A Street Named Terpsichore

A flat tire introduced me

to the sirens and their mother.

Before I knew Terpsichore

as a muse or the mother of sirens,

I knew her as a street, relatively

residential, nineteenth century

homes, called shotgun houses, 

stringing each room in succession,

front to back, because properties 

were taxed on width, not depth.

Imagine a street of homes,

sometimes duplexes, with

living room-bedroom-bathroom-

bedroom-dining room-kitchen-

back porch, a long house shaped

the like barrel of a shotgun.

 

Terpsichore had sister streets, all

comprising the Faubourg Lafayette

and Lower Garden District of

the Big Easy. You walked streets

named Erato, Calliope, Clio,

Thalia, Melpomene, Euterpe,

Polymnia, and Urania, and 

Terpsichore (of course),collectively

issuing their siren calls to come

home. My personal favorite was 

Erato, named for the poetry muse,

because I had a flat tire in a station

wagon on the interstate right

at the St. Charles Avenue exit,

and I guided our car full of teenagers

bound for the French Quarter down

the exit ramp, carefully, parking 

on a street named Erato. I fixed 

the flat, not knowing that decades 

later, that Erato and her mother

Terpsichore would remind me

of a flat tire.

 

Tweetspeak Poetry has a prompt this week, involving the muses and their siren songs. 

 

Photograph: A shotgun duplex on Terpsichore Street in New Orleans.

“Your Accent! You Can’t Be from New Orleans!”

When you’re born and raised in a city like New Orleans, you become aware of certain things very early on. 

First, there’s food. The basic New Orleans food groups are red beans and rice (on Mondays), crawfish, shrimp, beignets, and drive-thru daiquiris to go. A fifth food group might be the muffuletta. When I’d stay with relatives in Shreveport in north Louisiana, one aunt would make sure she fixed rice, because she worried I might be homesick.

 

Second, there’s weather. You’ve never met humidity like what saturates New Orleans. When you live in a place bounded by a lake, a river, and a gulf not too far away, and it’s built on swamp and bayous, then you will know what real humidity is like.

 

Third, there’s the accent. It’s not exactly unique; there are echoes of the New Orleans accent in Brooklyn and even south St. Louis. It’s a multicultural gumbo of influences, including French, Spanish, Cajun, Black American, Jewish, Italian, and German, embedded within American English. New Orleanians would be completely at home ordering in a crowded deli in Brooklyn.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Beignets by Julian Rosser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Thursday Readings

 

“Coyote,” poem by Bret Harte – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Elegy: #LeilaAlaoui – Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

Alexander Pope’s “To Lady Mary Wortley Montagu” – Karen Swallow Prior at The Priory.

 

“Lepanto,” poem by G.K. Chesterton – The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Coleman’s Bed – poem by David Whyte.

The Book on My Father's Bookshelf

The book sat on a bookshelf in my parent’s bedroom for as long as I can remember. The shelf itself was a former window, occupied by an air conditioner when they became available in late 1950s New Orleans. When central air became possible, the window was reconfigured as a bookshelf. 

The title of the book was The Battle of Liberty Place: the Overthrow of Carpetbag Rule in New Orleans, written by Stuart Omer Landry. It was printed by a local New Orleans publisher, Pelican Publishing, in 1955. This volume was apparently part of a numbered edition, except the number is left blank. If I remember correctly, a friend of my father’s at the publisher gave him a copy as a gift.

 

The book tells the story of a pitched battle that occurred in 1874, when New Orleans was still occupied by federal troops. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Illustration: A drawing of the battle near the Customs House on Canal Street in New Orleans.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Biden’s FBI targeted ‘radical traditionalist’ Catholics – Brandon Goldman at The Spectator.

 

”Shop Class as Soulcraft”: Let Us Recognize the Yeoman Aristocracy – C.R. Wiley at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Our Knowledge System Has Collapsed. Can We Survive Without It? – Ted Gioia at The Free Press.

 

Emerging Civil War Podcast: A Grand Opening Squandered – Sean Michael Chick on the Battle of Petersburg.

"New Orleans Poems in Creole and French" by Jules Choppin

When you are born and grow up in a state that has parishes instead of counties, whose legislature was required to write laws in both French and English as late as 1911, whose legal system is based on Napoleonic Code, and where Mardi Gras is an official state holiday, you gradually realize that you come from a very different place. 

