Men without thumbs or ears in white boots, lawmen clutching shotguns, game wardens becoming alligators at night, the concrete plants and dirt bike trails, the classic cars rusting in the woods behind my house alive only with oxidation and wasps. The levee keeping more than water out. The tunnel leaking daily on cars and the kryloned tombstones made by kids not yet ready to forget their friends.
The nightmare was all these presented in a filmic lens my dreams had never used before. I dreampt of a boy whose heart hung exposed and reliant upon the same contraption that keeps Wright's muse alive. I dreamed a van, its radio bulletining mass hysteria. I dreamed the dead, not quite dead, flowing down highway 23 like a flood. Finally, I dreamed fade to black. That was the most terrifying part. Black replaced vivid images, a black I couldn't wake from.
I woke screaming, sweating. Not since childhood had sleep-terrors make me spring from bed screaming. I shot from bed to my computer, and wrote until its imagery slipped away. When it was gone, I went back to work on what I'd started and didn't take the challenge back up until the final day of my poetry manuscript preparation class. Our final task assigned the same day as turning in a completed manuscript was to outline our next book. Remembering the dream, and what failings I had discovered writing Shun, I outlined a book called Louisiana God Machine. Here's part of the original proposal:
Now I won't bother pointing out the problems of this outline (e.g. the two main characters are named Judas and Orpheus???). Instead, I'll highlight the positives. I got a sense of the southern gothic, and gothic lit in general, as being excellent guides for the zombie trope. The reliance on the grotesque, the stereotypes and cliche backstories, even the antihero are present in both. I wanted to talk about social inequities, about the "inundation is inevitable" mindset that is almost suicidally beautiful about the gulf coast region. I outlined the book and instantly began reading gothics, composing lines.
Louisiana God Machine: A Southern Gothic Novel in Verse
by Geoff Munsterman
Southern Gothic is a sub-genre of the gothic unique to American literature, relying on supernatural events to guide the plot. Unlike its predecessor, it uses these tools not for the sake of suspense, but to explore social issues and reveal the cultural inequities of the South. Southern Gothics avoid perpetuating the antebellum stereotypes the dominant culture would prefer to see, such as the contented slave, the demure Southern belle, the chivalrous gentleman and the righteous Christian preacher. Instead, the writer takes classic Gothic archetypes, such as the damsel in distress or the heroic knight, and portrays them in a modern and realistic manner, transforming them into a spiteful, reclusive spinster or a white-suited, fan-brandishing lawyer with ulterior motives. In the case of LGM, I’m thinking Elvis Presley, Zombies, and a Bourbon Street bartendress. One of the most notable features of the Southern Gothic is the grotesque, a stock character who possesses some cringe-inducing qualities, typically bigotry and self-righteousness, but enough good traits that the reader finds himself empathizing in spite of himself. Deeply flawed characters, while often disturbing to read about, provide the author with greater narrative range and more opportunities to highlight the unpleasant aspects of Southern culture without resorting to open moralizing. Elvis, Zombies, the State Troopers/Game Wardens, visions of postbellum Hell.
The plan for this work is to make the stereotype horrific. Elvis is God, more or less and zombies don’t want brains they want television sets and sweet tea. Night of the Living Dead set in Belle Chasse.
The hero, Judas, a fourth-generation shrimp boat netter, Orpheus (a prostitute's kid), Kimya Lawsom (Daiquiri shop waitress/singer/whore), hide out in a house in Port Sulphur, Louisiana.
With only a powder blue Ford Econoline with rusty hubcaps and a bad engine, Judas tries to find what the news agencies are calling the “Louisiana God Machine.” Apparently the state has invented a machine that wills religious conversion; a tool they think can stop the river of zombies flowing in the streets.
Friends get bit, horrific imagery. Lynching. Antebellum and Post-bellum convergences, a new Civil War. Utter insanity and Al Jolson too.
The summer after was a weird one. It was the first time I was home for longer than a few weeks since my father died. I broke up with my first college girlfriend, partially because when I finally made my way back home I realized that I didn't recognize myself anymore. I liked the intimacy relationships provide, but it became more therapy than an actual relationship. I felt guilty for using her, for sinking myself into my writing as a way of getting my emotions out instead of, you know, talking to her. I had a job in the french quarter where everyone else was on vacation and I was left to mind the store. The promise of publication seemed imminent if only I could scrounge together enough good lines to make Shun something great. Of course, I was already obsessed with the zombie-gothic. Shun went to the back burner and has been there ever since. There was a tropical storm that did more damage than anyone imagined. Trees fell, flooding shut down the streets. All of this was eerie, and I used that in the book. I wondered on the page: if a tropical storm could do this much damage, what would a hurricane do?
