Where the Words Are

The literati are alive in the Crescent City

by

It’s a Saturday night, and as an MFA Creative Writing student in New Orleans, I’m as likely to be at a social event as a reading series—those regular gatherings of folks for sharing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. No professor is making me go for a grade. Rather, I’ve been pulled in, as though by a  magnet, by the sheer volume of literary activity in the city.

By my last count, among the currently active New Orleans reading series are The Splice, The Rubber Flower, Poets on Poets, UNO’s Gold Room (which I co-host), lmnl lit, Lucky Bean Poetry, Delgado Reading Series, Maple Leaf, and The Poetry Buffet, not to mention regular events at bookstores around town. Then there are the ghosts of influential series past, like Dogfish and Blood Jet, or the collectives like Peauxdunque and Third Lantern Lit—which offer additional support in between festivals like Words and Music, the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival, and the New Orleans Poetry Festival. And I know I’m likely still missing something.

A 2013 article from Emerson College’s Ploughshares estimated that New Orleans had the same number of bookshops per capita as Manhattan. A decade later, all but a few of those shops remain, along with a handful of new additions.  Similarly, if my rough tracking of thirty active and regularly-held, writer-organized literary readings in New York City has any hold, New Orleans, a city with a population of about 376,000, could very well have more reading series per capita than that literary Goliath, population 1.6 million.

What makes New Orleans such a hotbed for the literary arts? And what are some of the unique challenges facing the community of poets, fiction writers, and memoirists that spend hours organizing countless (usually free) events?

While some poets I spoke with considered New Orleans’s affordable cost of living (compared to meccas like New York or San Francisco) a factor of its attractiveness, others were quick to point out that even here, a third of the New Orleans population are paying more than half of their pre-tax income in rent and utilities. (A poetry professor of mine once shared a story about a colleague who, after winning a $1,000 poetry prize, was pestered by friends and family asking how he would spend it. They seemed to harbor visions of an elaborate, celebratory spree. His answer: “Food and gas.”) No matter where you are in this country, poetry is no money maker, but attend any reading in the city here and you will see that the seats are filled. People are showing up.

I wanted to delve beyond the easy assumptions of why New Orleans has a great literary turn-out: that the Crescent City promises to turn writers into bon vivants, or that poets move here to follow the ethereal trail left by the greats. A city can only rest on the laurels of bygone giants like William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams for so long, and these long-dead comrades in letters cannot be credited for the work being done today. None of the poets I spoke to are content sipping a daiquiri while snapping to a sestina and calling it a night. This is not just a party, but a craft.

"It's part of culture making. Like, how do you actively make culture?" —Rodrigo Toscano

But New Orleans’s bohemian culture does play its role. Michelle Nicholson, who co-runs lmnl (“liminal”) with Nikki Ummel, suggested that the city’s Mardi Gras history has engineered an infrastructure for live performance. “Where else [in the country] are you dancing in the street at two years old?” she asked. Rodrigo Toscano, a veteran of the San Diego, San Francisco, and New York poetry scenes, and one of the co-founders of The Splice Poetry Series alongside Henry Goldkamp and Sean F. Munro, agreed that New Orleans’s creative culture is “largely driven by people who live here who are aesthetically inclined.”

The Splice debuted in the middle of the pandemic, when all of that parading and gathering had slowed to a dead stop. But now, Toscano sees the city rising into a poetry renaissance, with organizers putting in “rigorous” work on the ground. “It’s part of culture making,” he said. “Like, how do you actively make culture? I think that it’s pretty amazing, actually.”

The series hosts I talked to have each mindfully structured their events to reflect what they would like to see in their community. For Toscano, Goldkamp, and Munro, The Splice, which features a regional poet and an out-of-town poet at each event, the goal is literary education. “We need a literary education by contemporaries, not just dead people,” Toscano said. “So, we thought it was something we [could] proactively build and raise the level of understanding of poetics … To be challenged by innovative writers doing radically different things than us would sharpen our own practice.” At the last Splice event, I was just as enthralled by the team’s introductions of their featured writers—essays on craft, criticism, and the larger directions of poetics in and of themselves—as the guests.

Cameron Lovejoy, the founder of Tilted House, a journal and local chapbook press, as well as the Rubber Flower Poetry Hour, is looking to bridge the gap between academia and “street poetry.” He hosts his shows at all-ages venues to allow for a younger audience to attend (often at Rubber Flower events, friends like Goldkamp man the donation-based bar). These crossovers are important to Lovejoy, who sees the scene in New Orleans as prolific but still segregated, be it by the blockades of academia or demographics. Tilted House Press reflects that intersection of craft and experience, publishing “a diversity of moods and modes,” by “fresh and pickled artists alike.”

Poets on Poets is another uniquely energetic space for the intersection of arts and conversation, founded by Chuck Perkins in 2016. Perkins, a New Orleans native, cut his teeth in the Chicago spoken word scene alongside the likes of Marc Smith, Malik Yusef, and Tyehimba Jess. When Perkins returned to New Orleans, he noticed plenty of poetry venues, “but it was the same poets and the same audience just moving around.”

Described by Lovejoy as “just perfect,” Poets on Poets is an open mic in the truest sense, with musicians, conversation, and spoken word colliding brilliantly in the late night hours.

“Sometimes a poem will be read and there will be a dialogue about the topic,” Lovejoy said, creating a salon-like energy that can be hard to come by today.

“We had some wow … a couple of musicians that were just incredible,” Perkins said of earlier days. “We used to do this thing that was more organic, meaning, if someone was playing a sort of thing and it sounded great and you were just sitting in the audience and you had something that would go perfectly with it, you could just come up.” Unfortunately, mic-hoggers forced Perkins to restructure the show, but it continues every Wednesday at Cafe Istanbul.

While Perkins agreed New Orleans’s community spirit is laudable, he also recognized its shortcomings. “I had a community of poets in Chicago, and we challenged each other all the time,” he said. “To be honest, I haven’t had [that sort of challenging] at all [here]. I haven’t felt like people are receptive to it.”

Arguably, that’s changing with this new batch of readings, but some find New Orleans’s inclusive atmosphere a benefit for their craft. “We create art as a form of connection,” Ummel said. “And I think our writing has improved because of the non-competitive nature of it.”

For Toscano, the stage is an equalizer. “No one is valued less or more as a literary actor,” he said. Perhaps inclusive reading is not about seeking approval, but about the co-education that inevitably happens when there are opportunities to perform work.

And those opportunities, as Ummel and Nicholson said, need to be accessible.Boosted by a recent grant from the Poets and Writers Foundation, lmnl is adamant about keeping its programming, which includes readings, workshops, and eventually a residency, free. Organizing lmnl is “a craft of precision and making sure we’re aware of what we’re doing,” Ummel said.

The same can be said for many of the reading series around New Orleans. Culture-making is serious work.