Poets and Poems: Alfred Nicol and "After the Carnival"

When you’re born and raised in New Orleans, you soon learn that one holiday frames and defines the city. The Mardi Gras season stretches for some three weeks before the final day of Shrove Tuesday. It’s filled with parades of floats with their masked revelers tossing beads and other trinkets to the crowds, marching bands, costumed balls, and (at night) the flambeaux carriers walking with the parades.  

My mother, also a native New Orleanian, always referred to Mardi Gras as “Carnival,” like its Brazilian counterpart.

 

Mardi Gras culminated on the Tuesday before Lent, with what seemed a series of endless parades beginning with the Krewe of Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club. It was followed by the parade of the Krewe of Rex, King of Carnival, and the “truck” parades of Crescent City and Elks. ending with the nighttime parade of the Krewe of Comus (now discontinued). The balls of Rex and Comus were held at Municipal Auditorium, and at midnight, the two courts would meet and officially end the Mardi Gras season.

 

After carnival came Lent. Tuesday was excess in all of its varied forms; Wednesday was restraint and ashes on the forehead. Experiencing Mardi Gras in New Orleans was like experiencing a cultural theology, moving from riotous sin to humble repentance.

 

Reading After the Carnival: Poems by Alfred Nicol is a Mardi Gras kind of experience, plumbing both the depths and the heights of human existence. 

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Review of Like: Poems by A.E. Stallings – Midge Goldberg at New Verse Review.

 

“George Crabbe,” poem by Edgar Arlington Robinson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

John Thomas Smith’s Antiquities of Old London – Spitalfields Life.

 

Shakespeare’s Film Moir: Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Poet Laura: Gardens and Grandpa – Sandra Fox Murphy at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Poets and Poems: Julien Vocance and “One Hundred Visions of War”

I’ll be honest here. I thought I knew, or was at least aware of, the major poets, British or otherwise, of World War I. I was wrong. I’d never heard of the poet Julien Vocance. One black eye for me.  

He wasn’t just another war poet. Vocance did something that no one had done before. He used the haiku form of poetry to help him understand what he’d experienced in the Great War. And it was his work, collected as One Hundred Visions of War, that first popularized the writing of haiku.

 

Perhaps that’s two black eyes for me – one for not knowing Vocance, and one for not knowing how the haiku form moved into Western culture.

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