CABIN FEVER AND POETRY AT CHICORY’S

Elizabeth Burk

You’d think that sensible people would stay at home on a freezing night and watch television or make a pot of soup or gumbo — they certainly wouldn’t drive for an hour from New Iberia to Grand Coteau, Louisiana to hang out at Chicory’s Coffee and Cafe where they could hear poets read. However, a good case of cabin fever was easily taken care of when we took that ride, ordered our gumbo at Chicory’s, and sat down to listen to the writers Elizabeth Burk and Sally O. Donlon. The event, sponsored by Festival of Words, also offered Open Mic, and Patrice Melnick, director of the Festival, asked me to read, but I hadn’t brought along any of my books, and I was happy to sit and listen to other poets perform. 

St. Landry and St. Martin parishes seem to be on the leading edge of music, literary, theater, and art events in south Louisiana, and I’m amazed at the proliferation of the Arts by gifted home-grown and migrant artists who perform in these parishes.

Elizabeth Burk, a psychologist who practices in New York, has tasted bayou water, returned to taste it again, and taken up residence in Breaux Bridge part of the year. Her latest book, Duet—Poet and Photographer, a collaboration with her photographer husband Leo Touchet, features a lead poem entitled “God Visits Louisiana, 1860,” followed by “Hush Over Atchafalaya,” and “Road Widow,” poems that reflect her fascination with the landscape and culture of south Louisiana.

She writes: “I am surrounded /by weepy trees,/ gnarled arms reaching out/over sultry swamps/where the murky deep rises/to meet the sky.” The accompanying photographs by her husband carry out the objective Touchet voices: “that each photograph and poem in the book have equal value.” Onstage, Burk introduced ekphrastic poems with blow-ups of Touchet’s photographs he placed on an easel as she read from Duet — an artistic device that enhanced her dramatic reading. Scenes and poems featuring New York, Venezuela, Mexico, Paris and other states in the U.S. provided international flavor for this volume of people and places featured in the Duet. Imagery in poems and photographs is doubly impressive.

Sally O. Donlon

The second writer, Sally O. Donlon, is in the process of creating a book and read three stories of the genre which I refer to as fiction/non-fiction/memoir, alternately provoking terror and laughter from the audience. O. Donlon refers to a “checkered educational past and holds an MS in Urban Studies, is ABD in Cognitive Science,” and is working on a doctoral degree in creative writing/non-fiction. A descriptive car ride, narrated by a passenger driven by an unknown driver who dumps her on a levee road in nighttime wilderness, mesmerized the audience, but the author quickly offered comic relief in a story about her experiences growing up next to a Baptist church in midtown Lafayette and her brother’s terrified bathtub exit when he sees, through an open window, a baptismal immersion at the church. 

Carol Rice

I’d heard Carol Rice read several years ago, but when she approached the Open Mic, I knew that we were going to top off the evening with laughter. Rice, who produced a slim volume of poetry several years ago entitled Fishing in Louisiana (“written, published, and illustrated by Carol Rice,” she announces on the title page) says she likes to “make jokes about things people take too seriously,” and “has three grown children, no more husbands or pets. Hasn’t had a smoke or alcohol today. [This is]my first chapbook, just in case I don’t get a chance to do another.” However, the little book is in its third printing and is delightful reading. The room was filled with something I call “lightness of being,” when she read. She’s a master last-liner as is evidenced in a brief poem about crows flying: “If walking to the mailbox, I disturb them,/they take off. There comes the soft fluff and fluttering sound of their flying close to my shoulder./If I had a dead chicken, I am thinking,/I would just throw it by the ditch for them.”

What a heartwarming way to spend a winter evening! Festival of Words frequently schedules these readings at Chicory’s, and this last one was videotaped to appear on Acadiana Open Channel. You can find out more by writing festivalwords@gmail.com.

