FRENCH QUARTER POETRY

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FRENCH QUARTER POETRY

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“The 19th century—
happened for me around
my 19th birthday.”
—Andrei Codrescu,
“Not A Pot To Piss In,”
The Muse Is Always
Half-Nude in New Orleans

Lafayette Cemetery

Have you ever felt—
Like you were living, breathing
Dying & rotting?

All at the same time—
Lafayette Cemetery
Is that fucking way.

Smoking pot at night—
Makes the living dead alive
Big Easy the Tomb.

I used to be dead—
But dope said that’s being square
“Surprise me,” it smirked.

So one dark midnight—
Down there in Chez Lafayette
I got stoned real good.

That dynamite weed said—
Dead as all these folks up here
That’s you these past years.

Pot can be shapely—
Shaped by dark purplish shadows
Smoke knows death, my dear.

A metaphor came—
Filling me with emptiness
Scattering my thoughts.

“Who are you?” they asked—
“And what do you want?” they said
Pot made them leery.

“Who are you?” I asked—
“And where do you come from?”
The tombs whispered “Home.”

View Carré Voyants

Mardi Gras ghosts spoke—
Thru me they could live again
There in the moonlight.

It was midnight then—
In the dark garden of good
And Big Easy evil.

“You’ll be our Poet—
For us French Quarter Voyants
We’ll see thru your eyes.”

“Our dear raison d’etre—
Even tho you are cross-eyed
Our second-sight boy.”

“Enivrez-vous—
As Miss Baudelaire once said
So perfectly drunk.”

“Your paradise lips—
So deliciously rotten
Our Queen for a Day.”

“Demiurge delight—
Whose history we shall piece
Together tonight.”

“We have been waiting—
For a young sucker like you
Our young View Carré voyant!”

Big Easy Bijou

They didn’t stop there—
They wrote stories in my head
Invisible ink.

Henceforth they became—
Djinns of the hookah dream
Hashish hooligans.

My pipe overflowed—
Obsessed with young male eros
I got high each night.

Lillith & Venus—
Flowed thru my veins, arteries
Mysterious meat.

Cornucopic cum—
Made me giddy, amorous
Boy poet of pot.

I became their pet—
Neither man nor woman born
I burned just for them.

“Well, smoking that pot—
Is surely the devil’s work”
My friends said to me.

“A Pandora’s Box”—
“Ghosts from Past & Present
Will surely haunt you.”

French Quarter Finesse

But what did they know?—
Slogging thru history blind,
Deaf & fuckin’ dumb.

Imagination—
That’s the reason I survived
Orphée’s talking head.

John’s poor head there on—
Salome’s silver platter
Blank-eyed paradise?

Of course, nobody—
Heard what the living tomb said
The dead womb of words.

Napoleon knew—
His smooth porcelain voice
Elba escapee.

Lost lives spoke to me—
Strolling the cemetery
Nights of past glory.

Laocoon strangled—
Youths forever despotic
Centuries of cock.

Snakes curling from graves—
Transylvanian mountains
Perched above tureens

Lafayette Séances

And so, late at night—
Strange longings, ancient
Dark embroideries.

Mysteriously—
Alert & moiling about
Above ground with me.

Mississippi ooze—
Just inches below each step
Decay, quicksand love.

The rotting odor—
The mildewy stench & stink
Centuries gone by.

Bit Easy moonlight—
Caribbean past glories
Spanish empire gold.

Napoleonic—
Old banana republics
Oozing thru us all.

Young Creole boyfriends—
Young Haitian slaves of love
Chiaroscuro cock.

“You are us” they said—
Inching their way so slowly
Sodom & Miss G.

Epicures in Sepulchers

Vanished people gab—
Epicures in sepulchers
Gourmet groaning groins.

Lafayette midnights—
Broken urns & worn statues
My Voodoo Hoodoo.

The sorrowful songs—
Of desiccating boudoirs
Beneath delta sun.

Relieved angels sigh—
When things cool off late at night
That’s when I listen.

Hidden above ground—
Above slimy squeaky mud
The dead wait for me.

Sucking sweet sorrow—
Cream of my adolescence
I let them drink me.

Leaning against crypts—
Countess Bathory sips my
Spluge squirting on stone.

I beat off for them—
My penis their kind of thing
Cumly nostalgia.

Voodoo Venus-Torsos

Poets fuck around—
Resurrecting living dead
Whispering jazz-texts.

Putting words down on—
Paper so outdated now
Fails all the time.

It’s like writing on—
Clay tablets in cuneiform
Confronting silence.

The started gluttons—
Greed for gruel of young gods
Need more than just words.

Born-again spirits—
Don’t need old dead oracles
They need dumb hustlers.

Greedy dogs from hell—
Beg for boners of young love
Like they used to know.

Consulting the dead—
Takes cum & not merely words
To unlock the fosse.

To wake them again—
Toppling funerariia
Waxing withered hearts.

New Orleans Night

Old coins, dead spiders—
Dried livers, coarse spiky thorns
Death on white-trash cross.

