Poems by Karisma Price
February 28, 2023
It’s a legend little known outside New Orleans that Harry Connick Jr. — pianist behind the “When Harry Met Sally” soundtrack, rom-com star, “American Idol” judge — learned to play piano from a gay Black musician struggling with a heroin addiction. His mainstream success stems from a deal initiated by Connick’s father, onetime Orleans Parish district attorney, who told James Booker he could stay out of jail if he taught his son to play.
In her piece “12-Year-Old Harry Connick Jr. Speaks to James Booker,” poet-professor-screenwriter Karisma Price renders the duality of Booker’s genius and agony through the lens of innocence, a tender view of the man called “Black Liberace,” who died alone in an emergency room lobby.
This poem is but one of many contemplations on Blackness both personal and historical in Price’s debut collection, I’m Always So Serious, which employs both the port city mythologies of New Orleans and Athens, Greece, and the palpably everyday (e.g., autocorrect on your cellphone). Here, Price shares two poems from Serious, including the aforementioned imagined conversation between Connick Jr. and Booker.
12-Year-Old Harry Connick Jr. Speaks to James Booker
I thought you released spiders
on the keys to mess with me.
I’m sorry about the tape recorder.
I wanted to hold your voice
to my ear like a secret.
Is it heroin or the police
this time? Your voice floods
the living room and I pour
it on the piano like gasoline.
You play “Malagueña,”
and the dam of me breaks
like a voice. I’ve played
Chopin’s Études, I’ve done
the whole thing, I want you
to teach me. My dad doesn’t
care, come back when you’re sober.
I picked up the phone when
I shouldn’t have. Harry, come
get me. I’m getting beat up by the police.
You’d cry and I would just
lull and talk and lull. I kept toying
with the recorder
like a rosary,
like a light switch,
like any little thing
you could worry in the dark.
After the 1916 Film
The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition requires melatonin & the soft dying body of a monkey face orchid.
The brilliant strangeness of watching everyone not you grow comfortable with themselves.
Trying to rehabilitate one or multiple racists.
Learning death does not fear you.
I am afraid of stars. The sky is a womb that allows for reentry.
Can you teach me how to rest? I know there are different avenues to happy but I still choose this one.
I’ve had panic attacks since I was five.
Everything you fear keeps you alive.
I am not safe inside the vehicle nor when I reach the tenor. Neglect, a different type of death. I mean here I am in the center of my body leaning left over exhausting myself.
I am a life skill. I am a body who loves the mercy of movement.
Tell me what to do specifically. I’d like some guidance.
I scare away all the punctuation
I am a sentence that is not allowed to end
Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at Tulane University. A poet, screenwriter, and media artist, she is also the author of I'm Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in publications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Four Way Review, wildness, and Adroit Journal. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, was a finalist for the 2019 Manchester Poetry Prize, and was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation. A native New Orleanian, she holds an MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. Click here to preorder I’m Always So Serious.
