“off Annunciation Street / don’t look for Martha Stewart”:

Jesse Freeman’s poetic sature exposes the ragged and raw, with energy and true grit

By Camille Martin

Contributing Writer

New Orleans Dizzy Spit

By Jesse Freeman

Anabasis Press, $8

Never has New Orleans seen poetry quite like Jesse Freeman’s. She wails its eccentricities, its institutions, and even its more or less ordinary denizens, in language that is at once sharply focused and disjunctive. Her work, largely unknown by fellow Southern poets until recently, has been quietly published in a series of poetry collections with small presses. These works trenchantly reflect her life in the small Louisiana town of Clinton, and her forays into New Orleans and other points South to drink deeply their quirks and pungent ironies.

            Her language exposes the raggedness and rawness of this experience. Indeed, her poetic language is itself a delirious experience. It is as if Freeman unleashes the intensity and disjointedness of the dizzy world by giving utterance close to the very roots of perception. At times the language seems unmediated, as though it has not yet had a chance to be spun into a smooth and perhaps more soothing narrative or description.

            These poems are anything but soothing, and those who prefer their poetry grammatical and polished will take exception to Freeman’s poetic license. But what she loses in tidy syntax she gains in the exposed nerves of energy and grit. Sometimes the diction is so disjointed and the imagery so wildly juxtaposed that one feels the key to a poem’s meaning has been lost.

            In Freeman’s poems one can no more pin down a precise meaning to the words and lines than one can pin down the humidity of a wiltingly hot day in August—“Raggedy Ann heat fearsome,” as she has it in “New Orleans Film Stills,” a poem of collaged street scenes. Freeman’s world is not one of propriety and bland middle American manners: “off Annunciation Street / don’t look for Martha Stewart.” Here, a “mademoiselle stalks Andrei Codrescu” and “draws near only to decamp / harass waiter stave off Jupiter Ultor / having done nothing worth remembering.” This young woman is extraordinarily ordinary in her “black velvet scarf & beaded handbag / don’t know her from Adam.” Perhaps she will find what she is looking for in another bar, or stalking another dream, for “tomorrow is a new day.” Perhaps.

            In “Beacon Remains,” Freeman turns her scalpel to dissecting the fest of greed and pretend merriness that Christmas can seem to the disillusioned. The detritus of commercialized Christmas is strewn across the poem’s lines like so many toys discarded, their novelty worn off or their batteries run down: “hideous plastic Santa elf / prune torte pigeon poop / Xmas jigsaw bayou choir.” By a deft juxtaposition, Freeman suggests the grotesqueness of a holiday pie, and in swift, jagged strokes reveals a choir bumbling its way through carols and the tacky atrocities gracing our front lawns in the name of myths long forgotten.

            Not much escapes Freeman’s sharp satire, including official religion, which in “Bow Deep Thrice” impresses its sacred images upon the faithful like the ranting blast of a fog horn: “Fog horn looks out / Presses bright enamel icon / Against the Pantokrator upon us.” This brand of spirituality is notably empty and unvisionary: “Vacant eyeglass frame looking / Upon air pockets & false heaven / Rid of old gook-layers / Leonardo’s Last Supper offering up black yoke / To devil.” One can only guess whether the devil accepted the dirty yoke of centuries of historical grime.

            Perhaps Freeman’s closest poetic ancestor is the British expatriate Mina Loy (1882-1966), who lived in Paris, Florence and New York and whose poems also investigate satirically the false and the pretentious. Loy’s poem “The Black Virginity” is a close kin to Freeman’s “Bow Deep Thrice”: “It’s an old religion that puts us in our places.” And Freeman’s disjointed imagery also recalls Loy’s edginess in that poem, which critiques the uniformity and snobbishness of incubators for the priesthood in “hermetically sealed dormitories”: “Baby Priests / On a green sward / Yew-closed / Scuttle to sunbeams / Silk beaver / Rhythm of redemption / Fluttering of Breviaries.” Freeman, like Loy, is also a visual artist, and the poems in New Orleans Dizzy Spit demonstrate senses, especially the visual and aural, keenly awakened to the giddy world around her. Freeman can paint in fine lyrical brushstrokes as well as jagged, as in “emigre 4.19.99,” bidding farewell to a friend: “Fare thee well / Rhone frost trumpet flowers red / Centers fare well & good / till Ylang Ylang tree’s brittle / weeping branches perfume all / Intents and Purpose / Your Jess / your own.”

            Many of her poems retain a mystery at their core, yet the satirical and edgy language entrances us with its ability to draw attention to its own rough texture. Witness the opening to “Gold Dung Flies”: “shiny gold fly upon manure / 40 degrees passion nil / off to the races God, yeah, / a mammal / a streambed’s unrequited zither.” And its enigmatic ending: “lissome damselfly / overdue take precaution / dungheap’ll smack of saffron- / yellow plumb-line New Orleans.” No wonder that in this arena of “dangers four feet below sea,” spit flies a dizzy trajectory.

(originally published in The Times Picayune, Sunday, May 27, 2001)