Letter from New Orleans: Poetry from one professor to another

(Photo courtesy of Berklee College)

Michael Heyman (far right) in New Orleans with Berklee colleagues (from left) Corinto Cevallos, Gillian Cantor, and Magen Tracy.

Eight staff members and faculty from Berklee College of Music are in New Orleans this week helping Habitat for Humanity build new homes for musicians and others displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The Berklee team is writing dispatches for boston.com about their experiences.

By Michael Heyman

We were all wanderers in the water
in the misery and madness
in the solemnity and sadness…
(waiting for the cavalry to arrive)
-- from “Song of My People ('a Katrina poem' for all y’all),” by Arthur Pfister, aka Professor Arturo

I had been to the Jazz Fest a few times in the early 2000s, one of the teeming masses, stuffing my face with etouffee and oyster po’boys, listening to the Nevilles and Odetta, but never had I experienced the real grit and glory of New Orleans.

This trip is different for me: I haven’t been back since Katrina, and now it’s hard to find a way to express the tragedy that continues to challenge this city. The Berklee crew, through Habitat for Humanity, is continuing a promise the college made just after Katrina struck: to help not just the city of New Orleans, birthplace of jazz and hence Berklee’s progenitor, but in particular the musical community.

And while my colleagues have participated in the musical culture here in the past, my particular role is somewhat different. I have come here not just as a layer of concrete and hammerer of nails but as an English professor at a music college, hoping to find expression to the tragedy, but New Orleans-style: a little post-Katrina poetry.

On our first night in town, Marian Wilson, a teacher for Berklee’s City Music program, and I strolled over to Frenchmen Street, a little away from touristy Bourbon Street, to try to find a more authentic local music scene. But we found much more.

After an evening in the Three Muses with a dueling clarinet and violin, we passed by two James Dean-looking toughs, sitting on crates on the sidewalk, crouched over typewriters (yes, typewriters, somehow fitting in a post-apocalyptic town when, halfway across the world, the last working typewriter manufacturer has recently decided to press its last platen).

Hanging before them, a simple sign reading “Poet for Hire.” I was struck then by this confluence that really should have been obvious: that this city breathes through all the arts.

We were about to employ one of these young poetic gunners when our attention was drawn to a pile of books in a nearby shop. The managing book slinger had stacked near the front volumes on every aspect of the city. And then I found the night’s treasure, a paperback titled "My Name is New Orleans: 40 Years of Poetry & Other Jazz,'' by Arthur Pfister, aka Professor Arturo.

Here was a collected volume of the performance poetry from lifelong New Orleans resident Pfister, who has been dishing out spoken word here since the 1960s. The included CD gives a hint as to what the Professor is laying down, as he dives deep into the history, language, and music of his city.

I was particularly drawn to “Song of My People (a ‘Katrina poem’ for all y’all),” quoted above. And here, just off of the French Quarter, near the poets for hire and within earshot of some of the most authentic New Orleans jazz bands, I found one powerful expression of the post-Katrina town.

The musicians express it in the occasional missed downbeat; the residents express it in a shy smile as they walk by our work site; the abandoned houses and the new bright blue houses of the Musicians’ Village in the Upper 9th Ward play in counterpoint -- but here Professor Arturo has found new words and grooves to express what has happened here, lending his voice as surrogate for the city.

Michael Heyman is a professor of liberal arts at Berklee College of Music.