Poets Respond to “Captive State” in Verse

On August 30, HNOC staff welcomed Pelegrin and her group—Stacey Balkun, Kelly Harris-DeBerry, Jessica Kinnison, Karisma Price, Christopher Louis Romaguera, Mona Lisa Saloy, Sha’Condria “iCON” Sibley, and Gian Francisco Smith—to HNOC’s Royal Street galleries. By this time Megan Holt, executive director of One Book One New Orleans (OBONO) and a longtime HNOC partner, was on board. A public performance, all agreed, was in order, and Holt suggested that the works debut at OBONO’s annual Words & Music Literary Festival, in November.

Captive State co-curator Kevin T. Harrell acknowledged that the poetry collaboration challenged traditional curatorial practice. “As curator, I spent a lot of time thinking about objects, themes, and a chronology that I felt best told this story about our state,” Harrell said. “Having poets wander unguided through those spaces seemed to invite a certain disobedience to that careful planning as they discovered their own chronological paths, themes, and relationships between objects. It was a method of interpreting our work that struck me as genuine, unpredictable, and meditative.”

All of these elements—truth-telling, provocation, hope—were in the air the evening of November 22, as the Captive State poets took to the stage of the André Cailloux Center for Performing Arts and Cultural Justice. One, Stacey Balkun, observed that “a poem is made up of two things, text and white space.” She continued, “The empty space (I hope) implies the existence of other stories—stories that were silenced, truths suppressed and even erased.”

For nearly six decades, HNOC has been dedicated to the stewardship of Louisiana history and culture. For much of this time, we have carefully honed and habitually guarded our institutional voice. But time has taught us that the most powerful stories are the ones we tell together.