My Byzantium: The Editor's Notes

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork . . .

—William Butler Yeats

If you were to ask close friends I have known since 1977 what I think of North American cities, some of them would tell you that I am obsessed by or in love with New Orleans, and others would tell you that I am from New Orleans. Still others would probably tell you that I talk too much about New Orleans—and I probably do. But none of these descriptions of my feelings about New Orleans would come from my own mouth. Such usages are not commensurate with passions I would publicly reveal, not even to friends. I will, however, confess this: Since I moved from Baton Rouge to the University of Kentucky (Lexington) in 1977, I have spoken—and continue to speak frequently—of how I have missed, and continue to miss, southern Louisiana—its people and their culture, and I have talked about how necessary it is for me to return, from time to time, to its magical and mythical city: New Orleans, "More miracle than bird or handiwork."

By the time I moved to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1986, I had, involuntarily but undeniably, become an unofficial ambassador for the Crescent City—so much a promoter of "the city care forgot" that most people I have come to know, since 1977, assume that I am, if not a New Orleanian, at least a native of Louisiana. I am not; I am an Auburn, Alabama, man, a native of "the village plains." I have never, in fact, even been a resident of New Orleans. But I have spent many unforgettable days and nights there—in the city where I learned to live the life of a rational Bacchanalian.

Almost every weekend on the calendar, between 1967 and 1977, when I taught at Southern University in Baton Rouge, I—a young man trying to "tear" my "pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life"—visited New Orleans, that Louisiana site which always feeds my imagination, while challenging my intellect. What would you do in the hearing of speech acts that conjure you to discover new ways of seeing the world around you? What would you do in the presence of an all-consuming music whose measures lure your feet to perform movements in rhythms you learn instantaneously? What would you do witnessing the performance of narratives, lived and invented, that force you to try to understand and even imitate on paper back in your hotel room? What would you do when offered food that tempts you to consume ten or more courses each meal? What do you do in the presence of architectural wonders—large and small, ornate and plain, painted and weathered—that illusively proliferate as you stroll through streets whose names conjure worlds of wonder? What do you do when you experience one special day each year when a city, all for magical pleasure, is able to turn its world upside down and suddenly return to its form of normalcy for twelve more months? If you recognize and appreciate these and other ascriptions that mark New Orleans, then you would, as I did, fall in love with that city. I have no doubt that you, as I, wept not a few days and nights after Hurricane Katrina and its flood; in love but not always without trouble, you, too, wept as you witnessed man's neglectful hand conspiring with the natural order of force against the miracle wrought on the Mississippi: New Orleans.

This issue of Callaloo, then, is a threnody for the New Orleans we miss, but it is also a praise song for the New Orleans we want to come. Moreover, this number of the journal, which I have entitled "American Tragedy: New Orleans Under Water," is also a call to action, however indirect—a call to all U. S. Americans to help rebuild New Orleans and to help its absent residents return home to the city that has long been one of the most valuable treasures of the United...