About Kid Merv
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 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.
--Cynthia
Hogue
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,
http://www.corpse.org/content/view/118/1/