Reading from her new book "BREATHTAKEN," Carolyn Wright, professor of literary arts, invoked the violence of post-Katrina New Orleans when she recited, "Can you pass a day without rancor / can you pick yourself up again?"
"BREATHTAKEN" is a collaboration between Wright and Walter Feldman, professor emeritus of art, who contributed visual etchings to the text.
The reading and question-and-answer session were held for a crowd of about 30 in the John Hay Library Wednesday and was sponsored by Brown/Ziggurat Press, a company founded by Feldman.
Wright, a former state poet of Rhode Island, is the author of more than a dozen books including "One With Others," "40 Watts" and "Rising, Falling, Hovering" - for which she was awarded the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2009. She is the recipient of several other awards including a National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and she was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2004.
Wright said she was thankful to work on this project at Brown with Feldman. "The resources here are tremendous," she said.
The poem addresses the corruption, lawlessness and unchecked violence of the post-Katrina New Orleans. The city, Wright said, is a "parade every day, party all night, but everybody's armed."
When asked why she chose to write about New Orleans, Wright discussed her personal connection to photographer Deborah Luster. Wright collaborated with Luster, who lost her mother as a result of the violence, on the poem "One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana."
Wright also noted the vibrancy and magnetism of what she described as a once "breathtaking" and now "breathtaken" city. The allure of New Orleans pulls people to continue to return after having lost everything, she said.
"No one can go to that city without being affected by it," Wright said.
"BREATHTAKEN," which Wright acknowledged as a dark poem, reflects both the violence and the majesty of New Orleans. She described the work as a "reductive look" into the violence of the city.
The richness and affecting connotations of the imagery juxtapose with what Wright describes as "austere" diction, demonstrated in lines such as "lying in the street / facing a deflated basketball / under a parked car."
The book, priced at $150, is rectangular and composed of heavy, inter-folding paper. Lines of poetry are written in gray, and red text used sporadically for numerals and for the beginning of the title, "BREATH," on the first page.
Feldman said his first interaction with the work was physically looking at the poem. "I heard a soprano on one side and a tenor on the other," he said, describing the difference in formatting between sides of the page.
Interspersed throughout the book are etchings that depict, among other things, scenes of the violence in the poem. Feldman described his physical accompaniments as providing "a feeling, a taste of what she was talking about."