Louisiana is an unusual state. North Louisiana, where my father grew up, could pass for East Texas or Mississippi; it’s Bible Belt country. My mother’s family was a combination of German immigrants and Cajuns from south-central and southwest Louisiana. I grew up in New Orleans, where people’s accents could pass for Brooklynese. I had close relatives who spoke German, Cajun French, and English. My mother didn’t go grocery shopping; she “made groceries.” 

 

When you’re a child, however, all of that seems normal. It’s your day-to-day experience. Only when you grow up and move away do you realize how strange it all sounds – and how difficult it can be to explain to people not from Louisiana. 

My childhood and family experiences came back in a rush when a friend handed me a copy of New Orleans Poems in Creole and French by Jules Choppin (1830-1914). 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

The Men Who Were Worthy of Athens – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

Poetry Prompt: Revels & Celebrations at Colony! – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Which words are not – poem by Laurie Klein at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

‘Insomnia, My Sometime Muse’ and ‘Netherworld’ – poems by Norman Solowey at Society of Classical Poets.

 

‘Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

A Little of the Story of Wilhelmina Bosch

She wasn’t famous. She didn’t do anything that would make historians sit up and take notice. But there is a story attached to Wilhemina Ostermann.  

She was born on Dec. 5, 1833, somewhere in Germany. We know who her parents were – Johann Ostermann and Lucie Hoffman Ostermann – but that’s about all we know. We can presume, but it’s only a presumption, that she had siblings. In the 1850s, Wilhelmina (and likely her parents) came to the United States, part of the second great wave of German immigrants to America in the 19^th century. German immigrants had come to Louisiana since the 1720s (New Orleans was founded in 1718), many settling in what was called the “German Coast,” a few miles west of the city. Today, the small town of Des Allemands testifies to that early German presence – the name is French for “The Germans.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

What My History Books Left Out

In early November, we visited friends and family in the New Orleans area. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, we found ourselves with some of our oldest friends wandering the French Quarter. For a break, we stopped at the small café operated by the Historic New Orleans Collection, a museum that is all about the history of the city. In the shop (all museums everywhere have shops), our friend pointed me toward a book called Afro-Creole Poetry by Clint Bruce. 

The work is a collection of 79 poems that were published between 1862 and 1870 in two newspapers in New Orleans – L’Union and La Tribune Nouvelle-Orleans. As the names employ, they were published in French: La Tribune also had an English edition. L’Union began publication a few months after the city fell to the ships of Union Admiral David Farragut. The paper lasted about two years, and it was almost immediately replaced by La Tribune.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

"The House Uptown" by Melissa Ginsburg

Ava has lived in Iowa for the 14 years of her life. Most of that life was on a farm, until her father lost the property and then his own life. Her mother works in a factory, but she, too, dies, from a rare disease. The only relative Ava knows of is her grandmother, Lane, who lives in New Orleans. And that’s where Ava is sent. 

Lane is not only an artist; she’s a highly gifted one. She lives in the only family home in what’s called Uptown – the area that was built along St. Charles Avenue and encompasses the Garden District, Tulane and Loyola universities, and Audubon Park and Zoo. Lane also stays in something of a personal fog, the result of almost non-stop marijuana smoking. Her hired assistant, Oliver, manages her bills, her life, and her marijuana supply. Ava is thrust into the middle of this world, and Lane is struck at how much the girl resembles her mother. 

 

But this is New Orleans, a place where everyone has secrets. Like the young man running for city council, following in his father’s footsteps. He and Lane share a secret from years ago, when he was the same age Ava is now. Long-buried secrets have a habit of erupting into daylight. And that can result in violence.

 

Melissa Ginsburg

The House Uptown is the second novel by author Melissa Ginsburg. It’s a story of New Orleans, and remarkably it’s the New Orleans I remember growing up in. Few writers get the sense of the city right, but Ginsburg has managed to do it.

 

A native of Houston, Ginsburg has also published the novel Sunset City; two poetry collections, Doll Apollo and Dear Weather Ghost; and three poetry chapbooks. She studied poetry at the Iowa Writers workshop, and her poems have been published in numerous literary journals. She is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, and she also serves as associate editor of Tupelo Quarterly. 

