Sportsman’s Paradise Lost?
Conceptual and environmental artist Dawn DeDeaux’s Free Fall is a “concrete poem” of erasure and of mourning. Free Fall is also a call to action.
Free Fall Superdome Six Block Installation in Progress. Photo by Crista Rock courtesy Helis Foundation
In Free Fall, Puritan poet John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost intersects with the environmental erasures suffered for over a century by the state that, on its license plate, still proclaims itself Sportsman’s Paradise.
Free Fall was installed on the “neutral ground” (or median) along five blocks of New Orleans’ Poydras St., the main artery of the city’s central business district. It stood for nearly two years smack dab before the Superdome, home to the New Orleans Saints and the once infamous shelter to survivors of Katrina's floods.
Free Fall was taken down in the fall of 2024 so that increased security measures could be installed before the February 2025 Super Bowl, measures which the domestic terrorism attack on Bourbon Street on New Year’s Eve made prescient.
On this at once heroic and tragic ground, excerpts from Paradise Lost were affixed to “falling” concrete columns, a stunning literalizing of “concrete poetry,” a tradition that flourished in antiquity, again in Milton’s day, and once again in the 20th century.
Read the rest of the piece over at Randy’s Substack, by clicking here: https://randyfertel.substack.com/p/sportsmans-paradise-lost
