones
and wait for her, each one a prince.

The eloquence in the last two lines evokes the image of an admiring father observing his daughter at play — a nurturing father portrayed in a powerful psalm. A childhood memory of learning “The Children’s Hour” by Longfellow in the third grade flashed through my mind and formed a cameo of the loving father surrounded by his adoring daughters.

I was drawn to all of Bedell’s poems about his daughter, and having written about a turtle yesterday, I revisited the following poem he presented at the Festival reading. These tender, soft-voiced lines resonated with me. 

Dead Turtle 

My daughter leaves the body
as it lies, will not disturb
the turtle’s last stretch
to position it with more grace.

She covers it with azalea petals
to cool its skin, outlines
its body in concentric circles
of branches, swatches
torn from magazines…

In some other place, she will find
song to hold all of this, enlaced. 

Bedell will present his work at the upcoming Louisiana Book Festival next weekend in Baton Rouge, and those who will participate and hear him for the first time can look forward to a time blessed with a wise and delightful reading from our state’s most hopeful poetic voice. 

ESPRIT DE FEMME

This morning, the fog on The Mountain blanketed trees, homes, and roads with an impenetrable curtain that could have caused feelings of morning gloom at Sewanee, Tennessee. However, when I went into the dining room for breakfast, I looked up at the windows facing our backyard and saw the latest glasswork of Karen Bourque that I brought back with me last week. A piece of purple colored glass with a hawk winging its way in the background cut through the somber world outside, and I decided to unveil this piece before it appears on the cover of my latest book, Above the Prairie, forthcoming through Border Press in June. There's no other word for Karen's new work — it's stunning!

Karen and I've been working together on covers for my books of poetry during the last decade, and have the kind of synchronicity that births an almost instant process: Border Press publisher, Vickie Sullivan, and I meet for lunch with Karen and her husband, Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana poet laureate, and before we fill our plates, I perceive an idea for a book of poetry, along with the title — presto. I tell Karen about the idea, sometimes sending her a photograph or the first poem, and before I can produce a dozen poems, she has begun work on one of her beautiful pieces. In today's slang about synchronicity, she "gets it."

In another life, Karen was a lab technologist, a working mother, and wife, but when she retired, she began to dedicate her talents to glasswork, and her pieces have appeared in churches, spiritual centers, the Ernest Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette, at the Louisiana Book Festival, and other cultural institutions and homes throughout Acadiana. She never advertises her work because the word is out about her brilliant talent. As soon as she completes a commission, and even before she completes a glass piece, someone else is at the door to her studio, seeking her artwork.

I know that my book isn't published yet, but this morning when I looked up at the soaring hawk above the Louisiana prairie in prisms of glass, my spirit lifted, and I was compelled to share this stunning glass piece with readers. I'm always as excited about my book covers as I am about the poetry within and hope you'll look for what's coming next...

P.S. At the risk of sounding like a Grandmother braggart: After Karen produces a photo of the glass piece, it is sent to Martin Romero, my grandson in Louisiana, who makes a handsome design around the glass piece for the cover.

‘’THE STORIES WE KEEP FINDING INSIDE…”

My mother, Dorothy Greenlaw Marquart, loved books and words. In 1984, I published Their Adventurous Will: Profiles of Memorable Louisiana Women, which includes a preface about my mother’s love of words: “Every month for years, Mother would take one of the three children in our family to Claitor’s Bookstore in Baton Rouge, Louisiana [where I lived for eight years of my childhood] to choose two books for our nightly reading session. She was the first family member to open the books, touching pictures with credulous delight. My mother began to fly in the heavens long before Mary Poppins opened her first umbrella to make her wonderful flights…”

When I was nine, a Methodist minister’s daughter accidentally knocked out most of one front tooth with a croquet mallet while I was visiting my grandparents in Franklinton, Louisiana, and my grandfather pacified me with $25 (a lot of money back in 1944). When I returned to Baton Rouge, my mother promptly took me to Claitor’s Bookstore where I spent the entire day and the entire $25 on books.

At that time, the old Claitor’s was located downtown, not far from the State Capitol, and was a general bookstore with shelves of colorful children’s books; the store didn’t specialize in books pertaining mostly to law, as it does today (in a different location). The day that I spent my $25, Mrs. Otto Claitor looked after me, fed me books she thought I might like, and even gave me lunch while I searched for books to enliven our family’s nighttime reading.

Saturday, while I was waiting to deliver a reading from my latest book of poetry, A Slow Moving Stream, in the Capitol View Room of the Louisiana State Library at the Louisiana Book Festival, not far from the old Claitor’s, that memory of the $25 book day flashed into my mind. It was followed by the wish that the first owners of Claitor’s and my mother were alive to participate in such a wonderful festival of books sponsored by the Louisiana Center for the Book. I also wished that my mother could witness me reading my poems aloud in a room that included four Louisiana poet laureates: Darrell Bourque, Julie Kane, Ava Haymon, and Peter Cooley.

The 2016 Louisiana Book Festival was commemorated by a special art piece created by Kelly Guidry that now hangs in the Louisiana State Library and a prose poem by Darrell Bourque, former Louisiana Poet Laureate, entitled “Words, A Poem” about the “transformative nature of books in culture…” The sculpt piece, made of cedar and mounted on a base metal framework, is an angel with outspread wings nicknamed “Libby,” which is a shortened version of “Librarian.” Darrell’s prose poem, a powerful tribute to words and language, is too long to record here, but I couldn’t resist publishing an excerpt from the end lines: “...how language is a flight from one word to another, how sentences are made of those kinds of flying words, how stories are filled with the hum of bees telling us who we are, how to get to China, how to get to Malaysia, how to get to how we got here in the first place in the stories we keep finding inside the words set down inside us before we ever knew we could fly with them and in them.”

In 2004 the American Library Association honored the Louisiana Book Festival with the John Cotton Dana Award, citing the Festival’s “community partnerships, exceptional programs, and extensive media coverage.” In 2006 the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress recognized the Louisiana Book Festival with a 2007 Boorstin Center for the Book award, and I know that more awards will be forthcoming for this 13-year old event. Through recent communications with Jim Davis, Director, Louisiana Center for the Book, I can see why this Festival has achieved the excellence for which it has been recognized.

A special treat for me was an informal afternoon conversation with Rebecca Wells, author of the famous Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood: A Novel, who was interviewed by my good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, English professor at ULL. Over 200 writers were featured at the Festival, and it was certainly a “Mary Poppins flying in the heavens” event for me.

As I said, I’m sorry my mother missed it… but perhaps she didn’t. After all, the event was immortalized with a literary angel and a transformative poem that fit on the angel’s wings! And one of the poems I read was about my mother changing forms to become a brilliant cardinal – she must have been aloft Saturday!

Photograph by Darrell Bourque