This chapter invites us to understand New Orleans not only as an historic rim city and a great world port but also as a poetic ecosphere filled with resonant sounds, wavelike rhythms, and a buzzing profusion of messages. Such a poetics takes shape within the city’s understudied lyric traditions, formed and informed by three centuries of multicultural confluence and botanical excess.Desire unfolds not simply in terms of human longing, but as the comingled energies of plant, animal, and wetland life-forms that drive myriad currents and subtle undercurrents of imagination. Now facing submersion, New Orleans maintains as both a great port city and a port of entry into poems. The surrounding Mississippi River and Gulf waters saturate consciousness. Images and sound meld within a rich linguistic and ecological alluvium. We seek messages within sedimentations and intonations. The metamorphic work of poetry becomes dead serious in this tenuous rim of a city, where a desire for meaning unfolds in the thick of things –– stirred on by water, water everywhere.

The Middle Miocene marked the emergence of the Appalachian uplands as a significant sediment source to the Gulf of Mexico. As a result, the Tennessee River joined the Mississippi in creating the dominant fluvial/deltaic depocenter. At the same time, supply from western interior uplands decreased. Two Miocene deposodes and multiple eustatically modulated high-frequency Pliocene—Pleistocene deposodes are recorded in northern Gulf stratigraphy. The continental slope wedge prograded onto the shallow Sigsbee salt, initiating canopy deformation and rapid basinward canopy advance. Salt-encased minibasins created rugose slope topography with multiple, efficient sediment traps. Nonetheless, large volumes of sediment bypassed the continental slope and constructed a series of large, long-lived abyssal plain fans. A narrow coastal plain and shelf prograded along the western Gulf margin. Extensional growth faulting was compensated basinward by compressional faulting and folding above Paleogene detachments. In the Sureste, the river-fed, prograding continental margin and ongoing basement deformation mobilized salt of the Campeche Salt Basin.

In the major literary writing by women in New Orleans in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the theme of home is a central preoccupation, and it is often figured in the literal houses the main female characters inhabit and the landscape that surround these houses. What these houses and landscapes mean varies for each of them, but all of them share an interest in the power of storytelling as a tool for taking ownership over a space and thereby achieving a certain autonomy – a sense of home – with regard to a world that would otherwise dominate them.

The location of New Orleans constitutes a paradox, for a city on this site is both inevitable and impossible, the boundaries between land and water ever changeful, and human settlement always understood as unsettled – that is, provisional and an ongoing project of problem solving. The settlers’ attitudes toward swamps in general determined their understanding of the particular city that sprang up among them. The swamps, they thought, were a source of deadly disease, an endless hiding place for smugglers and runaway slaves, and it thus carried moral, political and even racial overtones, as reflected in the writing of the first historian of New Orleans, Charles Gayarré and in other early commentary on the city.