We found out on August 29th. I'd evacuated to Ohio, back to school, for Katrina. My family, for the most part, stayed behind or went only as far as Baton Rouge. Katrina was big, nasty, and engulfed the gulf on weather channels. I drove the sixteen hours from New Orleans to Gambier, all the while listening to news radio about what was about to happen. The storm hit on the first day of classes. The levees broke on the second day. On day three I finally slept, poorly. Cell phones didn't work. People in the bubble showed care, but didn't let the disaster stop them from partying and catching up with classmates after a summer hiatus. My roommate, who had been emotionally useless when my father died, continued his inability to console. He could wax poetic about mowhair or economic turbulence, but tell him someone died and he ran like a shot-at mutt.
The book went on the shelf. It was too weird to think about. The proximity to when I'd thought the book up to the storm creeped me out. My ideas of making the natural disaster that threatened gulf coast residents each summer into a supernatural one felt almost like I'd wished it in existence.
Then the phone calls came, the conversations. My brother, who got married three months later, had friends at the rehearshal dinner telling me about driving through empty towns only to find in the brief shine of a headlight someone's dark-disfigured face staring back. "Like zombies" they said. Well, I was off.
From December until February, I wrote Louisiana God Machine (I'd renamed it Delta Dawn by then after the zombie-like girl in Tanya Tucker's song who stumbles mad as Ophelia after her fiance broke his promise to take her as his bride). It was in a strict syllabic form I'd invented called the "zombie" which I relate here. The numbers represent the number of syllables her line:
A Zombie:
8/8/6/8/6/8/6/8/6/8/6/8/8/8
8/8/6/8/6/8/6/8/10/8/6/10/8/6
[or, 206 Syllables]
886868686868888868686810861086
They would be either single or double sonnets. The strictness of the form would emulate the plain speak of Sterling Brown poems and the vivacity of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" and, since the number of syllables was 206, the number of poems would be 206 as well. I wrote 206 strict poems in two months. And I hated it. It sounded hoaky, old-fashioned, and generally lacked bite. I liked the shape these poems took, however. There was a uniformity I appreciated, but I could never get over the short lines. I was used to writing ten syllable lines, and had a hard time making use of six syllable lines. It wasn't right for the subject, it wasn't right for the project. Here is the original version of poem 1:
I. Rabbit Trap
Long since dead the cotton field gags
golden in summer dust
of old crops left to die.
Honeysuckle twined around
axles and bent chassis
blooms despite the heat and rust.
Some nights boys come to drink
and pour cold beer down girl's shirts.
Some nights, who knows but now
is quiet. And in the bush
a white rabbit
shakes its whiskers
at a dead hand
rising from dirt.
Windhowl mornings everyday. Each
cypress a tongue cancerous
with silver moss and knots
that bulge bark same as taste buds.
The white rabbit pauses
sniffs the fingers quietly.
All a sudden that rotten hand
grabbed rabbit by the foot
grabbed rabbit by the foot
and tore it, pulling underground.
In wake, a soil suckhole opened up,
coughing clumps of hair white as cotton used to be.
As dirt clammers up and in again a quick spurt of blood
a crunch of bone.
I started editing, but one stumbling block I hit was that from whole groups of poems I'd usually only salvage one good line or image. I didn't like the plot much anymore. Some of the original character concepts (a guy named Wrecks (like Rex) who was your typical junkyard-dog-of-a-human-being or a football star who brings shame to the community with his off-field antics, a reverend named Zombstradamus) fell flat.
I started from scratch. I ditched the "zombie" form for longer lines and constricted and truncated sentences. I developed a linguistic version of the landscape of the mind--a way in which the people talk and describe the world around them. I change Judas Benjamin (the owner of Belle Chasse plantation and conferedate secy. of state was Judah P. Benjamin) to George Leander Benjamin (George like myself and my grandfather, Leander for Leander Perez, and Benjamin for Judah P. Orpheus became, for all intensive purposes Orph. All of his brothers, Osiris, Cerebus, Hercules, and Oberon adopted a similar named truncation--Osi, Cere, Herk, and Obe. Kimya became Kimily. Wrecks vanished.
