a speaking novel unspoken

A Speaking Novel Unspoken

"If you don't like the novel," LBJ told me, "you oughtn't write about it."

LBJ has a generous heart and a Harlem Renaissance mindset.  We have to protect writers who get published in the right places.  Cast no shadow on their achievements.  Would you allow a single negative comment to throw an entire ethnic group into a ditch?

LBJ said I should not write about the novel that I happen not to like.  He didn't say I should not write around the novel.

I do not especially like novels where each paragraph is a cinderblock, related only to other cinderblocks by virtue of proximity.  The novel doesn't lack intelligence and design.  It lacks the fire I expect to find in an upper middle class confessional.  It gives me as much pleasure as an annotated telephone book.

I did find one thing to like in the novel.  The reverse revenant of a narrator mentions Sissiretta Jones.  Like Paul Laurence Dunbar's Malindy, Miss Jones could sing.  The late Ja Jahannes knew that when he wrote a play about Sissiretta Jones.  As far as divas go, she was a diva's diva.  It pleased me that the narrator rescued a jewel from the barnyard.

"O.K., LBJ.  I did not write about the novel."

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            May 20, 2016

v

Note for two writers

A NOTE FOR TWO WRITERS

                After our conversations earlier this week, I recall that once the exchange of letters helped to sustain friendships.  The absence of hand-written  letters doesn't make a friendship less genuine.  It simply leaves a friendship bereft of ritual, the art of penmanship,  imagination with a feeling. The latter was most important when letters were in vogue.

                By accident, I found several instances of creative sparkle in some letters Hart Crane wrote in the 1920s to people I assume were his friends or close acquaintances.  In a letter to Harriet Monroe,  justifying phrases in his poem "At Melville's Tomb,"  Crane made well-designed comments on the reader and metaphor: "The reader's sensibility simply responds by identifying this inflection of experience [ Crane referred to inflection of language] with some event in his own history or perceptions  --  or rejects it altogether.  The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology."  Crane had the common sense that many young and not-so-young  makers of popular culture  often lack; he knew the operations of writing and reading are not democratic or universal but constrained by time , culture, and humbling knowledge of tradition.

How can one write, and expect to gain approval,  if one is dismissive of a tradition of extending and/or challenging?  When I consider that some third-class work earns top dollar, I realize the question is lame.

We older writers can only suggest to those who come to us for advice that standards, values, and discipline do matter.  Many of them have obese egos. They  over-rate their skills and talents.  Many of them are not brave enough to risk getting a rejection slip.  So be it.  If they do well in the world with  work that repeats what they don't know has already been done and  that appeals to the sensibilities of people who don't give a damn about inflection of language, so be it.  I don't want to block their success.   Why do they bother to ask for our approval?

Finding Crane's poem "Black Tambourine" in the same paperback with his selected letters was also a fortunate accident.  He did not ask Jean Toomer's approval to borrow images and metaphors from Cane in the first stanza:

The interests of a black man in a cellar

Mark tardy judgment on the world's closed door.

Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,

And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.

Likewise, I'll not seek the approval of Hart Crane's ghost when I write about the evil of a white man on a screen,  about a carpenter known as Z-Mann  Zimmerman.  Perhaps we are asked for approval  because we know what a letter can mean and have the skills to steal as effectively as William Shakespeare.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 19, 2016

Death and Fame

DEATH AND FAME

Being deliberately out of touch with much that is trendy and fashionable in the world of 2016, I am not impressed with outpourings of grief each time a person who has accomplished something dies.  Did you know the person as more than a name in a newspaper or magazine or a reproduction on a television or cinema screen?  Did you have meaningful conversations with the person?  Did you have a meal, drinks, tea or coffee, laughter or tears with the person as the two of you discussed issues of mutual interest?  Was the person your teacher or mentor?   Did you exchange correspondence ( letters/emails) which was personal rather than just professional?  Did you publish constructive criticism of the person's work?  If the person was a fellow writer, did you review the person's  book (s)  or an isolated work that gave you insights about genius, craft, wisdom or just plain common sense? Did you try to help that person get a job or a fellowship by writing recommendations?  Did you publish the person in a magazine or an anthology  that you edited?  Did you explain, first to yourself and then to the person, why her or his artistry or argumentation is more than a throwaway item in cultural, social, or intellectual histories?

