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POSTCARD FROM NEW ORLEANS By Jonathan Holt Poet in the City "Is this a long poem?" one white-haired woman asked another as nine readers took their places on a weathered boat in the corner of Antenna, a small New Orleans art gallery. Perhaps realising she'd been overheard, the woman giggled and sat down, carefully, on a bright green television. For an art installation created by the artist-poet Mark Yakich, this gallery in the blighted and bohemian Bywater neighbourhood is littered with detritus: several broken chairs, a toilet, a discarded vacuum cleaner. All of it painted a cheerful pastel green. Black-marker graffiti spreads across the gunmetal grey floor and over the green objects. Much of it is philosophically random. Some of it is rude. If the effect is incoherent and impenetrable, this may the point. The installation is a three-dimensional exploration of "Green Zone New Orleans", an ambitious post-Katrina poem that channels the fierce incoherence and brokenness of a city that is now more difficult than ever to read. In Bywater, which is the city's New Cross or Kenington (poor in funds, rich in creativity), nearly every block has houses that are crumbling, pristine or works-in-progress. Almost all still bear the spray-painted crosshairs rescuers used to mark their homes and bodies off their list three years ago. In a city where many buildings sat casually decaying before the catastrophe, direct cause and effect are not really for the observer to know after it. In the end, Yakich's poem (subtitled "A Poem for Nine Voices in Unison") took barely 10 minutes to perform, with each of the nine readers taking a section in turn. The language in the poem is sexual, biblical and irreverent ("Facts first: Jesus was / A gay, black man. / Just say it aloud / And see how nice / It sounds.") In performance, the poem spoke loudest, literally, at the surprise climax, when all nine readers re-read their sections at once. The whirlwind of noise they created was not unlike a hurricane or a heave beyond grief or a city of stunned citizens finding their voices all at once. |