Situation Report from a Culture of Reading, Part 1
Now is the winter of
our discontent
Made glorious summer
by this son of York;
And all the clouds
that low’r’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of
the ocean buried.
Richard III
Unlike Richard, contemporary readers need not be “subtle,
false and treacherous” unto themselves and the worlds they inhabit. They need not pretend those worlds are either
peaceful or private spaces, immune to terrors made with alacrity by other,
literate human beings. The hyperbole of
Reginald Martin’s title Everybody Knows What Time It Is becomes a truism in the
process of daily reading, especially if what you are reading is not a political
document, an analysis of skills, prowess, and trash talk in one sport or another, a scientific treatise, or an essay informed by
valid evidence. That is to say, if you
are reading what proclaims itself to be “literature,” you are counting privileged
nanoseconds of duration. People who read
“writing” count plain minutes of time. I
value writing more than literature, because writing is a more accurate
representation (gesture) of how historical consciousness marks off trails.
Writing that empowers is often excluded from lists of bestsellers. So be it.
The writing that is important for my culture of reading does
not fit into any single canon, because it follows the Drinking Gourd and quits
the merely fashionable, post-whatever plantations of the Western academy and
looks for sanctuary elsewhere. Fortunately, a considerable amount of writing in
2015 has abandoned slave space for regions where inevitable “enslavement” is
minimal. Anticipate more flight in 2016.
There is no known human space can where writing can locate absolute
freedom, but that fact does not preclude noble efforts to discover ideal places
of more than four dimensions. Necessary
writing is very comfortable with the advancing theories of physics.
To begin with poetry.
Honorée Fannone Jeffers’s fourth collection The Glory Gets (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015) is
valuable blues and womanist testimony regarding the endurance of the abused
peoples of the Earth. As the elders
would say, we must be still to carry and absorb the weight of Jeffers’s craft,
which doesn’t err in being craft-for-craft’s sake. We can expect a similar dropping of knowledge
in Treasure Shields Redmond’s “Chop: 30 Kwansabas for Fannie Lou Hamer,” which
won the Winged City Chapbook Contest; it will be published by Argus House Press
in Fall 2015. From LSU Press in November comes All Souls: Essential Poems by Brenda Marie Osbey, a much-needed
record of her consistent excellence in a tradition of African American poetry
that wants attention. The work that Osbey, Redmond, and Jeffers do to anchor us
in remembering is complemented by Philip Kolin’s Emmett Till in Different States (forthcoming from Third World
Press). His book takes us into the
Mississippi territory of abrasive recall mapped by Redmond’s tribute to Fannie
Lou Hamer. It can be said that writing
by Kolin, Osbey, Redmond, and Jeffers takes us to the spaces where language
gives birth to images of iconic moments in America’s violent past. These images morph into the bullet and blood
photographs of the terrible present. And these visuals for the mind’s eye take
us to the certain dread of existential futures. As writing, the poetry of now
forces us to abandon excuses and assume the onus of reckoning and payback
actions. We do not have to dismiss the
recent angles and topologies of ascent claimed by poetry as literature, the
motions that flee from or seek to trivialize the fires of the Black Arts
Movement legacy. Such literature can
travel to the post-Elizabethan bosom of some ocean of opportunity. Can it stay there forever is a question
without an answer.
Two recent anthologies are devoted to poetry that is more akin
to” writing” than to “literature.” What I
Say: Innovative Poetry by Black
Writers in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), edited
by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey and The
BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Chicago:
Haymarket Books, 2015), edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate
Marshall. From quite different angles,
the books deconstruct and reconstruct the once simple idea of “writing” (acting
or performing in print). The heavy question that applies to both is: WHAT IS
INNOVATIVE POETRY? The word “innovative”
is not an easy substitute for the word “experimental.” Even if it were, we are required to ask
INNOVATIVE FOR WHOM AND ON WHAT GROUNDS? The word must be contextualized so as
to expose the motives for using it. C. S. Giscombe’s introduction for What I Say has its own integrity as a
statement on aesthetic experimentation; it is rightly addressed to an audience
that values “the difficult.” And we get another question: FOR WHOM IS WHAT
DIFFICULT? On the other hand, Kevin
Coval’s introduction for The BreakBeat
Poets reminds one of the pioneering explanations in Eugene Redmond’s Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American
Poetry. Coval is very clear in saying his anthology is by and for the hip
hop generation, a generation that constantly seeks alternative spaces for
expression, and that the anthology has an unfinished mission. The debate about
the innovative must go forth, and I hope the two anthologies will exist in
parahistorical harmony. By the way, “parahistory” is a concept that I attribute
to the historian Lerone Bennett.
Part 2 of this situation report will deal with some special
narratives.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
June 1, 2015