This is not what these—
Imaginary beings
Come back to Earth for.

They don’t want old books—
Spun out not-born of the flesh
Blooming in the void.

It’s the messy world—
Dimly lit City of Night
Rainy cracked pavements.

The yolk of chicken—
Young peasant boy cumly pricks
Straight from the bayou.

Sluggish garfish boyz—
Anchored in swampy romance
One night stand blowjobs.

I can remember—
Dark Carpathian mountains
Son of Dracula.

Son of Dracula

They showed me again—
Dismembered feudal estates
Doomed monasteries.

Dark Ages castles—
Perched on high mountain crags
Bad Balkan boyfriends.

Ghost still drinking blood—
Sucking off young peasant pricks
Seminal midnights.

Count Dracula sucks—
And drinks thick runny mucous
Draining Europe dry.

A thousand virgins—
Pretty pricks from pouty Prague
Budapest bad boyz.

Nietzsche himself signed—
My death certificate more
Than a thousand times.

Communism said—
God is dead & Lenin too
In that Zurich cabaret.

But Dada was dead—
And Cold War gargoyles were dead
Marx & Freud dead too.

French Quarter Boyfriend

My Mardi Gras muse—
My Minoan macho male
Nude Lafitte’s lover.

Came from who knows where—
Illyria all the way to
Daccia Felix.

A serpentine kid—
A Babylonian hustler
With snakes for long ears.

Cumly mountain-folk—
Had traded him centuries
Ago to pirates.

Black Sea vandals who—
Sold him to Greece, Roman pimps
Byzantine whores.

Ali Babu and—
His Forty Thieves knew him well
He outlived them all.

Arabian nights—
Told its sad sordid story
Thank god for hippies.

He hustled my way—
Uncanny Japanese style
As my drug-dealer.

Letting me see him—
His Kabuki kimono
Slipping to the floor.

Nude New Orleans Muse

He had wide shoulders—
Thick petulant-cobalt lips
Rimmed with faint peach-fuzz.

He had a long neck—
From centuries of cruising
Undulating tricks.

He looked like 19—
We sat smoking & chatting
What else could we do?

He blew some smoke-rings—
Into my stunned naïve face
He was a dream-boat.

Once he was Rimbaud—
Making Miss Verlaine grovel
Hash & absinthe.

Hart Crane knew him too—
Aztec-Orizaba trick
Over the railing.

Once he was Beatnik—
Young handsome Neil Cassidy
Hoodlum Fifties stud.

Once he was all mine—
Just a cute Gretna Garbo
Alone as can be.

He told me simply—
Poetry’s challenge was
Hidden in a Pipe.

Intoxicated—
Big easy adolescent
New Orleans nude muse.

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GOODBYE BATON ROUGE

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“Minutes ago your teachers
were students themselves,
then student-teachers, then
assistant professors, then
tenured professors, and the
whole process was
uninterrupted by anything
more than a summer vacation
in Europe. We are teaching
in an institution run by
institutionalized people who
have invested all their time
into the institution! The
lunatics run the asylum.”
—Andrei Codrescu

“Creative writing programs
over the past half-century
have endorsed the maxim
“Write what you know,” so
why don’t we have more
novels about creative writing
programs? Departmental
meetings, thesis advisories,
workshop tensions, suicidal
poets, deferred student
loans—the material is ripe
for the picking.”—Yelena
Akhtiorskaya, “Teaching
Poetry No Longer Books,”
The Yewish Daily Forward
11/26/2010

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Andrei Codrescu

Well, so much for Andrei Codrescu & his tenure teaching writing job at Louisiana State University. The Romanian-American poet no longer has to commute between New Orleans where he lives & Baton Rouge where he used to teach. Codrescu retired in 2009 & now haunts his charming Post-Katrina View Carré precincts—the famous French Quarter of the Big Easy still lollygagging down by the polluted, dying Gulf of Mexico.

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Parting Gift

Codrescu’s parting gift to LSU since teaching there in 1984—has been the legacy of his creative writing classes & now his summary of what happened, “The Poetry Lesson.” It’s a literary genre in itself—non-fiction, not-poem, not-memoir. Somewhat similar to the amusing rants of Theodore Roethke in his essay “Last Class” about rich Bennington college girls and also reminiscent of Richard Hugo’s “Stray Thoughts on Roethke and Teaching” in Triggering Town.

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New Orleans Writers

Louisiana & especially New Orleans has always attracted writers—like Walt Whitman, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Anne Rice, Andrei Codrescu & many others. After the Katrina Hurricane, the Big Easy itself has become a kind of “Exquisite Corpse”—like Codrescu’s enduring avant-garde literary journal. The flooded, levee-cursed city still walks, talks & tells stories—even as the Gulf of Mexico continues to rot & decay with BP poisons & oily shit & refuse. The dying Redneck Riviera along the coast from New Orleans to Key West—seems to only add to the ongoing Big Easy transgressive charm & eternal View Carré ancient decadence so attractive to poets & writers.

