Last mission to repair the Hubble telescope Hubble space telescope discoveries have enriched our understanding of the cosmos. In this special report, you will see facts about the Hubble space telescope, discoveries it has made and what the last mission's goals are.
For their own good Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
Fill out this form to email this article to a friend
Overflowing emotion
Poet Martha Serpas remains drawn to the water, even as it tries to swallow the land where she grew up.
By REBECCA CATALANELLO
Published November 7, 2006
ADVERTISEMENT
[Times photo: Daniel Wallace]
Louisiana-born poet Martha Serpas, a professor at the University of Tampa, has published her second collection of poetry, "The Dirty Side of the Storm." Listen to Serpas read "A Corollary"
What happens to children who grow up in disappearing towns? In towns where storms turn earth to flat sheets of water, where pavement melds into bayou, swollen ditches become playgrounds and floating bits of wood, toy boats.
Martha Serpas knows. Last year, after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the 40-year-old University of Tampa professor and poet stood on a bridge 16 miles south of her Galliano, La., hometown and gazed on the last exposed nerve of land - dry only because man-made levees held the water at bay.
"I know the land is going to go," Serpas says now. "There's no stopping it."
She lived her first 22 years immersed in the brackish water and Catholic-infused rituals of south Louisiana. For the past 18, she has observed from the standpoint of an exile the slow erosion of her coastal home.
Her response is a new collection of poetry, The Dirty Side of the Storm (W.W. Norton & Co., $23.95, 89 pages). It is at once a love song and a dirge to a landscape being swallowed by the waters that define it.
"One shouldn't outlive one's birthright," she writes in A Corollary, one of three poems from the collection previously published in the New Yorker magazine.
By the time hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped across the Gulf Coast last summer, Serpas had already penned 45 of the 46 poems that make up the collection. In a poem titled Water, the Gulf of Mexico is a "a persistent curl against the shore, who won't back down or be denied," a description Serpas wrote before the levees of New Orleans burst.
Harold Bloom, the nation's pre-eminent literary critic, teaches at Yale, where Serpas received a master's degree in divinity. He has hailed her work as prophetic in its "anticipation of the ecological destruction of her native state."
But, in Serpas' mind, the truth is far simpler.
"Louisiana suffers hurricanes all the time," she says. "If I wrote a book where water is a central image, flooding is a central image, land-loss is a central image, this is because coastal erosion and the effects of hurricanes are common."
Serpas realized she would be a poet as an undergraduate at Louisiana State University. The daughter of an English teacher, she'd written occasionally all her life - the mandatory teen angst journaling included. But a college poetry writing workshop clinched it.
"That was it," she says. "I was never going to be content in any other pursuit."
Serpas discovered rare satisfaction pulling together seemingly disconnected details of life, then sculpting them into a literary experience.
Serpas, for example, brings together outboard motors, wasps and grottoes in a seven-stanza piece called Creation, an earth-grounded meditation on God's ability to quietly comfort and quickly destroy. A wasp dwells barely visible nearby, then stings without a warning.
Paradox is Serpas' stomping ground.
Water gives life and takes it away. Home beckons, but the reality of home is most clearly viewed from a distance. Ours is at once the "divine earth" that "takes everything in its wounded side and gives back wholeness," in a poem titled Psalm at High Tide.
Serpas moved to Tampa in 1999. She lives in a raised house in Seminole Heights, not far from the Hillsborough River. She walks her big Labradoodle, Kindle, at Epps Park, beneath moss-covered live oaks and cypress trees, herons and vultures overhead. Take away the palm trees and, to her, the river looks almost like a bayou in her native Lafourche Parish.
"Except the water moves more quickly sometimes," she says.
In her work, Florida imagery is sprinkled in with scenes from the Barataria-Terrebonne Estuary, where she grew up. A peacock roams along the Hillsborough River after it "blew over from the zoo" in the poem No Name Storm. Blooming jacarandas and scurrying lizards have a home here, too.
Louisianans and Floridians live under the threat of hurricanes. They know the relentless rhythm of the ocean, what it means to feel "the last silt sink under your feet," as Serpas puts it.
It is not coincidence Serpas has never lived far from water. She doesn't think she can. Houston, New Haven, San Diego, Oregon, New York. Growing up in a land defined by the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast, her reflection is on the water's surface.
"I live on the Gulf Coast," she says of Tampa. "That's my perception of it. And I grew up on the Gulf Coast. . . . In one sense I'm home and in another sense I'm not home."
Yes, she says, she will probably go home one day. The highest praise she has ever received came from a lifelong friend who called her the poet laureate of Bayou Lafourche.
"If there were a University of Bayou Lafourche, I would be there," she says. "But there's not."
So Serpas keeps her connection to home through frequent trips and writing. She works with the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program to try to save the land. And she hopes a documentary she's helping with will raise awareness of the need for coastal preservation.
You'll have to forgive her if she sits on the Hillsborough and sees the bayou. There aren't many opportunities in a homeland being swallowed by water.
News
Fifty years ago, they were screwed-up kids sent to the Florida School for Boys to be straightened out. But now they are screwed-up men, scarred by the whippings they endured. Read the story and see a video and portrait gallery.
Print
Email story
Comment
Email editor
