Jazz Poetry for Hire on the Streets of New Orleans

A couple of nights every week, Eric Carter sits at the top of New Orleans' Frenchman Street with a typewriter. The legendary music street is famous for jazz, but he's practicing another kind of improvisational expression.

"Poetry," his sign reads. "Your topic, your price."

Give Carter a word, and he'll tap out a poem for you on a piece of receipt paper for a donation.

"I can celebrate an anniversary, or the river, or a birthday -- people ask me to write about food, or the saints or all that, so that's what I do," he told AOL News.

"It's got me out of several writing blocks, and it's just fun. People are in good moods, out here on Frenchman street. I just sit out here and do my thing."

I asked him for a poem about pelicans -- he responded with an impassioned Louisiana ode to Sazeracs and po' boys. Nothing on pelicans, strictly speaking, but that is poetic license.

Carter, a Washington, D.C., native, came to New Orleans 12 days after Hurricane Katrina to help with the relief effort. But he fell in love with the city, even in its broken, desperate state. People said hi to him on the street. He could talk about food with strangers for hours. Most importantly, he felt the sort of creative energy and excitement that has inspired poets like Tennessee Williams and others for years.

"I swear, the people here are just so incredibly nice. People are just wholeheartedly into making sure that you feel a part of something," he says. "I came down here to help these people, but they've given me so much more than I could ever give them.

"People love to share. They're proud of it."

He occasionally writes for magazines in town, and he uses his time on Frenchman Street as a writing exercise. He's part of a core group of four or five poets who are out almost every night attracting the confusion and interest of music fans who aren't yet poetry fans.

When he gets a topic, Carter fires off a few questions to get the subject going. Say the word is "balcony": When do you sit on the balcony? Who do you sit with? What do you see? He takes that and works on a poem -- 25 to 200 words that take him anywhere from a few minutes to an hour.

For Erin, another poet who sits next to Carter many nights, poetry is a natural outgrowth of the bizarre confluence of oil spills, hurricanes and jazz music that the Crescent City finds itself grappling with.

"It just happens," she told AOL News. "We're living in a world of really chaotic forces. The ends aren't meeting, and poetry is kind of an outshoot of that.

"The fact that people read it and say this is beautiful, that in itself is beautiful. People giving money, and saying this is awesome, that's amazing."

Rent is cheap in New Orleans -- some poets can actually sustain themselves with their Frenchman Street donations, living the sort of Bohemian life that has drawn people to the city for decades.

"People are so beautiful out here, and people here are so prone to that idea that I might see you out of the corner your eye, and something might happen, that's magical," Carter says.

"There's something sacred and special here. Once you drink the water, they'll call you back forever."