My poem, “Louisiana Disaster Recovery 3.0,” appears in the latest issue of Gulf Coast. I’m so grateful that it found a home in a journal so close to my hometown because it’s about the floods my family and friends suffered in the greater Baton Rouge area last fall. The poem is written as a Venn diagram in two voices: Voice 1 is focused on recovery from the floods, and Voice 2 has no energy left after all the disasters that have hit the area in recent decades. This structure was inspired by “Employment Relations 4.0,” an innovative poem by Brian Bilston, which I used as a writing prompt in my introductory creative writing class last fall. (I actually wrote a first draft of the poem in class; one of the perks of my job is that I get to do all of my writing prompts alongside my students.)
My class and I were working, that semester, on responding to a call for poetry for a multimedia dance/art/creative writing concert organized by Joshua Legg at my university last fall. The concert was called “Re/Action,” and Joshua had chosen coping with tragedy as its overarching theme: how communities create stories about ourselves to cope with tragedy, successfully or unsuccessfully. The floods had just happened right before he told me about the prompt, and every time I tried to respond to it, I kept thinking about them.
The frequent hurricanes and floods are part of the reason my spouse and I chose to leave south Louisiana. It’s so difficult to build something, when the weather continuously undoes all your hard work. My mother-in-law’s home in Vermilion Parish was devastated by Hurricane Rita in 2005, and they had to use FEMA money to raise their house up on concrete stilts. Most of the other houses on the Ramke family land have been destroyed by the constant floods. Here are some pictures from our most recent visit to the land that my daughter will inherit when she grows up–that is, if it’s still around.
If you’re interested in reading the poem, you can order a copy of the issue here.
