24 NEH Summer
Scholars and “Don’t Deny My Voice: Reading and Teaching African American Poetry”
As a
Project on the History of Black Writing Board member, I thank you for helping
us to explore new territories in the contact/combat zones of African American
poetries. Your questions and comments
have deepened exploration of the nature of reading from diverse angles. You have enlarged considerations of how to
teach in ways that may enable students to become more secure in shaping their
critical thinking. Your thinking about
engaged scholarship, following the exploratory work of Lorenzo Thomas, reminds
us how crucial our agency is in managing chaos.
Agency is all when chaos is everything!
Let
us remember what Dr. Maryemma Graham said about climate, community, and culture
in her letter of July 14, 2013. If
Lorenzo Thomas’s guiding spirit convinces us not to deny our voices, we must
remember
1) Climate
refers “to where poetry come from, under what conditions is it being produced,
and by whom”
2) Community
refers “to the relationship between audience, the poet, and the poem,” or, to
quote from Eugene Redmond’s “Parapoetics”
Poetry is an applied science:
Re-wrapped corner raps
Rootly-eloquented cellular, soulular
sermons
As we practice poetic
community, we may find Thomas Kuhn’s The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions as
needful as C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures
and the Scientific Revolution. Ought
we not be able to say whether the second law of thermodynamics is applicable to
any poem Langston Hughes wrote?
3) Culture refers “to the meaning of poetry, and
what values it espouses, drawing attention to the multiple sites and forms of
black poetry.” In the emerging culture of our conversations, our voices
constitute our values.
Entering the third week of our
dialogues, I urge that we supplement three “c” words with three “r” words
-----research and relentless reflection.
Please ask me off-schedule what I have in mind as a response to a
question in Pluck! (Issue 9, 2013)
---- “Is activism truly dead?” Perhaps
not, but I must conquer a mountain for an answer.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
July 25, 2013
