Kalamu ya Salaam listens to New Orleans.

• Author: Tisserand, Michael

Inside Eleanor McMain High School is a massive turquoise-and-cream Uptown building that was freckled in mold long before last August's flood. Inside its walls, Kalamu ya Salaam is engaging in what he says is a revolutionary act. He is teaching creative writing to public school students. This is where the fifty-nine-year-old poet, playwright, activist, publisher, and one-time executive director of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation devotes most of his afternoons these days. He works through Students at the Center, an independently funded, public school-based initiative that he co-directs with longtime teacher Jim Randels.

When one student turns to Salaam for approval after sharing her latest writing, her hopeful gaze just seems to bounce off her teacher's thick, round glasses. Instead, Salaam cajoles other students into the conversation. The answers aren't with me, he says repeatedly, they're with you.

The results are striking and varied. Some students this afternoon are harsh and polemical; others are lyrical and reflective. Salaam finally coaxes one reticent student to read aloud a poem he wrote about a father he never knew. The poem returns again and again to the phrase "This man is not who I am," a line that builds in conviction even as the student buries his head in his paper as he softly reads.

"Kalamu doesn't shy away from pushing people to go really deep," says Randels, who frequently co-teaches with Salaam. "He's good at making students comfortable, but at the same time he's going to their sore spots, their sad spots, their angry spots."

Post-Katrina New Orleans is a rash of sore spots. In the immediate aftermath of the flood, Salaam's was one of the clearest voices denouncing the lethal, malignant neglect that residents faced. He's still at it.

"In the long run, New Orleans is doomed, unless there's a major turnaround in how the environment is dealt with," he says. "I really don't see that happening."

This is not the language of a city reaching for optimism, where fleur-de-lis flags now fly from freshly gutted houses. Those kinds of symbols get you nowhere, Salaam says. "That's the desperation of survivors. They want to hold on to whatever their image of New Orleans was. That's gone. We can forget that. There's a new New Orleans now."

So what would he most like to see in the new New Orleans? He's got a ready answer. "The President's head on a stick in Congo Square," he says, referring to the city's historic gathering place...