 

The House Uptown is a compelling read, difficult to put down. Ginsburg has a way of keeping the reader focused on the story and the page. You think you know how the story is going to end, and you discover you can be right and wrong at the same time. 

“True Blue Detective” and “Criminal Instinct” by Vito Zuppardo

Zach Nelson is a retired New Orleans police officer. He’s been living with his son and daughter-in-law; his wife was murdered many years before during a robbery. Family circumstances require a temporary move to a retirement home. Zach, irrepressible on a bad day and exuberant on a good one, soon makes friends – and an enemy in the retirement home’s administrator. 

The home is a place where strange things happen, strange as in untimely deaths. While Zach and his friends are trying to figure out what’s going on, the reader knows – the doctor who owns the home has a gambling habit, and he needs money for both gambling and paying off debts owed to unsavory people. So he arranges an accident for a retirement home resident and magically produces an organ donation agreement. The organs are sold to a shadowy figure who flies in and out of the New Orleans Lakefront Airport.

True Blue Detective is the first of several in the series of the same name by Vito Zuppardo. There are currently six in the series, most of them featuring New Orleans Police Detective Mario DeLuca (True Blue Detective does not). This one is alternately horrifying and funny; the craziness of the life depicted in this retirement home almost boggles the reader’s mind. The book includes a host of memorable characters who seem to walk right out of the New Orleans culture. There’s also a great chase scene up St. Charles Avenue that ends on the River Road.

Criminal Instinct is a prequel to the series (likely written after the series was underway). It’s a novella featuring Detective DeLuca, who is sitting with his girlfriend at a restaurant while watching a diner staring at a couple dining nearby. DeLuca recognizes what is about to happen – the diner is going to shoot one or both of the people he’s watching. 

The detective intervenes, stops the shooting before it starts, and finds out what’s going on. The woman is the diner’s sister, and the man is a drug pusher, woman abuser, and general low life. DeLuca makes a promise to bring the low life down. And DeLuca always keeps his promises.

Vito Zuppardo

Zuppardo retired from the casino business in 2003 and began writing full-time. His the author of nine police novels in the True Blue Detective and Lucy Voodoo series.

If you like police stories packed with action, True Blue Detective and Criminal Instinct are for you. Along with underlying (and sometimes overt) humor and bodies – lots of bodies. 

Top photograph: a view of the New Orleans business direct from Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, by Ben Dutton via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Perpetual Care: Stories” by James Nolan

For a native of New Orleans, reading the 16 short stories ofPerpetual Care by James Nolan is an immersion in both memory and reality. This is the city I remember, and this is the city I know, the one that is part of me for life. Even for the two stories set in San Francisco, strong New Orleans connections undergird the narrative.

Writers who know the city well, like John Kennedy Toole of The Confederacy of Dunces and Nolan, know how New Orleanians talk. What Southern accents exist in the city are imports. Natives, particularly those born and raised within the boundaries of Orleans Parish, have “the accent” – a curious mixture of French, Spanish, and African-American with added influences of Irish, Italian, and German immigrants. It sounds like Brooklyn and south St. Louis but still different from both. Nolan’s caught it exactly right in his stories.

The stories may be New Orleans-centric, but they reach beyond the city. In “The Immortalist,” a man attends the memorial service of a friend from the hippie culture youth. “Why Isn’t Everything Where It Used to Be?” concerns an older woman slipping into Alzheimer’s and takes the bus from the suburbs into the city because she knows she has to meet her mother and sisters for shopping. In “Knock Knock,” a boy slips away from potential sexual abuse. “La Vie en Rose Construction Co.” is about a courtyard repair that looks to go on indefinitely. The collection even includes a mystery story, “Open Mic,” in which a police detective investigates the disappearance of a young woman.

James Nolan

My favorite story is the title story, “Perpetual Care,” because it is so New Orleans. A woman tending to the family tomb in one of New Orleans’ “cities of the dead” is startled to hear singing come from the tomb across the walkway – and a cultural phenomenon is born, complete with food carts, the Jazz Festival, and tourist buses. It’s a laugh-out-loud story, and it’s perfectly believable in a city like New Orleans.

