National Poetry Month 2019: I am playing with poetry alongside Mary Lee Hahn, Jone Rush MacCulloch.Christie Wyman, Molly Hogan, and Catherine Flynn.
This weekend in New Iberia was the third annual Books along the Teche Literary Festival. On Friday, I attended a reading by former state poet laureate and one of my mentors, Darrell Bourque. He brought along accordion artist Mary Ardoin Broussard.
Mary Broussard plays the old Creole style of Zydeco music known as La La music. Darrell’s poems from his book Where I Waited (Yellow Flag Press, 2016) are written in the voices of early Cajun and Creole musicians from the 1930’s and 40’s. Cajuns and Creoles in Louisiana spoke French. I don’t speak French, so sometimes I have a hard time following along. I love this music for its dancing beat, but I can’t sing the lyrics and rarely know what they mean.
Darrell wrote about the song Quoi Faire in his poem for Golden Thibodeaux with the title “Here and Here.” Mary said quoi faire means “Why you broke my heart like that?”
Darrell then spoke of the energy in Golden Thibodeaux’s music. I, however, listened to the energy between Darrell and Mary, making their own kind of music by echoing and honoring the voices of the past.
I played in a different way with my own poetry finding new lines within the lines of Darrell’s poem Here and Here.
Reflections on the Teche 