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Raymond McDaniel
After the hurricane
As anyone who has heard the hundreds of literary introductions
he has given around town over the last decade would suspect, Raymond
McDaniel is a poet who revels in the textures of words. Many of
his poems focus on the intersection of sounds, the alliterative
play of the consonants fighting against the longer, almost rhyming
sounds of the vowels. Often the words are collected in sonorous
clusters that are more important than the lines or stanzas or even
the narrative sense that would try to contain them: "Mosquito
netting's opera lace for godly, for godlets.
masquerade mechanical."
This technique is an almost perfect way to capture the languid,
tropical atmosphere of the Gulf Coast, McDaniel's home ground
and the setting for his most recent collection, Saltwater Empire.
I'm guessing that this book started as an effort to recapture
some of the characters and the language of New Orleans and other
parts of the gulf. McDaniel would look at the picture clearly,
recognizing the full range of the history, allowing anger even as
his clear affection for it all often created the undercurrent of
the poems. But then something happened. Hurricane Katrina hit,
and in its aftermath the country abandoned many of its citizens.
What may have been seen as McDaniel's understandable nostalgia
was replaced by rage. The Saltwater Empire has changed forever.
The book includes several long poems, all called "Convention
Centers of the New World." These poems are built out of other
people's words, people who were famously captive in the New
Orleans Superdome and whose words are collected in an oral history
project called "Alive in Truth." McDaniel puts this simple,
powerful language against his own powerful but more elaborate
language:
It's just unfair to me. I mean, I have so much unfinished
business
in New Orleans, that — will it ever get taken care of?
Will the pieces ever get put together?
Will I be spending the rest of my life living in the past?
You know, what? Where do I go from here?
Where do my children go from here?
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This contrast of the documentary language with McDaniel's
own hits the readers with a force that is greater than either would
have otherwise. And when the two languages are directly combined,
as in the poem "Assault to Abjury," McDaniel creates the
poems of this historical moment that may indeed become part of the
way we remember it: "God help us we tried to stay shattered
but we just got better.
fled.
were harmed, and then we healed."
Raymond McDaniel reads from Saltwater Empire at the Ann Arbor
Book Festival street fair on North University on Saturday, May
17.
—Keith Taylor
[Review published May 2008]
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