Crone

When you cross the rusting drawbridge leading to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, you enter a south Louisiana town long acclaimed as the Crawfish Capitol of the World that has drawn “foodies” from around the world. However, since 2014, this bustling town in Acadiana has gained added cultural dimensions with the establishment of the Teche Center for the Arts, a center on E. Bridge St. housed in the old “Murph Theatre." Foodies who appreciate art and culture as well as fine cuisine, can easily find the Center in the middle of town, a few doors down from a foodie haunt, Sydnie Mae’s Restaurant.

The Teche Center for the Arts, directed by Sandra Sarr, has as its mission to feature music, art, theatre, literary art, French lessons, history and educational exhibits for St. Martin Parish and surrounding environs in south Louisiana. As The Center was a movie house in the 1940’s, it’s complete with a stage on which poets have begun to perform readings. 

Clare Martin (r) and Bessie Senette

Last night we attended a reading of Crone, a book of poetry written by Clare Martin and dramatized by Clare and a fellow poet, Bessie Senette, before a full house of regional poets and artists. Crone has received kudos from Louisiana Poet Laureate, Jack Bedell; Sheryl St. Germain, Writer of the Year 2018 at the Louisiana Book Festival, and Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Broken Angels. Clare and Bessie read to an appreciative audience that saluted them with "Bravos" when the long poem ended. I found it heartening to see so many young adults in the crowd — and I attribute this interest to the workshops and readings of outstanding Louisiana poet laureates: Darrell Bourque, Jack Bedell, Ava Harmon, and Julie Kane, as well as the long-time efforts of Patrice Melnick, director of Festival of Words.

I hadn't read Crone until this morning, and when I began reading Clare’s written version, Robert Frost’s "Witch of Coos" came to mind. Like Frost, Clare used several voices to weave this supernatural "song" that held her audience spellbound. She used primitive chants divorced from rational, traditional verse, that was further emphasized by costuming, linking sorcery and spiritualism in an imagined dialogue between a wise woman and her devotee. At the reading, the audience was mesmerized by long incantations featuring props of candles, feathers, silk scarves, and a cauldron to deliver lines. 

One of the Crone chants caused me to reread: "The undulating core/of the universe encapsulated/in a most tender bulb of skin./Her breath’s ignition/resurrects the miracle nerve./It is nothing like love,/it is nothing—/Be brave, she says,/It will hurt more than a little/when I grind the scars." Clare is unsparing in her images of female suffering; e.g., lines like "dried blood flakes from her fingers./A black tooth drops/into the cauldron," and I was startled when I heard her read this last line at the performance.

Yet she predicts resurrection and deliverance in the verse: "God’s secret name must not be spoken./And yet, you call upon it over and over./ When you are desperate to believe/you are free." From that point, Clare moves on to more hopeful imagery: "We lie between the five mounds/beneath the flowering pear./Still, the wind gossips/of summer grass." For me, that last line resonated strongly in Whitmanesque power and loveliness.

The performance ended with a quotation from Rilke: "I've been circling for thousands of years" which she uses to preface end verses: "I've been circling for thousands of years,/planting seeds of conception./I've been waiting for God to show a mighty hand./I am an Old Woman, pregnant with ephemeral dust./This is proof enough for me."

In one former comment Clare made concerning the long poem, she claimed that she "channeled" a crone, and, at times during her performance last night, I felt she was or had been channeling when she wrote the entire poem at a week-end retreat. However, I really feel that Crone is a product of the freed-up imagination of a poet who has emerged from the shadows, or her own Shadow, as Jung defines the traumas that live in our memories and cause problems and suffering.

Clare founded the online poetry magazine, MockingHeart Review and Crone is her third book of poetry. It was published by Nixes Mate Books and is available on Amazon. Contact Clare Martin to find out more about copies of this spell-binding book. 

