Constance: Delicate Burdens.

Williams, Alan

Constance: Delicate Burdens

Edited by Erik Kiesewetter and Patrick Strange

New Orleans: Constance Project, 2008

If the premier issue of Constance, titled Replicas & Replacements, sang out like the unexpected call of a post-Katrina phoenix, its triumphant note has been tuned darker in Delicate Burdens, the new New Orleans art and literary journal's second issue. It's a more dimensional, truer tone containing the riff that victory and defeat, survival and death, can often mean the same. The injury of the hurricane and added insult of bureaucratic morass haunt these pieces, whether created as direct responses or in the aftermath's shadow by no other choice. "These fragments I have shored against my ruin," wrote T. S. Eliot in "The Wasteland," and the forty-six New Orleans artists gathered here have written, photographed, painted, collaged, sculpted and executed designs to buttress the levees within.

What it means to be a New Orleans artist was radically redefined on August 29, 2005, a fact brought home, in more ways than one, by Constance's argument that biography is handmaid to artistic interpretation. By turns confessional, cheeky, and quixotic, contributor profiles are laid out on the same page as the works, offering the answer to the reader's reflexive question, "Did he/she return to rebuild or move elsewhere?" The collection, then, serves as a bittersweet reunion for the determined who remained, those who were displaced and fought to return, and others who have embraced a form of exile.

By extension, a dialectic between staying and going, at least between the short fiction and poetry, may be expected, but that isn't the case. (Intriguingly, that tension is best on display in Constance being a collaborative publication; editors Erik Kiesewetter and Patrick Strange made opposite decisions about living in the city and relocating.) Instead, the pieces scrutinize, interrogate and wrestle with what it means to fashion a home in today's New Orleans, both as a changed city and as a state of mind.

Among the most potent is the triptych of Frank Relle's eerie nightscape photos of flood-damaged and desolate homes with Patrick Strange's prose musings. Less like stand-alone snap fiction and more like Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee series (pen-and-ink drawings of San Francisco structures coupled with conversation scraps or zen-like, synaptic epiphanies), these structures turn prismatic through ventriloquy. Like one-time and possibly future occupants, the shelters are vulnerable refuges ("I settle into routines easily and get lonely when nobody's around late at night"), false comforts to be abandoned ("I finally ran out of breath near the old shipping yard and wished that for just once, this was some wide-open plain where I could run forever and never have to worry about hitting water"), and ruined vessels testifying to, and afflicted by, the zeitgeist of Katrinaland ("Currently Vacant but Hanging on for Dear Life").

Throughout Delicate Burdens, home frequently contains less framework and more emptiness, spatial and otherwise. "My porch is gone so I sit / where it used to be," writes Katie Bowler in "Sticks and Leaves," echoing the need to situate oneself in the locale of loss for reconciliation. In "At 30," which advises "moving from a house is not the same as losing it," stranding one on an "eye-land of ferocious outcomes," Megan Burns concludes:

 I miss the thread of my life in a terrible way
 but that too has become something of a watery promise
 amid images and photographs, it's a land you can visit anytime

 where something once was
 was torn down
 somehow this space spells progress
 somehow this space is what's left of disaster

That void demands reverence despite the ache to fill and cover it. Inscribing such lacunae with "all the words I ever thought I had a right to and all the words I ever thought might say just the right thing" is the task Burns takes up in "Fair Trade," but it's a breathless, unfeasible pipedream amounting to another form of erasure: "the world would be clear and the hole would be full and anyone could pass right over it / without ever knowing what lay beneath what I had to put down to get from there to here."

Metamorphosis also percolates through these pages. In "FEMA-Trailer Train" by Andy Young, a parade of trailers evolves out of another federalization:

 tanks lined up

 like this a year two? ago
 the green lurch of them
 each gun raised the same

 way like compass needles

Meanwhile, Anne Gisleson's "Stroller" ennumerates how the city--its detritus from history and poverty, including "endless chains of FEMA trailers of the blankest, most despairing and hopeful white you'll ever see"--jolts and impresses through a stroller to become part and parcel of the child within. Pushed through the city's contradictions, the stroller's contents grow into an uneasy assemblage and the stroller itself into a cargo ship "stacked stories high with maroon and robin's egg blue containers, heading towards the Gulf of Mexico, cruising and laden towards much larger seas." All transformations are not so unwitting. Indeed they are key to survival, as in Richard Collins' "When the Last Bookshop in New Orleans is About to Close":

 These are all good omens, very auspicious,
 for when disaster strikes
 there's nothing like these new and improved dreams
 recycled from organic tissues harvested from the fungal stems
 of your own cells drowned in the rain.

That ability to regenerate via envisioning, especially when social and political odds may be stacked against it, is a lesson to reteach and relearn. That need explains, in part, the large percentage of work with children as its subject in Delicate Burdens. C. W. Cannon tells "Bend It Like Spiderman" through the free-wheeling, hyper-deductive perspective of a grade schooler, whose best friend's house "got broken in the storm," while in "Atsa Rap," Michael Patrick Welch teaches young kids to rap with a drum machine. Structuring the biographical piece ironically as a syllabus, Welch exposes the gulf between linear frameworks for imparting information and the subjective, zigzagging interpretations on the receiving end. Conversely, it is kids who dispense all-too-clear and unwanted lessons on street-life socioeconomics to a contractor's assistant in "Mazant St." by Berman Black.

Not only has Constance cemented its reputation as a creative forum and cultural artifact with Delicate Burdens, but it has demonstrated what we may expect from the book in the future. Like Ninth Letter and a handful of other new publications, Constance makes the case that, as the role of digtial technology continues to evolve, the book may accrue greater significance in lives as a literary object in which style and substance, tone and texture, passion and purpose, fuse singularly between covers.

In other words, from the blurred designs of the inside cover and title page, as if the copy in hand was waterlogged and drying out, Delicate Burdens announces that it continues to weather the storm. That it's a beguiling testament to the necessity of bearing witness and a testament to New Orleans as an inimitable setting for art. That it welcomes high and low culture, the published and the unpublished, just as its inescapable city embraces the sacred and profane. That from humble beginnings, its very existence is, in fact, a minor miracle.