By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 8, 2006
BATON ROUGE, La. -- She found her muse in the muck and horror of it all. In the way her New Orleans went dead silent. Horns dropped from sight. Spindly-legged men who used to be on street corners staring as if from an old tintype suddenly -- whoosh -- gone.
She's a young poet, and so she started writing.
What happened to the Creole and Cajun aromas
From mawmaw's kitchen, that loved to shake their hips
And wave their handkerchiefs in the wind?
The verses are from her published poem "La Nouvelle-Orleans Apres l'Orage" -- "New Orleans After the Storm."
Aug. 27 of last year happened to be Trenise Robinson's 21st birthday. The Robinsons lived in New Orleans East, on North Idlewood. They sliced cake and paid little mind to the angry wind and waters churning off the gulf. But a day later they all had to bolt. Trenise's mother, Sandra, a school administrator, came to Baton Rouge. Trenise returned to the University of Richmond for her senior year.
"When Trenise was in preschool," Sandra Robinson says, "her teacher told us, 'Mrs. Robinson, this child can write.' "
It was the kind of benevolent praise bestowed upon many children. But the child did start to break away. "She was published in children's anthologies," says Sandra Robinson.
In college, she was poetry editor of the Messenger, the school's literary magazine.
Mother and daughter are at the kitchen table of their small townhouse here on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. The kitchen table is the only piece of furniture they were able to salvage from their New Orleans home. They got down on hands and knees for days and scrubbed the sand and soot from it.
At her mother's praise, Robinson just shrugs. She doesn't know where the gift came from. "It's very saturated with imagery," she says of her poetry.
But there beneath lies mudbugs and slave bones
And the syncopated music of motherlands
Beating their congas and timbales, massaging the earth
With their festive feet and ash-crossed foreheads.
A few months back, Robinson applied to the Hurston/Wright Writers' Week, a prestigious summer workshop, named after the African American writers Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, that takes place at American University.
She was overwhelmed with joy and appreciation when she got her acceptance letter. But she couldn't imagine how she'd come up with the $1,250 to attend. She hated to ask her mother, who'd lost her teaching job in New Orleans and was struggling to meet financial obligations.
The poet did her own nitty-gritty economic balancing: She phoned family friends in Springdale, in Prince George's County, and asked if she could stay with them during the workshop. She was able to lop off the $600 for room and board.
Then she called the Hurston-Wright program. They offered a $200 scholarship. She was now short $450.
She started a letter-writing campaign to various philanthropic organizations, pleading for help. Answers came back. "They wished me luck but said no," she says.
Her last appeal went to the New Orleans-based Tennessee Williams Literary Festival. "As the #1 fan of my writing," she wrote, "my mother would have normally found some way to scrape up the money for me to attend this program, but with our life shaken by the events of Hurricane Katrina, this possibility is a lot less likely, seeing as much of our savings have been exhausted."
The festival approved her grant.
Robinson landed in Washington on July 16.
She had never been around so many writers. She was in the poetry workshop, taught by Tyehimba Jess, an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"She's trying to stretch imagery in order to bring to life the devastation and beauty of New Orleans pre-Katrina," Jess said. He was especially taken with Robinson's reception to critique. "A lot of people show up at these workshops, and all they want you to do is tell them their work is 'the bomb,' " he said. "Trenise wasn't like that at all. She was very attentive."
"Our workshops were so intense," Robinson says, shaking her head at the memory. "If this particular line wasn't right, they'd tell you."
Just before the end of the workshop, there was an open-mike night. Writers had two minutes to read before an audience that numbered more than 100. The poet from Louisiana read her New Orleans poem.
The streets are too quiet, no longer flashing hypnotic lights
And beckoning with its rum-soaked, flirtatious breath.
Even the horns of men who made cocktails out of rhythm
And drugs now lay rusted on my doorstep,
Their notes a mere gargle.
"When she finished reading," recalled Tinesha Davis, a Waldorf poet in the audience, "there was a brief moment of silence. Then there was that 'wow.' "
The young poet -- not unlike William Carlos Williams, the famed poet-doctor of New Jersey -- majored in biology in college. She wants to be a doctor "and a poet." She was wait-listed at a couple of medical schools.
"I feel torn between science and writing," Robinson says. "But I've invested a lot of time in my writing."
When she went back to New Orleans two months after the hurricane, she was dumbfounded.
"You see all your stuff out in the street," she said. "Like this big dump. I looked for this baby doll I used to love. I tried to remember the house the last day I saw it, the day of my birthday party. A lot of imagery from that visit went into my New Orleans poem."
"When I write," the poet says, "I'm in another zone."
All of her poems, her oeuvre, every bit of her writing from childhood on, was lost in the hurricane. If she sat and thought about it for a long time, Robinson says, she'd cry. So she doesn't.
The crows are grey now, and caw in a listless perch
On great oaks that gasp to retell Noah's tale.
The grass once green and fat with greed in the humid air
Now brittle, and petrified by the moment's sudden enrapture.
The poet is standing on her small porch. Mosquitoes are everywhere, surfing on the Louisiana heat. "I'm working on my manuscript now," she says, her eyes full of light. "It's poetry. The hurricane will be in there. It's based on my life."
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