Artist, writer, chef, teacher and LSU Communication across the Curriculum studio coordinator Vincent Cellucci is a man of many talents, each of them affected by Hurricane Katrina. His poetry, though, proves the most inspired by the storm.
But it wasn’t until after Katrina that he began to publish his works.
Cellucci always chased his interests, despite roadblocks in his way.
When Loyola University did not offer glassblowing courses, Cellucci forged his own path and enrolled at Tulane University. He cross enrolled at Loyola for painting and poetry and at Tulane for glassblowing, receiving his undergraduate
degree in English writing.
While in school, he also became a cook for Emeril’s Delmonico restaurant in New Orleans.
He focused most of his time before Katrina on visual art and gourmet cooking.
“I actually think painting and cooking have a lot in common,” Cellucci said.
While Hurricane Katrina inspired Cellucci’s writing, it physically destroyed another one of his creative outlets.
The storm wiped out most of New Orleans and along with the broken levees went his glass sculptures. The storm forced him to harness his creativity in a more feasible manner.
“I realized that practice was unsustainable — just the energy bills alone and the specialized equipment that you have,” he said.
He forfeited glassblowing in favor of practicality while he lived out of his Jeep, traveling back and forth between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Like many New Orleans residents after the storm, Cellucci was in limbo, but he continued painting, writing and cooking.
“I like painting so much,” Cellucci said. “It’s portable. You can stretch canvas anywhere. You can throw paint on the wall anywhere. That’s why the poetry was so handy, too, is because all I need is a notebook and a pencil.”
And he now only cooks for fun.
Cellucci received a Master of Fine Arts from LSU in 2008 and used his master’s thesis for the basis of “An Easy Place / To Die,” a book of poems influenced by Hurricane Katrina. For Cellucci, the book is a metaphor for New Orleans.
“You can really submit to your earthly appetites, and I think it’s more beautiful to that,” he said. “You’re not lost in the ideals. You’re very much in your environment and your sensory experience when you’re in New Orleans.”
Since “An Easy Place / To Die” was published, Cellucci has collaborated on several projects with fellow creative minds.
“I like collaborating with people,” he said. “It’s more rewarding to me, artistically, and I think it’s less [selfish]. I like the socialization aspect of working with other artists.”
Through it all, Cellucci remains humble. He jokes about being a “lowly poet” and is sarcastically self-deprecating. He commends the artists he collaborated with as well as those who derived inspiration from Katrina’s destruction.
His collaborations range from helping translate a Bengali author’s chapbook of poetry and prints, to creating a vulgar anthology with more than 50 other poets called “F— Poems.”
“I got tired of defending poetry as something vital and alive. A lot of people would be teasing me about it [being] a dead art,” said Cellucci about the motivation behind “F— Poems.”
But 10 years later, his poetry is hardly dead.
On Thursday, he held an interactive, multimedia poetry reading in honor of the 10th anniversary of the storm for LSU’s Katrina & Rita Symposium. Through a website, the crowd read along with Cellucci, tapping words throughout the poem on their phones and sending them to light up colorfully on the screen and sound over speakers in the auditorium, essentially bringing his poetry to life.
Jesse Allison, a non-native of Louisiana who was responsible for the audio portion of the presentation, said that “An Easy Place / To Die” helped him understand the local environment in 2005.
“It’s sort of a little window right into what went on and what it would be like to have something happen now that I’m down here,” Allison said.
This window is a prominent theme in Cellucci’s writing. Despite other Louisiana natives finding solace elsewhere after Katrina, Cellucci thrived off his surroundings.
New Orleans is a focus for his works, but Katrina pushed him out of the city limits. He traveled around the state for his writing, and much of his work is focused around Baton Rouge and the Mississippi River.
“It gave me a greater appreciation of the state of Louisiana and the culture of Louisiana,” he said.
It’s this deep love and commitment to the state that has kept him from fully healing from the natural disaster.
“There’s a really thick callous that I think is a problem,” Cellucci said. “In some ways, I’m afraid to remove it. You don’t want to pick scabs too much. I won’t say they’ve healed over, but to me, I think it’s just all about focusing on what’s new, trying to be positive about it where I can — and that’s with these creative collaborations and that’s with making new work and celebrating other people’s work.”

Gallery • 4 Photos

Ronni Bourgeois

LSU Alumnus Vincent Celluci, an Artist, Poet, Author and Teacher reads one of his poems from "An Easy Place / to Die" on Thursday Aug. 27, 2015, at the LSU Digital Media Center which he wrote as his masters' thesis after Hurricane Katrina.