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The Poetry Lesson

“The Poetry Lesson” is really about Codrescu the creative writing teacher—rather than the campus Mississippi minions who moiled around mindless in his creative writing class. He divided his students into two types: the “restless ironic” ones and the “mordant, obsessive” types—with himself falling somewhere in between.

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I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

As for me, Professor Codrescu reminds one of Sandra Dee—the naïve nurse who sails for Haiti in Jacques Tourneau’s moody, film-noir classic “I Walked With a Zombie” (1943). There on an isolated old sugar plantation, in the eerie sugar cane fields under the full moon—she discovers a society of undead Zombies much like the living undead students on the LSU campus. Voodoo drums in the darkness—gimme dat Voodoo-Hoodoo black magic!!! Aint dat where primitive unconscious Poetry comes from—form the hypnotic loins of African Kings, the Mandingo Dark Meat of Dinge Queens & Groaning Gay Goddesses?

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Haitian Zombies

These living undead Zombies from Haiti—that caused so much trouble & heartache for poor Colonel Sutpen in William Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!!!” Aren’t these Charles Bon Spirits & Philoprogenitive Phantoms—still here among us more alive than dead? Don’t they remain more dead than alive—deep inside us & our haunted, quivering Thighs & throbbing, yearning Pussies?

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Balkan Baton Rouge

What’s supposed to happen now—to all those young talented so-called gifted creative writing students there in those empty Codrescu classrooms at LSU? Those silent, echoing Allen Hall Tearoom Séances—and all those queer Quad “Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte” Memories lost now without that crazy Romanian Romantic Voice in the Balkan Baton Rouge Honeysuckle Verandah Evenings?

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Delta Zombie Poetry

Who’s gonna take up the Slack—and the slovenly Slide back into the Louisiana Swampy Slime? Who’s gonna seduce—and push of the undead Delta Zombie Moment into the crummy Present Performance of Poetry Now in the Twenty-First Apocalyptic Millennium?

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The Living Dead

Who’s gonna beat the fuckin’ life back into Living Dead—helping the Undead Undergraduates to write living, breathing Poetry again? From the North Louisiana conservative religious right Repug Dummies up there in Shreveport—down to the wild Creole & Cajun cretins of the Zydeco Zombie Bayous way down South? How can these young naïve Louisiana Delta Denizens even begin to wanna write Poetry now anyway?

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Balkan Beatnik Professor

It’s a natural question for a Transylvanian aging Balkan Beatnik professor like Codrescu to ask—after all the living Undead of Europe & succulent-blood-suckers of the primal Louisiana swamps have a lot in common. Add a little typical fin-de-siècle salaried Euro-ennui and a Dada-esque Leninist flair for scintillating Switzerland café exiles & decaying Austrian-Hungarian cabaret intelligentsia boredom—and what have you got? Obviously more than just a bored retired tenured creative writing teacher—even more bored than his students after years of Exquisite Corpsing in the haunted Ivy-vine Halls of Ancient Academe?

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John Hazard Wildman

Personally I fondly remember a time when you could still smoke dope in the classroom—ah yes, those were the “good old days” back when Professor John Hazard Wildman & us hippies got stoned & fucked-up just as bad as that dirty old man Yoknapatawpha Faulkner! The Viet Nam War was beginning to warm up—and Integration had descended on the Huey P. Long Banana Republic campus back then in the mid-Sixties. The LSU campus was still rather laid-back & sophisticatedly risqué—with a whiff of hookah now & then as new Amerikan wars & military-industrial-intelligence complex Adventurism was beginning to spread its greedy octopus-tentacles throughout Asia, the Balkans and Iraq-Pakistan-Afghanistan Archipelago.

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W. H. Auden

Even old Beatnik Ginsberg guru—had to finally admit as time went by that War Protest Poetry really didn’t change anything. As Miss Auden said earlier at the beginning of WWII—in some New York City dive with his melancholy “September 1, 1939.” His echoing words: “I sit in one of the dives/On Fifty-Second Street/Uncertain and afraid/As the clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade/Obsessing our private lives/The unmentionable odor of death/Offends the September night.”

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French Quarter Voyeurs

So much for Poetry & Political Activism—sighs the Moaning Delta Muses & the French Quarter Ghosts. How many hurricanes, floods, fires, invasions, wars—have come & gone over the years? The View Carré coils & uncoils like an Anaconda—with its own slithering, snaky Creative Writing Class creeping outta the Past. With its own jaundice-eyed Water Moccasin Mississippi Delta Memories & Meandering Gulf of Mexico Dreams.

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Bourban & Royal

Long after all the wrought-iron balconies have rotted away—on Bourbon & Royal. There’ll still be the stink of decay & decadence—known as French Quarter Petulant Poetry. At the very beginning of any fraudulent enterprise—there’s always a moment of hushed hesitation & haughty silence. As the underlying darkness gloms onto the bourgeois ego—and slowly grows lekk mold on green, mildewing cheese.