Nolan received a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California (Berkeley and Santa Cruz). He’s taught writing and literature at universities in the United States, Spain, and China, and directed the Writing Institute at Loyola University in New Orleans for 12 years. His books include Drunk on Salt (2014), Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy

(2017), Higher Ground (2011), Jaime Gil de Biedma, Longing: Selected Poems (translation, 1993), Pablo Neruda, Stones of the Sky (translation, 2002), Perpetual Care:Stories (2008), What Moves is Not the Wind (1980),Why I Live in the Forest (1974), and You Don't Know Me: New and Selected Stories (2014). He lives in New Orleans.

The characters populating the stories of Perpetual Care are classic New Orleans people – police officers, plumbers, strippers, bartenders, men whose families pay them to stay away, a would-be writer determined to get published at any cost, the French Quarter residents ready to commit homicide if one more vampire-tour group comes by, the elderly clinging to the houses they live in because they’re anchored in the sense of place, the people who respond to chain letters. New Orleans people, yes, but people recognizable anywhere.

“City of a Million Dreams” by Jason Berry

New Orleans, the city where I was born and grew up in, turned 300 years old last year, rather old by American standards. Founded by the French, managed for a time by the Spanish, incorporated into the United States with the Louisiana Purchase, then a part of the Confederacy before it was dragged back into the Union with Reconstruction, the city has a history that’s colorful, turbulent, diverse, and still being lived.

These days, I usually approach books and articles about New Orleans with doubts. How much of what I read will be ideological? How much does political correctness seep in? Will I recognize my hometown in what I’m reading, or will it come across as some alien place, unrelated to anything I know?

City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 by Jason Berry captures a considerable amount of the city’s color and turbulence. It’s an account of a city that’s includes usually forgotten elements and people but also manages to avoid the traps of ideology. In short, I recognize my city in this story of its history. The problem I have is that I don’t recognize enough of it. 

Berry is an investigative reporter who lives in New Orleans and who’s written some 10 books, including on subjects as diverse as the Catholic Church crisis, the power of money in the Catholic church, a history of New Orleans music, a novel about Louisiana politics, and others. He is a producing City of a Million Dreams as a documentary film, expected to be released this year. 

The book begins at the beginning, with the founding by the French in 1718, specifically by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, the man known for his snake-tattooed body that always impressed the native tribes. Berry tells a good story of Louisiana’s first 100 years, covering the French, Spanish, and early American periods, along with the powerful influences on the city by the French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, slave rebellions in the West Indies, yellow fever, and French national and colonial politics. 

Jason Berry

It was during the discussion of the period leading up to and including the Civil War and Reconstruction eras that I began to see the book’s strong point – the emphasis on the city’s musical history – was also its weak point. The emphasis on music allows an enhanced discussion of the history of the city’s African-American people, including both slaves and “free people of color.” But it also means that other elements are crowded out. The reader gets an extended discussion of specific musicians and a funeral home operator, but not a single reference to John McDonough, the philanthropist who shaped the lives of hundreds of thousands of people through the public schools, and few references to the importance played by city’s position as a leading seaport.

Aside from the discussion of colonial history, the book does provide solid background on how the city’s neighborhoods developed, where Congo Square came from, the original of "second-lining" funerals, and how New Orleans’ musicians, like Louis Armstrong, became part of the city’s musical diaspora across the United States and into Europe. But you will find very little on the city’s contribution to World War II and the space program, and the role of businesses and industry, including cotton. 

City of a Million Dreams is uneven, and its emphasis on music likely reflects the author’s previous work in that area. The music is a fascinating and important aspect of the city’s history. But other aspects are important as well, and Berry could have his excellent storytelling style to those as well. 

Top photograph by Robson Hatsukami Morgan via Unsplash. Used with permission

Dylan Thomas, Christmas, New Orleans, and Me

I remember my childhood Christmas celebrations by presents and relatives.

The earliest Christmas I recall must have been when I was three. My mother, at her wit’s end by my constant pulling of pots and pans from the shelves, prevailed upon my father to buy a toy set, which was interesting, but not as interesting as the jack-in-the-box my father had searched New York City for, or the Davy Crockett coonskin hat (with faux racoon tail) that was all the rage because of the television series with Fess Parker. The Christmas puppy arrived when I was six. The Lionel model train came when I was seven. The “big boy’s” bike (26-inch wheels) showed up when I was 9. The bb gun came at 10. The last remembered present was a chess set using the characters of Augustan Rome – Augustus for the king, Livia for the queen, and Cicero for the bishop. I still have it.

