Returning to Narrative
Hidden neatly in the hyperbole of Thomas Sayers Ellis’ “All Their
Stanzas Look Alike” (The Maverick Room. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2005.
114-115.) is a truth of sorts. There is a boring “sameness” in a substantial
amount of contemporary “canonized” American poetry. Perhaps the alleged excellence of how MFA
programs teach the making of poetry is partially to blame. MFA is an acronym
for an unprintable phrase. In my scandalizing
opinion, MFA programs promote craft as technical excellence and
ego-interiority, minimizing the option of craft to speak with engaged boldness
of the painful messiness of life and world affairs. To be sure, aesthetics can evoke bright moments
of pleasure or eargasms, even a bit of knowledge. But the best poetry uses aesthetic properties
to intensify the pragmatic, the always present need to deal with how people
manufacture horrors for themselves and others. Jazz counts as some of our best
poetry, and certainly John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor and other jazz
people direct our minds to the “sound” science and physics of existing.
Metaphysics for real. How refreshing it is to read John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and
the Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010) edited by Leonard L.
Brown. Abstain for a time from the
sameness of poetry and look for practical and critical stimulation in the
differentness of fictional and non-fictional narrative. Find alternative spaces
where furious flowers bloom. We do not need to construct and deconstruct a
bogus war between poetry and non-poetry, because in certain remarkable
instances it is poetry and poetic equations that cut a pathway to narrative.
Consider the importance of how poets Brenda Marie Osbey and Honoreé Fanonne
Jeffers excavate histories, of how Rudolph Lewis employs the poetics of orality
to craft fiction.
Yes, we have many lines to straighten and many “lost” narrative to read. And now is the time for the Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) to resume its leadership in recovery work by way of the 2015 Margaret Walker Centennial; PHBW can increase awareness of a humanistic tradition implicit in how the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival (1973) was conceptualized and executed, in why Walker’s novel Jubilee initiated a call for rigorous examinations of histories. In one sector of American letters, Joyce Carol Oates has responded to Walker’s call in The Accursed (2013) and Larry McMurtry has done so in The Last Kind Words Saloon (2014). In another sector, Kiini Ibura Salaam, James Cherry, Jesmyn Ward, Keenan Norris, and Anthony Grooms make answers in the tradition. I am noticing a need, however, to use the treasury represented by the PHBW novel database to say more about orality/orature and fiction from the Civil War/post-bellum period to the present. PHBW’s planned GEMS retrospective on John A. Williams can open up many issues about who gets taught in the academic world against who gets read by the non-academic public. Credit must be given to Ishmael Reed for suggesting some years ago that we pay tribute to John A. Williams by reinvesting effort in trying to understand the present relevance of Williams’ noteworthy but under-examined body of work. Let us not forget the importance of revisiting Reed’s own anthologies, novels and essays, his thoroughly multicultural conversation with America.
Yes, we have many lines to straighten and many “lost” narrative to read. And now is the time for the Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) to resume its leadership in recovery work by way of the 2015 Margaret Walker Centennial; PHBW can increase awareness of a humanistic tradition implicit in how the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival (1973) was conceptualized and executed, in why Walker’s novel Jubilee initiated a call for rigorous examinations of histories. In one sector of American letters, Joyce Carol Oates has responded to Walker’s call in The Accursed (2013) and Larry McMurtry has done so in The Last Kind Words Saloon (2014). In another sector, Kiini Ibura Salaam, James Cherry, Jesmyn Ward, Keenan Norris, and Anthony Grooms make answers in the tradition. I am noticing a need, however, to use the treasury represented by the PHBW novel database to say more about orality/orature and fiction from the Civil War/post-bellum period to the present. PHBW’s planned GEMS retrospective on John A. Williams can open up many issues about who gets taught in the academic world against who gets read by the non-academic public. Credit must be given to Ishmael Reed for suggesting some years ago that we pay tribute to John A. Williams by reinvesting effort in trying to understand the present relevance of Williams’ noteworthy but under-examined body of work. Let us not forget the importance of revisiting Reed’s own anthologies, novels and essays, his thoroughly multicultural conversation with America.
The reception of genres at any given period is central, of
course, in recovery work, but so too is the matter of how themes can encourage
or discourage discussion and examination in the public sphere. Kenton Rambsy’s work
with short fiction for his dissertation is bringing some aspects of what I see
as a major discursive problem in how we deal with literature to the foreground/
Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American
Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2014) and Keith Clark’s The
Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013) ask us from
very different angles to reexamine "social realism" or
socially/politically engaged fiction in light of what happens in American life
beyond "literature."
I find myself generating questions in my writing about how
Wallace Thurman's Infants
of the Spring might connect us with the preoccupation in mass media
with the antics of Jay-Z and Beyonce, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Or how his
The Blacker the Berry obligates us to
deal with the color-blindness of people of no-color who have 20/20 vision of
racial colors as they project their unacknowledged pathologies on the screen of
the American mind. Narratives by Waters Edward Turpin, Sutton E. Griggs, Oscar
Micheaux, Lorenzo Dow Blackson, and Albert Evander Coleman may occasion a fresh
vision of what the world is or wants to be in 2014.
As I see things, PHBW
has maximized attention to poetry and some twentieth-century fiction writers
through its NEH-sponsored institutes and larger projects. Now is the time for PHBW
to do more with non-canonized fiction and non-fiction. It is only fitting that
more be done with the holistic, politically astute vision Margaret Walker
Alexander had in nurturing African American humanism.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
May 24, 2014