Maine-ly Cold…

Painting by my brother Paul Marquart

So you think that the temp at 32 degrees (and lower with wind chill) in Louisiana is icy? Think of Limestone, Maine at 22 degrees below zero this morning! I say Limestone, Maine, because years ago I experienced 52 degrees below zero (wind chill factored in) one winter night in this northernmost land of winter gales on the northeastern tip of the U.S. near the border of New Brunswick, Canada. I spent one year among potato, dairy, and beef farmers on the Aroostook Plateau because the U.S. Army had sent my husband to Maine. He worked in a radar shack perched at the border of the U.S. and Canada, on “Alert,” searching for any enemy planes that might fly overhead. In the upper story of a farmhouse equipped with an ancient oil stove and a red electric blanket, we survived a bitterly long winter, peering out of the upstairs window at nearly 100 inches of snow that season.

Maine is a place where the sun rises first in the U.S., so we saw sunlight before anyone in my native Louisiana, and I was told that the air was one of the healthiest in the U.S. However, if a person has no indoor interests like reading, listening to music, or writing (and no one owned a television set in my neighborhood), she’s likely to develop a raging case of cabin fever. Think of a place once covered with thick glaciers that smoothed and rounded the hills and mountains, filled rivers, and moved rocks around, and you may be able to envision where I spent that winter. Much of the surrounding land near Limestone included white pine, fir, maple, oak, and spruce trees in dense forests that added to our feelings of isolation. 

But potatoes made Aroostook County, Maine famous. Potatoes formed the mainstay at mealtime for struggling non-commissioned officers in the U.S. Army, and pinto beans came in a close second for a regular table staple. This menu proved so fattening that when we returned to Louisiana, our families marveled at our girths. “How did you gain so much weight living on next to nothing?” they asked. On this poor person’s diet, we managed to become rosy-cheeked and round, despite suffering from the extreme cold. On payday, we sought platters of fried oysters and mugs of beer down the road in Houlton, Maine, but this was a once-a-month occurrence.

Maine’s cold winters have fostered a pantheon of writers; e.g., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Stephen King, disparate types of literary giants; however, both were born in Portland, Maine, and are examples of those who survived merciless winters by writing and reading. As did Sarah Orne Jewett who wrote a series of interconnected sketches of New England life and whose Country of the Pointed Firs became a literary classic. I also think of the essayist E. B. White, but he had enough sense to schedule his visits during summer months.

At one time in the Maine backwoods, moonshine was a thriving industry, and smugglers hid boatloads of illegal whiskey in coves along the Maine coast — a gracious plenty of bathtub gin and rum running provided farmers with extra income. By the time we arrived, prohibition had long ended, but today I wonder whether the dense forests hide illegal activities like meth labs.

Caribou, Maine lay right down the road from us and still has an extensive collection of artifacts from the Red Paint people, but we didn’t frequent places of culture during our stay in Aroostook County, although I should have done more research since French-Canadians in my background formed a large part of the population in my area of Louisiana. The Acadian Historic Village outside Van Buren, Maine contains sixteen fully restored or reconstructed buildings showing how Acadians lived in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

We left Aroostook County near the time of the great Northern Maine Fair and the Crown of Maine Balloon Festival, two occasions during warm weather that brought people out of hibernation. We had endured perhaps the worst winter of my life, and I’ve never returned to that region — perhaps I’ll venture to the Acadia National Park or Monhegan Island one day, but a re-run to Limestone, Maine isn’t on my bucket list.

By May, defrosting had begun in northern Maine, and freezing temps (32 degrees) like those we have been complaining about in New Iberia as “unbearably cold” actually allowed us to go outdoors in shirtsleeves. By June, we had been home in Louisiana one month, just in time to escape the scourge of Maine’s north woods black flies that descend in June and hover in gray clouds of thousands that leave no patch of human skin unbloodied (shades of Louisiana mosquitoes). 

In 1998, a storm President Clinton dubbed as a national disaster covered some areas of Maine with three inches of ice. Are you readers feeling warmer yet?

Painting by Diane’s brother Paul