Contemporary Works
Required
- van Laer. "First Date."
- Ava Leavell Haymon. "Louie's: Home of the Veggie Omelet."
- Mona Lisa Saloy. "Louisiana Log."
- David Middleton. "The Sunday School Lesson."
- Cutrer. "Ceramics."
- Becker. "My Letter to Louisiana.
Optional
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast 89. Interview with Ava Leavell Haymon, Louisiana's Poet Laureate, Part1
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast 90. Interview with Ava Leavell Haymon, Part 2.
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast 40. Interview with poet Mona Lisa Saloy, Part 1.
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast 41. Interview with poet Mona Lisa Saloy, Part 2.
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast 31. Interview with poet David Middleton.
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast 211. Kevin Cutrer.
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast 140. Comic Kristen Becker, part 1.
- Louisiana Anthology Podcast 141. Comic
Kristen Becker, part 2.
So there is no unifying theme for today's reading beyong the
fact that these are currently working writers. Everybody but
Kristen Becker, who is a comedian. They are from various
locations throughout the state. Kristen Becker and David
Middleton are from Shreveport. Kevin Cutrer is an accountant in
Boston, but he is originally from Kentwood, hometown of Britney
Spears and Kentwood Spring Water. Ava Leavell Haymon lives in
Baton Rouge. Mona Lisa Saloy lives in New Orleans, but she was a
student at LSU when she stood up Ava for lunch.
Listening to Ava Leavell Haymon read "Louie's: Home of the
Veggie Omelet" was the most surreal experience I've had with
literature. I'd found it on Soundcloud & started listening
to it while looking at other stuff. I gradually became aware
that she was talking about my Louie's resaurant where I
ate when I was a student at LSU. And she was waiting on my
friend Mona Lisa, who was a student at LSU with me. According to
Mona Lisa, she did not forget Ava, she got a toothache
that had to be taken care of. One thing I like about the poem is
that it celebrates something very specific: not a famous
restaurant that people come from around the world to see, but a
dive diner behind LSU that students to go to get sober food
after partying at Murphy's Bar. As gratuate students, we'd go
there after class to eat and continue our discussion. So hearing
the poem was one of those moments that takes me back to my own
past.
When she's not dealing with a toothache, Mona Lisa Saloy is
also a poet. "Louisiana Log" is a poem I'd looked for for years.
I'd been teaching "Chicago" by Sandburg, and I wanted something
similar that describes Louisiana. Mona Lisa's poem does just
that. Both poems are written in the Walt Whitman style of free
verse. Plus they share the Walt Whitman theme of celebrating the
diversity of America.
Middleton is a poet who grew up in Shreveport but spent part of
the summer in Saline with his grandparents. His poem "The Sunday
School Lesson" is based on his memory of a particular Sunday
School lesson he heard there in the 1950's. In Baptist and
similar churches, Sunday School classes divide up the
congregation by age and often gender for Bible study classes. In
this class, Jack Hopkins talks to restless thirteen year old
boys about baseball, fishing, and hunting. The boys sit
uncomfortably in their "Sunday clothes," which must not be
gotten dirty by playing in them. This particular Sunday, he read
Matthew 14:22-33, the story where Jesus walked on the water.
At last, he slowly read, then half-recited
In a drawl that took the measure of King James
Those passages in Matthew where affrighted
Disciples cried out to Jesus as He came
Walking across night's foam upon the water
Notice how Middleton uses the word "affrighted" instead of
"frightened," because it evokes the King James Version that
still universally read in Souther Baptist churches of the era
(although the passage actually says 'troubled'). In an Ancient
Mariner moment, Jack relives a terrifying night on the
lake when he was trying to get away from a sudden storm when he
too saw Jesus walking on the water, revealed by the lightning.
The boys picked up on the man's emotion, and were drawn into the
story of a man facing his own mortality. As they left the room,
they were embarrassed and scared to even look at him, much like
the wedding guest in the Ancient Mariner.
Rebecca van Laer's poem "First Date" is about her being a
new-comer in New Orleans, going on a first date with a woman and
eating raw oysters for the first time. I've heard of oysters as
an aphrodisiac for many years, but never really understood the
connection until I read this poem.
She orders oysters, of course I don’t know how to do this,
to slip a three-pronged fork under the white flesh of some mollusk
and wiggle soft globes of muscle from the black mass
of shell, the lemongrass broth the dense gem swims in —
how to pop it
out and into my mouth and then suck, savor the dense slip of it,
then again:
a sequence of teasing, eating, repeating, and this is only
our appetizer.
The more experienced woman introduces her to the mystery of
eating mollusks, and by extension, to the mystery of sex itself.
Oh, she may have eaten oysters and had sex before, but never
like this. Life in New Orleans is baroque, like the
"ridiculous cherubs entreating with their fat blue eyes"
overhead. It overwhelms the senses.
Kristen Becker is a comedian who talks about growing up in Buffalo, NY, and Shreveport, LA, as a butch, out lesbian. Her blog post is from April 22, 2014. This date is important because she's writing about the situation in Louisiana prior to June 26, 2015, the date the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage throughout the country. Since then, gay people have had mostly the same rights in Louisiana they have in more progressive states. Kristen notes that even at that time, with discrimination on the books, she experienced tolerance from individuals in places all over the state. Since that writing, she and Rev. Jay Bakker (son of Jim and Tammy) have teamed up in the Loosen the Bible Belt Tour, which tries to bridge the gap between religious America and our gay citizens.
Kevin Cutrer's "Ceramics" is a poem about his mother's
collection of ceramic pigs. It's not unusual for people to have
displays around their house of things they have a special
interest in. My Aunt Nelda collects antique kitchen implements
and hangs them on the wall, along with tiny skillets with a
brand name in them. They're big enough to fry an egg, but she
has dozens hanging on a wall. For Kevin's mother, it's ceramic
pigs. They come with a cost: not only the money spent on them,
but the upkeep of having to dust them frequently. But she does
this with a song.