And the relatives. We lived in New Orleans, my mother’s hometown, and she came from a large family. For years, our suburban ranch home was the place for Christmas dinner, for no other reason that it had a large den that could hold everyone for dinner. My mother would always make the pies and the fruit salad. My father would cook the Christmas turkey and make oyster dressing, which everyone in the family raved about. Except me. I wouldn’t eat it, possibly because I saw what the raw oysters looked like going into it. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The Circus: The Last Hurrah of Childhood

I was 12. My soon-to-be-sister-in-law was taking me and her younger sister to the circus. I had been to the circus once before, but had few memories.

This was the Shrine Circus, which came annually to New Orleans and set up in what was then the largest building for shows and exhibitions in the city – the Municipal Auditorium downtown. The auditorium continued to operate until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when it suffered flooding and wind damage. It is currently closed, but at the time I went to the Shrine Circus, that was far into the future.

The auditorium is bounded by North Rampart Street, Basic Street, and Congo Square. In fact, it’s right across North Rampart from the French Quarter. It’s built adjacent to what used to be known as Storyville, New Orleans’ famed red light district where jazz was born. The area is now known as Faubourg Treme, but when I was 12 it was more simply “downtown” – we didn’t have “faubourgs” back then. Downtown was where you went for entertainment; all of the large movie theaters were downtown – the Saenger, the Loew’s State, the Joy, and the RKO Orpheum. In the next few years, much would be swept away in a wave of demographic and social change.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Image by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

How to Throw the Best Party Ever

In  Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears,  Margaret Feinberg discusses one way she dealt with the awful physical pain she experienced with chemotherapy for breast cancer.

She threw herself a party.

Actually, she threw herself several parties. She celebrated, by herself, with her husband, and with others. She partied, she ate good food, she grabbed on to savor everything good thing life had to offer.

The partying had a purpose. It was an act of defiance, defying a disease and a course of treatment that is devastating physically, emotionally and spiritually. But defy she did. She fought back with celebration.

All this partying and celebration brought to mind Mickey Easterling.

From the time I was 8 or 9 to my senior year in college, I spent a lot of time at my father’s printing business in downtown New Orleans. Most of that time was spent working – especially weekends and summers – and some of that time was spent partying, like at Mardi Gras.

During the work times, I learned how to do just about everything – operate the printing machines, the paper cutter (a small guillotine), the postage metering machine, the collating machine, the addressograph, and even a machine that tied packages in string. I made deliveries all over downtown New Orleans and the French Quarter. I took checks to the bank. After I turned 15 and got my driver’s license, I drove big bags of mail to the New Orleans Post Office.

And I met a lot of unusual people.

The office was often a veritable parade of politicians, candidates, socialites, businessmen, non-profits and others seeking printing and mailing services. Once (when I wasn’t there) a young man came into the office seeking to have pro-communist propaganda printed; my father showed him the door. The young man’s name was Lee Harvey Oswald. After the assassination of President Kennedy, the FBI was crawling all over the downtown business district, tracing Oswald’s footsteps and activities, and they interviewed my father because of that one short meeting.

The parade of customers included quite a few local “characters” and celebrities, and one of them was a socialite named Mickey Easterling. She was a small woman with a large (very large) presence, given to flamboyant clothes and a distinctive, loud voice recognized anywhere. I remember seeing her many times, in my father’s office as well as her own office and home. She was a gracious and friendly as she was loud. Everyone merited a “hello how ya doin’ dawlin” from her. And she meant it.

She was a “presence” in New Orleans, and knew how to get things done. As much as she mixed with the powers that ran the city, she tended to favor the poor and disenfranchised, never forgetting her own background and upbringing. She was known to African-Americans as a tireless champion of civil rights – not the easiest of things to be in 1960s and 1970s New Orleans and in the circles she ran with.

Mrs. Easterling died last year. Instead of a wake or visitation, she threw herself a party in the lobby of the Saenger Orleans Theater. You’d have to see the lobby to appreciate it. The ticket office is on Canal Street, and you have to walk a good marbled half block through the long lobby to reach the theater itself. Entering Mrs. Easterling’s last party from Canal Street, you’d walk up that marbled hallway to the area in front of the theater doors, where guests and mourners found the guest of honor waiting.

