 Creative writing students at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux – and anyone else interested – can experience the South Louisiana landscape through a poetic reading from a University alumnus tonight.
Louis E. Bourgeois, 36, will read selected poems from his recently published book “Olga” at 6:30 p.m. in the Archives Room of the Ellender Memorial Library on Nicholls’ campus.
A New Orleans native, Bourgeois earned his bachelor’s in English from LSU in 1996. In 2002 he became the first graduate of the University of Mississippi’s creative writing master’s program.
“My poems rely very much on imagery of the South Louisiana landscape – the marshes and the bayous,” Bourgeois said. “In a way it’s the quintessential Louisiana book of poems. My first memories are on Bayou Sauvage.”
Bourgeois said he hopes the audience will realize it is possible for someone from South Louisiana to be a published poet.
“It can be done,” he said. “I’m from Slidell, and as far as I know, I’m the only poet from Slidell with a book of poetry from a national publisher.”
Cincinatti-based Word Tech published “Olga” in September 2005.
“The message will be that South Louisiana is a wonderful place to write about,” Bourgeois said. “For me, it was always the marshlands, the types of birds that you find and the smell of creosote from the pilings of boat sheds and wharfs. The smell [of the wood preservative] is the most intense scent when you live out there.”
Bourgeois wrote his poems while at the University of Mississippi.
“In graduate school you write what you know,” he said. “And the thing I knew the most was growing up on the outskirts of New Orleans.”
He said he recalled from his childhood the natural imagery of his surroundings.
“The bayou speaks for itself,” he said. “I don’t try to force a theme on my poems. I try to record accurately the landscape.”
In his poem titled “As If a Boy,” Bourgeois writes, “In the October twilight, you find yourself in a purple field under a sky of ochre and crimson. The last bats of the season speckle the diminishing sky … All life, for the moment, is caught in the silence. Your life is caught in the silence. Bats flicker on the horizon, and the brown thrush is almost gone.”
Bourgeois said he did a reading at the University of Mississippi in January and at Middle Georgia College in Cochran, Ga., in February. He said he would love to do a reading at the University if given the opportunity.
He said he had more freedom to be independent as an undergraduate at LSU than he did at the University of Mississippi.
“I enjoyed Free Speech Alley and listening to those characters,” he said. “I think that LSU was great for me and great training ground for my writing career.”
Though part of his income comes from his writing, Bourgeois is also an English instructor at Rust College in Holly Springs, Miss.
Bourgeois is working on a collection of childhood stories that parallel his poetry.
“I just have an impulse to do this,” he said. “I write completely on instinct. I don’t write to get published. It just happens. I write completely when I feel like it.”
Contact Chris Day at [email protected]
