Wednesday October 1st at 7:30pm I read at the University of New Orleans, to a full room.

After the reading, we had a brief but sharp Q&A, probably the best I've ever had or heard after a reading. The students at UNO were very direct in asking what I hoped I was going to accomplish though my work and how I thought through the questions of race and power that frame my work.

At least one listener thought it worthwhile:

He read from his latest book, A Murmuration of Starlings, a book whose task is to tell or re-tell the history, the story, the un-history, the not-history, the not not story of past events centering around the civil rights movement in Alabama. I left his reading feeling educated, moved, and uncomfortable, and went home and poured through his collection. I highly recommend this book.

The next day, I was able to get out and see some of New Orleans, and research some new poems. After a few hours in the Public Library's Louisiana History room, where I read a few hundred yards of microfilm, I stepped out for a po-boy at the Parkway, where I was clearly out of place, though they took care of me anyway.

The look and the sign say it all.

The goal of the day was to learn something about the murders of Aaron Lee, Joseph Thomas, and Marshall Scott, Jr., who are among what the Jackson Clarion-Ledger called the "forgotten martyrs" of the Civil Rights Movement. The microfilm research told me more than I could find before, so I left Parkway with the addresses of the places where they were found dead.

Aaron Lee was hit by a car, early in the morning of June 11, 1967, out in New Orleans East, along a stretch of road that is now practically abandoned — old Gentilly Road, which is now an access for a number of scrap-yards.

There are a few houses, some abandoned, some burned, some fenced in, so there must have been some kind of neighborhood here, but Aaron Lee lived several miles away, so he must have been walking home or going somewhere, but it's hard to imagine where, and the papers don't offer very much explanation.

Joseph Thomas was murdered in his back yard. He was found with a bullet hole in his nostril. No trace of the killer. Not a clue.

I had the address, which led me to an open field where the St. Bernard Community once stood.

Both men, both murder sites, practically wiped off the map, by years and hurricanes and flood, and maybe their killers, too, and most of their stories.

Marshall Scott, Jr., had been killed in the New Orleans Parish Jail, which I decided to save for another day. But I had an hour or two left before the end of the day, so I took one last errand, to find Kevin Simmonds's childhood home on North Galvez Street. He told me, via e-mail, to see if the burned-out piano was still in the front room. It was.

Like so much of New Orleans, this block of Galvez is an uncomfortable mix of the very new and the very old, some of it replacing what's fallen or burned or been torn down, and some it still hanging on. People are trying to rebuild, though clearly they have to do it slowly, and some of them, of course, may never return to try, so even more will be erased.

Eric Dolphy said about music, once you hear it, it's gone, disappeared in the air. New Orleans, city of music, too much of you is like the music, disappearing into the air. If we've heard, we carry it with us, the music, the food, the neighborhoods.

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Roberts, Cynthia Wesley—and ensuing riots in which Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson were killed.

I've written about this day again and again and will continue to do so, probably until I stop writing.

Today, I remember this way:

ELEGY FOR LITTLE GIRLS

     Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, September 16th 1963

Puncture the mud, the iron pours out

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tongue of fire, not a word

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stays still but breaks along the channels

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pressed in the cast floor’s sand.

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Now it’s pigs suckling at the sow’s

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iron teats, so many children blind

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to the air and world that harden them.

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A gift. Dark come on. When

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the slag-man pulls the plug, fire

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explodes, its violent, molten light

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bathes the irons, a glow on their spines

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like stained glass or twilight fades

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on headstones’ crests, row on row on row.

"America's metaphors have become strained beyond recognition, our nation's verses are severely overwrought, and if one merely examines the internal logic of some of these archaic poems, they are in danger of completely falling apart," said the project's head stanza foreman Dana Gioia. "We need to make sure America's poems remain the biggest, best-designed, best-funded poems in the world."

Gioia confirmed that the public-works composition will be assembled letter-by-letter atop a solid base of the relationship between man and nature. The poem's structure, laid out extensively on lined-paper blueprints, involves a traditional three- quatrain-and-a-couplet framework, which will be tethered to an iambic meter for increased stability and symmetry. If the planners can secure an additional $6.2 million in funding, they may affix a long dash to the end of line three, though Gioia said that is a purely optimistic projection at this stage.

The rest is here.