Poem For The Murder Capital (New Orleans)

After failing to rebuild the city since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans has experienced everything from the cutting of social services, to an increase in street crime, to school privatization upwards of 70%. In this video, poet and critic Alex Sheremet presents a poem in the ario format, “They’re Closing All The Schools In New Orleans”.

A note on the ario poetic form: Bruce Ario (1955 – 2022) was a Minneapolis poet who created the “ario” poetic form, a 10-line poem with 3 stanzas of 3 lines each, concluding with a final line that inverts or otherwise comments upon everything which preceded it. For more information, check out our video, ArtiFact #35: The Life & Times Of Bruce Ario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycAD9s57Re8

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Background footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf38Ugp0WGA

Text of poem:

THEY'RE CLOSING ALL THE SCHOOLS IN NEW ORLEANS

* on the flight over

Swallowed to the pit like an old classroom
Promoting fractions into wholes
A child yaps I've filched an hour from New York.

Go write. NOW——but needed time
So needlessly distended
It took itself for perpetuity

As if we'd never had a holiday
One could not just mop away on Bourbon Street.
Imagine all the janitors kept home.

Who tried to keep you honest?

Tags: #neworleans #poetry #shorts