The floodwaters stopped about two miles from my house, about a mile from my high school. Belle Chasse, for the most part, was spared. South Plaquemines sunk into the gulf. New Orleans fell into chaos. The westbank, however, stayed dry and deputized people to line the Mississippi River Bridge to keep fleeing New Orleanians out of the westbank. The mall on the westbank was set on fire by looters, and everyone assumed it wasn't local residents. Decades old contempt people of the westbank felt New Orleans showed had manifest itself into bad blood that likely cost people lives. This "luck into a safe place" scenario was ripped straight from George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Like Mr. Cooper defending the cellar from blacks, people of the westbank defended their turf.
So the book developed into a kind of karma tale: imagine a town spared by a natural disaster amid absolute destruction. It doesn't help its neighbors. It generates money from its neighbors. We got generators for sale, sure, but for a premium. Need safe lodging? Sucks to be you.
The whole thing slowed. The themes were caustic and the imagery gruesome. If not done right, it would only come off as caustic and grotesque. I took a summer writing and rewriting and had, by August 2006 a working manuscript of about 140 poems.
Then my Kenyon career fell apart. So did I. I became a minor alcoholic, drinking nightly. I lived in a house of nameless distraction. From the time the book began to then, I'd developed a whole new set of friends.
My met with the college counselor and we talked about the book. After my father died, I stopped in and read my poems to him. Now, being denied the chance to write one big poem as a finale to school, he said: "It sounds to me like you're seeking redemption. I guess my only question is what do you think you did that you need redemption from?" And I thought about it. I wasn't home for so much, I had dedicated so much time to writing poetry at Kenyon. I had become so promising to so many people that I needed to create something epic like, say, an epic. It was the only way, in my mind, to show that I belonged there. That it was right to go there in the first place. But finally, I was tired. I dropped out in November and went back home. I didn't write much, but was happy and not drunk all the time. I soaked up the landscape, the stories, edited and cut. By May 2007 my 140 poems had dwindled back down to about 19.
But the 19 were solid. Finally I knew what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. I knew my characters, I had a rough idea of the plot. I pretty much read every gothic novel I could get my hands on, and criticism on the genre. I watched over 100 zombie movies. I tattooed a zombie on my arm just to keep going.
I went back to school confident I count work the book and go to school at the same time. But the place had changed. It was unhealthy for me to be there at a time when so much anti-establishment coursed through my blood. I'd witnessed the evils of addiction, depression, elitism, and the dirty side of money. I grew to hate the place as it changed into something I didn't think agreed with me. So I bolted again. Lived for a year in Portland and didn't write a lick. My 19 grew to 36, but in Portland remained at 36.
More tragedy back home and a growing sense that I was never going to be expected to grow up in Portland sent me back home. I got on the bus a day before Hurricane Gustav hit. Since then, September 2008, I've written 36 to this week when I managed the end.
The book changed as much as I did, and reflects as much. My publishing goals subsided--I was in a "fuck fame" mood. Now in Lafayette trying to finish school elsewhere than Ohio, I felt good enough about my decisions and free finally from regrets about the last 5 years that I could write an ending.
Delta Dawn is 68 mean little pages. My characters are people and not stereotypes, and I had to murder some of them. I endured constant emails from friends who saw anything about zombies. Yes, I know, I knew about that zombie thing before you did. Like it was my job to know. I've seen works come along that mirror things I was doing, each time learning that any idea done with originality and vividness can endure similarities to other works. Other zombie poems, even poems that connect katrina to zombie movies don't do what I am doing. My book isn't just a concept, it's a fleshed out thing. That's comforting now, but when I was in the middle of writing it I feared not finishing or being beaten to the punch. I found a way to make the book personal and national--after all disasters happened on both levels.
I'm happy to be done and look forward to writing about something other than zombies. I look forward to getting it in people's hands. Even if it takes a while, I'll try to make it happen. Some poems, like books, take no time at all. Others require intense concentration and energy to remain interested. After five years, I can say my book is the latter and not the former.
Redemption is half complete. Next is publication, and a diploma. We shall see.
I think this can best be described as an epic-blog
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