From Our Own

Page 30 American Book Review FROM OUR OWN Raucous waters roared, gushed, and eventually muscled through the levees which guarded the city of New Orleans from flood during Hurricane Katrina. The ease at which The Big Easy was overcome with such tragedy may be aptly analogized as a burglar tiptoeing past sleeping sentinels. However, as the zealous desire of nature to expand its territory past New Orleans’s ill-prepared walls was revealed here, so too was the expansive and thriving power of the very culture which was threatened by it.Andrei Codrescu had this at least partially in mind when he composed his new book of poems, Jealous Witness. Like the water which rushed unyieldingly past set boundaries , the culture and history of New Orleans expands well beyond its geographical domain, and has been imagined and re-imagined throughout time. In this remarkable collection, Codrescu does not rely on topographical milieu to find his way through the joyous muck of New Orleans culture as it goes head to head with disaster; instead, he gives credence to cartography as existent primarily in the realm of imagination. Acting as a sort of prologue, the first section of Jealous Witness, “before the storm: geographers in new orleans,” is a long poem that ultimately leads into essay to more fully underline the aim of the book as a whole, and exhibits Codrescu’s initial feelings of discomfort at the prospect of speaking to geographers regarding New Orleans: “Geographers must love being lost. / When a friend and colleague approached me / to speak to geographers I felt terror.” A Romanian immigrant, Codrescu briefly sketches the history of his homeland in relation to this discomfort: My own beginning was shaky born in a place drawn and redrawn after every war a ping-pong region batted about by great powers settled at the time of my birth inside the fish of Romania. Codrescu in fact places great emphasis on his childhood desire to escape into imagination: “I made my own maps / pirate maps leading to treasures.” These desires, however, did not disappear with adulthood, as his desire to discover new worlds actually fueled his escape to America, which eventually landed him in New Orleans, where he was eventually asked to converse with geographers: Imaginary geography is still the prime mover ............………....…………………………… And there is no better time for discussing this mapping of desire than the day after Mardi Gras in New Orleans with the storm-tossed souls of geographers ............………....…………………………… So, geographers, I commend you for being in this city that refuses to conform to anything that is known about it. The breadth of the enjambed line coupled with the adamant decision to avoid almost all punctuation—with the exception of the occasional period when absolutely necessary—allows the poet to push his ideas of imaginary space freely into the realm of essay. It is precisely this move into essay which defines and sets the stage for the progression and ultimate revelation of Jealous Witness: to sketch a cultural and literary history out of which comes countless re-imaginings, including but certainly not limited to that of New Orleans. In this remarkable collection, Codrescu does not rely on topographical milieu to find his way through the joyous muck of New Orleans culture. In the book’s second section, “maelstrom: songs of storm & exile,” Codrescu sectionalizes the poems which deal directly with Katrina and its victims, something which he vowed not to do until approached by the New Orleans Klezmer AllStars, a Jewish folk ensemble which, on an accompanying compact disc, performs the poems in this section with spirit and passion. Codrescu often refrains from writing about tragic events, rather personal or collective , though these poems give voice to the people of New Orleans that seems strikingly accurate. In doing so, Codrescu has given due attention to characters and subjects as of yet unused in poetry dealing with Katrina. Tinged with the poet’s own surrealist tone and knack for arresting images, poems such as “what to do with your goat in a drowning world,” offer a new perspective in which overt sentimentality is replaced by eccentric characters, though nevertheless in devastating circumstances, “water’s up to my attic windows / and...