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 21st 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