If you can't say "yes" to most of these questions (and to others I've not itemized), I suspect your grief is not genuine.  I suspect you are an opportunist, lacking a judicious measure of respect or honesty or humanity.  I am so old-fashioned, old school, or downright antiquated in my navigation of feelings as to believe you should share the esteem you have for people when they can see, hear or read it.  In some instances the expression of regard is quite private and remains forever unknown by a public.  That's cool.  It is more important that the person knows where the regard is coming from.  After the person is dead, cremated or buried, your weeping or your wording of grief contributes nothing to the person's happiness or spiritual balance.  Your chatter  is an ephemeral gesture of  self-serving desire.  It is merely your ego calling  attention to itself. Publishing well-researched, thoughtful critical assessments of a dead person's achievements and legacy to humankind is quite a different matter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 13, 2016

The Kwansaba

Discovery and Discipline in East St. Louis

To obtain an informed  view of what is happening in American poetry and poetics, you have to do a lot of work.  One task is to attend to matters of discovery and discipline in East St. Louis and the directions traced in

Roy, Darlene. Afrosynthesis: A Feast of Poetry & Folklore.  East St. Louis: Kuumba Scribes Press, 2015.

Roy, a co-founder of the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club,  has compiled a guidebook to the kind of African American experimentation and lore which is seldom mentioned in such  critical discourses on the status of our literature as the anthology What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey.  Roy's book is evidence that our literary culture is vast , always contributing the American  historical narrative which is myopic and unfinished.  The yearly "Da-Dum-Dun" gatherings that pay homage to Miles Dewey Davis, Henry Dumas, and Katherine Dunham enliven triple consciousness regarding sound, words, and motion, but that consciousness can only be transmitted by such a creative document as Afrosynthesis, which allows us to discover the rewarding discipline of the kwansaba,  a fixed poetic form that originated in East St. Louis.

"The kwansaba," Roy explains , "is a form composed of seven lines of poetry, each of which has seven words, with each word containing no more than seven letters.  It was developed by Eugene B. Redmond and refined in an EBRWC summer workshop in 1995" (60).  The forty-three  kwansabas  in Afrosynthesis, which are prefaced by free flowing poems, blues, toasts, haikus and tankas  ---preparatory works for dealing with the challenges of the kwansaba, illuminate how to both conform to and depart from the strict rules.  In "Appendix: Guidelines to Writing Effective Kwansabas" (60-61), Roy enumerates permissible exceptions to the rule of seven and suggests using alliteration, assonance, neologisms, and onomatopoeia to maximize variety.

 It is pleasant to discover from careful readings of Roy's kwansabas how discipline within a tradition inspires remarkable innovations  ---re-w(rapping), for example, of consciousness into conch-us-nests.  Through the dedicated play with language and form, Roy teaches us how shape historical clues about the April 1, 1865 founding of East St. Louis or the July 2, 1917 race riot (a prism for Ferguson, August 9, 2014); craft  praise poems for Mrs. Ezora Gertrude Woodard Duncan, Josephine Baker, Barack Hussein Obama,  Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe;  remix Paul Laurence Dunbar's phonetics with the humor of Langston Hughes.  Ultimately, Roy teaches us that the discipline demanded by fixed poetic forms begets stronger authenticity and encourages sustained meditation on the conditions of now.  Ah, yes. Afrosynthesis gives us proof that innovation in a nest of complex African American imperatives  is a beautiful thing in need-plagued time.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 11, 2016

On the death of Michael S. Harper

Death, Our Artists, and Public Grief

Last month when a person I had known for over fifty years died, I wrote:

Saturday sorrows in purple

and hews so close to home

that memory's mission

traces the leaves of then

in the light of now.

Half a century

later than love

on a summer's day,

peace erases illness.

Eternity springs like hope.

When words make time

fit to freeze grief,

then we remember

how  we fall tomorrow

into winter's holiness.

The final stanza is crucial. It brought a common sentiment to an end and to the beginning of a different state of thinking, living, doing, and saying.  For those of us who knew the unnamed person well, grief involves some loss  of collective definition.  It is an inevitable  acceptance that nothing gold will stay.

The death of Michael S. Harper (1938-2016) on May 7 provoked  an instructive  awareness, one I associated with the 1964 film "Seven Days in May."   As I got messages from fellow writers about their contacts with Harper, their sadness,  and how they valued the legacy of his poetry and life, I felt more emptiness than sympathy. I remembered communion with Harper, had  flashbacks of  his readings at Tougaloo College in the 1970s, of a conversation about modalities and Gayl Jones in his office at Brown University, of his inviting me to speak at the University of Alabama during a short residency he had there, of his being a guest at my apartment in Charlottesville during a visit to the University of Virginia, of reading with him in Munich, of his agency in getting "Open," one of my best poems, published in a 1975 issue of Iowa Review.  These private memories are not designed  for spectacle and public consumption. Poems often are.

The death of our artists is a pre-future reminder of  death to come.  Public grief in poems  is such an ephemeral  commodity in the 21^st century  that I want to have as little to do with it as possible. I tell artists  who have genuine meaning in my life how much I treasure them when they are alive by way of face-to-face or telephone conversations, interviews, having meals, coffee, or drinks with them,  letters (more recently in emails), reviews of their works, poems that they can read  or critical essays.  When our artists are dead, they are not interested in the sound a poem makes. The silence of memory  is sufficient. 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 9, 2016