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About Kid Merv |
Cynthia Hogue |
The photographer and artist Rebecca Ross and I are working on a large, multimedia project entitled Voice-Prints: A Katrina Elegy, from which the interview-poem "Kid Merv and Some Jazz" and the photographs that accompany it are excerpted. What we are trying to do is to portray the impact of Hurricane Katrina by focusing on the local and the individual—interviewing and photographing a cross section of Katrina evacuees who came to Arizona, and retracing the steps of their journey—to relate a compelling sense of what happened to people caught in disaster. The Katrina transplants who will be a part of our larger project represent a migratory microcosm that opens a window on a broader phenomenon of migration. Through interview poems and black-and-white photographs of people and their possessions, we follow twelve people's journeys from Louisiana to Phoenix in the kind of detail that emerges in a personal interview, making the particular story vivid. As artist-witnesses, we listen attentively, observe closely, hear and see with empathy. As analytic artists, we are investigating how someone survives the shock of catastrophe—of dislocation, loss of intimacy, loss of community and the ways one had of making a living. There is a striking depth of analysis that emerges as Kid Merv speaks about what happened to him, the sense he makes of what he has been through, that reveals the courage he has shown under duress. The story he tells of travail and resilience is not what any reporter, historian, or sociologist would recount, because it is from inside the event. As a poet, I have tried completely to stand aside. This is an interview-poem, and as such, is in the words of the interviewee and used with his permission. I have shaped and edited the original text, just as Rebecca has worked with lighting in the photographs: capturing an angle in close-up, adding contrast and relief. Our larger conceptualization is to weave poems and photographs together to create portraits of lives profoundly touched by trauma and tragedy. We track evacuees as they struggle to reinvent themselves in order to make new lives. Photographs reflect present moments, but gesture toward what evacuees have lost. The physical markings that are left of those lives lead back to contextual roots that have withered, ghosts of memory. The specifics speak to our times, and thus tell a larger story. We bear witness to one tragedy that impacts the local, but offers insight far beyond local borders, into how the human spirit falters, learns resilience, and then rallies to transcend suffering in an age characterized by forced migrations. Our series will tell a universal story of quest and, perhaps, of redemption.
Editors' note: An extended version of this poem appears as "Kid Merv" in Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters and Life, founded and edited by Andrei Codrescu.
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