So I wanted to share one of the New Orleans poems,
just as a kind of homage to that city, which is
being drenched again by Isaac.
This was a project that took several years.
I interviewed evacuees from the New Orleans and Gulf
area who evacuated to Arizona because I
was working at the time.
As I was driving down here yesterday,
I heard an interview with someone--
and I actually forget what he was being interviewed about.
I just was so struck by something
he said about the power of the individual's experience,
the individual's voice.
And I thought, that is what I was trying
to do with this project--
to give a space.
Not to give voice, because I only
use the words of the interviewees themselves.
But to create a space in which people who are otherwise
erased in dominant culture have a space in which
to express their experience.
And in this way, Victoria Greene,
homeless mother of four, stepped into that space
and became a collective voice for an experience
of the dislocated.
"We the people of New Orleans always talked of the Big One,
but I had not heard of Katrina.
Hurricanes come and go.
But when Lake Pontchartrain broke, every one of us
was screaming and hollering.
If lake was flooding the city, we knew it'd never be the same.
These times you remember every kid you went to first grade
with by name.
You wonder where everybody was, the bum
on the corner, the pickpocketers, the little man
that's always on Bourbon Street painting the city.
CNN was showing people on houses.
This was not a strange neighborhood to me.
This was my neighborhood.
It's where I went to school.
Where I shopped for groceries at Circle Food.
I got married in that church, christened my children,
buried my kin.
New Orleans is the cornerstone for spirituality, the stomping
grounds for psychic ability.
You don't get on the bus and go somewhere else.
It's our culture.
You'd have to be a citizen of New Orleans to understand.
I was here a week and my mother passed.
She never had been sick.
I think any of us would trade any charity we
got to go back to August 15, 2005
and warn all our family that terrible storm would
take everything away from us.
But we don't get those chances.
We get what we get.