For Today
Carolyn Hembree's new poetry collection weds geography to its people in an unnamed New Orleans
After reading poet Carolyn Hembree’s newest poetry collection For Today (LSU Press, 2024), it’s no surprise to learn that her writing space (“My little hole, as my child calls it, which is the laundry room.”) contains on its walls photographs she takes, writings, and maps. The poems in For Today are layered with images and impressions that altogether produce a simultaneous narrative of the speaker’s internal life and her neighborhood as she walks through it. In ekphrastic compositions, the pulses of a Southern city collide with personal dramas: the death of a father, motherhood in a world where middle schools have lockdown drills, a sick friend.
Hembree, an associate professor at the University of New Orleans and author of Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague (Trio House Press, 2016), and Skinny (Kore Press, 2012), told me that For Today began a decade ago as a documentary-style project on violence against women in disaster-struck areas. As many an artist can attest, however, sometimes “the plan is the problem.” After a year of research and writing funded by the Atlas Grant, she tossed what she had, and started on a new poem that later became the starting point for the collection’s titular long poem, “For Today.” Though themes from her original research survive, the poem took on an altogether new identity.
The poems in For Today are layered with images and impressions that altogether produce a simultaneous narrative of the speaker’s internal life and her neighborhood as she walks through it. In ekphrastic compositions, the pulses of a Southern city collide with personal dramas: the death of a father, motherhood in a world where middle schools have lockdown drills, a sick friend.
“As I continued to work on it, I started to realize—oh no, this is ten pages,” Hembree said. “Once I got to about twenty-something … I realized, at that point, this is going to be huge. And it seemed like I could put anything in it. There was a point at which there was such joy. I had never had an experience of writing that has been that joyful or fulfilling. There was nothing I couldn’t fold into that poem, it would hold anything I put in it. It was amazing.”
[Read Chris Turner-Neal's list of his favorite local books released in 2022, here.]
The city described in the pages of For Today is not named, though details like barge-board walls and the slow rise of bridges suggest it is New Orleans. There’s the “shuttered mud hut of shutdown pawn shop,” an emblem of the disaster in “August 29, 2005” and the empty silence of a stilted, pandemic-ridden city in “April 2020.” Many sections alert us to a backdrop lush and precarious behind the personal narrative. As the speaker meanders through the neighborhoods, history pulses through old buildings, just as memories of her late father seem to slide out of the sidewalk cracks.
Hembree, a Tennessee native and New Orleans resident since 2001, was conscious to not claim to represent an entire city. She has written about Alabama and Tennessee in her previous books, but from the distance of having left. With For Today, she was faced with the dilemma of writing place in the present.
“As a writer I think it’s really dangerous to think one writes a place,” she said, “because a place is the people. In saying the words ‘New Orleans,’ which I never do in the book, there is a certain kind of authority that I don’t feel comfortable having. I wasn’t born here, I was not raised here. I have not experienced any of the most dehumanizing, horrifying aspects of the South, or the Gulf South.”
So, she whittled the setting down to her neighborhood. “Once landscapes shrank down to neighborhood, I could feel a ‘geography wedded to its people,’” a concept borrowed from the Arkansas-born poet C.D. Wright.
Indeed, the neighborhood speaks, and Hembree puts its players in conversation with each other, with memory, with objects. In one such moment, the speaker arrives home: “A rumble/about to rain/across the alley, my lakeside neighbor, retired carnival gown seamstress, whose blushing plum fleshes my window frame, blows a kiss from her window seat…” As she reflects on this neighbor’s wartime stories while going through the mail, the poem takes the shape of the lockdown drill consent form she’s received, the page ending with a line waiting for its signature.
In “Dizzy Bird Fantasia” there exists both frantic worries (observing “clouds” gives way to “clot” and health concerns), and the free-form afternoons of mother and child. In "Funk Hour Fantasia,” the speaker “done thunk enough” and turns up the radio. It’s a universal feeling, though maybe one no better displayed than in the second lines rambling down nearby streets. As concentrated as For Today’s setting may be, the poems and their neighborhood are a microcosmic display of the tender tensions of living.