Chapter 9 - The Poetics of Rims

Summary

This chapter invites us to understand New Orleans not only as an historic rim city and a great world port but also as a poetic ecosphere filled with resonant sounds, wavelike rhythms, and a buzzing profusion of messages. Such a poetics takes shape within the city’s understudied lyric traditions, formed and informed by three centuries of multicultural confluence and botanical excess.Desire unfolds not simply in terms of human longing, but as the comingled energies of plant, animal, and wetland life-forms that drive myriad currents and subtle undercurrents of imagination. Now facing submersion, New Orleans maintains as both a great port city and a port of entry into poems. The surrounding Mississippi River and Gulf waters saturate consciousness. Images and sound meld within a rich linguistic and ecological alluvium. We seek messages within sedimentations and intonations. The metamorphic work of poetry becomes dead serious in this tenuous rim of a city, where a desire for meaning unfolds in the thick of things –– stirred on by water, water everywhere.