Jesmyn Ward's Memoir

Jesmyn Ward’s Mississippi Memoir

Had Jesmyn Ward been raised elsewhere than DeLisle, Mississippi, she might still have written a memoir infused with dread.  A writer’s temperament, contrary to popularized beliefs, is only partially shaped by environment, and much of what she deems crucial or he decides is stylistically purposeful lies hidden in genetic histories.  But Ward was raised on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast in a family whose genetic profile is New World ---African, European, and indigenous.  In twentieth-century Mississippi (and rest of the South), such a profile can only be Black or White, because Southerners pretend to be ignorant of nuances of mental color and world authorities on skin colour.  Thus, in Men We Reap (2013), Ward writes a story capable of inducing pre-future catharsis.  Her bite-the-bullet prose and brutally honest presentation of self precludes any consolation of tears.  Neither complicit guilt nor deceptive hope results from reading Men We Reap. What one does gain is a cold, sub-zero perspective on what life offers a certain class of African Americans in the South and what it withholds from them. Ward writes well.  Her gift is the agony of dread, the best anodyne for the contemporary human condition.

Ward’s memoir brings a crucial difference to the writing of Mississippi life history and the writing about the deaths of young Black males, because it seems her sensibility is more at home in the superhighway of rap than on the dusty roads of the blues.  In Men We Reap one does not find the defiance of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, the womanist testimonials of Anne Moody’s classic Coming of Age in Mississippi and Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta, the sweetness and light of Clifton Taulbert’s Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, or the photograph-inspired quest for resolution in Natasha Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  Ward does incorporate some recognizable blues strategies in her writing, but they are a far cry from the negotiations with reality to be heard in the voice of Koko Taylor or in the blues poems of Sterling D. Plumpp. Ward is brave enough to endow her writing with the amorality of Nature itself.

Ward prepares her readers well for a season in dread in the “Prologue.” She is very clear about her objective:

My hope is that learning something about our lives and the lives of the people in my community will mean that when I get to the heart, when my marches forward through the past and backward from the present meet in the middle with my brother’s death, I’ll understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here.  Hopefully, I’ll understand why my brother died while I live, and why I’ve been saddled with this rotten fucking story” (8).

Readers learn what she has learned, and they are stronger for this education in writing.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

March 4, 2014

Honoree Fannone Jeffers

Library of Congress

101 Independence Ave. SE

Washington DC 20540

March 4, 2014

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Poet Laureate Selects 2014 Witter Bynner Fellows,

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Jake Adam York

The 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, Natasha

Trethewey, has selected poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers as the recipient of a

Witter Bynner Fellowship and has named poet Jake Adam York posthumously as a

fellow.

Trethewey will introduce a program celebrating the fellows at 6:30 p.m. on

Wednesday, March 26, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the James

Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20540. The

event is free and open to the public. No tickets are needed.

Jeffers will read her poetry, and Trethewey will read the work of York, who died

in December 2012.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, “These fellowships—to poets

whose distinctive talents and craftsmanship merit wider recognition—provide a

wonderful way for the Laureate, the Library and the [Witter Bynner] Foundation

to encourage poets and poetry.”

Commenting on her selections, Trethewey said Jeffers and York “are two American

poets whose work deserves a wider audience.”

Jeffers will receive a $10,000 fellowship. This is the 17th year that the

fellowship has been awarded.

Jeffers is the author of three books of poems, including “Red Clay Suite”

(2007), “Outlandish Blues” (2003) and “The Gospel of Barbecue”(2000). Her

other honors include the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry for her first

book and the 2002 Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, as well as awards from the

Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Rona Jaffe Foundation and fellowships from

the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the

MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A founding member of

Cave Canem, the writer’s colony for African-American poets, Jeffers teaches at

the University of Oklahoma, where she is associate professor of English and

creative-writing coordinator.

York was the author of four books of poems, including his forthcoming book

“Abide” (2014), as well as “Persons Unknown” (2010), “A Murmuration of

Starlings” (2008) and “Murder Ballads” (2005). He also published a book of

literary history, “The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech

in American Poetry” (2005). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts

Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry, York also received the 2005 Elixir Prize

in Poetry for his first book, the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry for his

second book, and the 2010 Third Coast Poetry Prize for his poem“Before Knowing

Remembers.” Founder of the online literary journal storySouth, as well as the

online journal Thicket, York was a contributing editor for the literary journal

Shenandoah.

The Witter Bynner fellowships support the writing of poetry. Only two things

are asked of the fellows: that they organize a reading in their hometowns and

participate in reading and recording sessions at the Library of Congress.

Applications are not taken for the fellowships; the Poet Laureate makes the

selection.

The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry was incorporated in 1972 in New Mexico

to provide grant support for programs through non-profit organizations. Witter

Bynner was an influential early-20th century poet and translator of the Chinese

Classic “Tao Te Ching,” which he named “The Way of Life According to Laotzu.” He

travelled with D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence and proposed to Edna St.

Vincent Millay (she accepted, but then they changed their minds). He worked at

McClure’s Magazine, where he published A.E. Housman for the first time in the

United States, and was one of O. Henry’s early fans.

Previous Witter Bynner fellows include Carol Muske-Dukes and Carl Phillips

(1998), David Gewanter, Heather McHugh and Campbell McGrath (1999), and Naomi

Shihab Nye and Joshua Weiner (2000), all appointed by Robert Pinsky; the late

Tory Dent and Nick Flynn (2001), appointed by Stanley Kunitz; George Bilgere and

Katia Kapovich (2002), and Major Jackson and Rebecca Wee (2003), appointed by

Billy Collins; Dana Levin and Spencer Reece (2004), appointed by Louise Gluck;

Claudia Emerson and Martin Walls (2005), and Joseph Stroud and Connie Wanek

(2006), appointed by Ted Kooser; Laurie Lamon and David Tucker (2007), appointed

by Donald Hall; Matthew Thorburn and Monica Youn (2008), appointed by Charles

Simic; and Christina Davis and Mary Szybist (2009) and Jill McDonough and Atsuro

Riley (2010), appointed by Kay Ryan; Forrest Gander and Robert Bringhurst

(2011), appointed by W.S. Merwin; L. S. Asekoff and Sheila Black (2012)

appointed by Philip Levine; and Sharon Dolin and Shara McCallum (2013) appointed

by Natasha Trethewey during her first term.

The Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress fosters and enhances

the public’s appreciation of literature. The center administers the endowed

poetry chair (the U.S. Poet Laureate), and coordinates an annual literary season

of poetry, fiction and drama readings, performances, lectures and symposia,

sponsored by the Library’s Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund

and the Huntington Fund. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/poetry/<http://LOCPR.pr-optout.com/Tracking.aspx?Data=HHL%3d%3e%2c30%3e%26JDG%3c%3c9%40!OHL%3d8%2b62&RE=MC&RI=4441818&Preview=False&DistributionActionID=33335&Action=Follow+Link>.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and

the largest library in the world, holds more than 158 million items in various

languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and

the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its

award-winning website at www.loc.gov<http://LOCPR.pr-optout.com/Tracking.aspx?Data=HHL%3d%3e%2c30%3e%26JDG%3c%3c9%40!OHL%3d8%2b62&RE=MC&RI=4441818&Preview=False&DistributionActionID=33334&Action=Follow+Link>.