 I am not making this up. You can read the newspaper reports.

She was a character in a city famous for its characters. And while I still can’t decide whether that either the wackiest thing I’ve ever heard of, or the one in poorest taste, or both, it was vintage Mickey Easterling.

It was also an act of defiance. She couldn’t stop death, but she didn’t have to surrender to it. And she wouldn’t.

Margaret Feinberg defied illness and pain, and fought back with joy. And a lot of parties. She wouldn’t surrender to breast cancer, no matter what happened. And what she was learning was that the outcome was less important than the fight. She didn’t know how it would end, but she was determined not to be defeated. And she wasn’t.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Fight Back with Joy. To see more posts on this chapter, “How to Throw the Best Party Ever,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Kevin Casper via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

On Being a Writer

I’ve been reading On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts by Charity Craig and Ann Kroeker. I like this book for its simplicity and straightforwardness. I like the wisdom Ann and Charity bring to the subject of writing – wisdom born of experience. And I like how each chapter is organized: Stories about writing, and exploration (live, respond, writing prompt, a bonus activity, and discussion questions). And you can ask yourself the discussion questions, or you can ask them in a group.

Here’s one of the discussion questions from chapter 1, “Identify:”

When did you first call yourself a writer?

I thought I knew. Turns out I didn’t.

It might have been when I was 10, when my father brought home from his printing business a bound volume of blank pages. It had a pale green paper cover. Today we would call it a journal. I even know what I wrote in it – a mystery story for kids, about kids, involving secret passages and tunnels (and likely borrowed wholesale from The Hardy Boys).

But then I realized something. What prompted my father to make that book? It didn’t just materialize in his head as an idea. Something told him this would be something I would enjoy. So, clearly, there was some pre-existing event or condition before that bound volume was placed in my hands.

It was likely linked to my family reputation as “the reader.” I was an early reader. When I was six, I pedaled my bike to the local dime store and bought Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion for 59 cents. That was the first book I bought on my own.

Sometime between the ages of six and ten, something happened that suggested to my parents that I might be writer.

However, my father wanted me to be a doctor. That had been his dream, which he was forced to abandon when he graduated from high school in 1933, the pit of the Great Depression. College had been out. Instead, he went to work as a roughneck in the East Texas oil fields.

Charity Craig

I tried pre-med for one year at college. Too much chemistry for someone who was more interested in English literature. I even considered (for a very short time) the ministry. And it was my father who advised against a business degree and instead still do something that would help me earn a living – journalism. (My father had worked for a time in the circulation department of the Shreveport Journal, and after serving in World War II for a trade publisher in New Orleans, which is where he met my mother.)

Was there a moment when I first thought of myself as a writer? Probably, but it’s buried in the mists and fog.

Ann Kroeker

But I can pinpoint the moment when I first said (or admitted) I was a poet. We were visiting New Orleans in 2010, and I was paying for several poetry books I was purchasing at the Faulkner House Bookstore in Pirate’s Alley. The owner looked over the books, and looked at me and said, “Are you a poet?” I funbled with an answer, something like “I write it a bit.” So he repeated his question. “Are you a poet?”

And I said yes.

So if you’d like to know what On Being a Writer can do, just look over what I just wrote. I moved from a description of the book to a question to the search for an answer that took me back to the 1930s and 1940s – before I was born – and then forward. Ann and Charity’s book is simple, but deceptively so. It will make you think, and think hard.

Yes, I am a poet. And yes, I am a writer.

Photograph: Faulkner House Bookstore in New Orleans. The man on the left was the one who asked me, "Are you a poet?"

The cities of the dead

The cities of the dead,

they say, or they think

they say, come alive

on certain days,

at certain times,

whisps and vapors

escaping from the tombs,

monuments, to celebrate

or wail, laugh or moan,

a false gaiety,

a disguised agony,

to be sure but

the only time life

can be felt, not where

desire lives, but where

desire is granted,

on certain days,

at certain times. That’s

what they say, anyway.

I wonder what

they would say

about the cemeteries.

Photograph: A cemetery in New Orleans.