what for a poem is the 4th of July?

REPARATIONS: a process poem

 

Repair/rat/ions

                    ion(s)/>is on

 

Re(pai)<(r)<ations      rationales     rat/ion (ale) s

                      ↑                                                ↓

Repay            c                repay actions   =   sale/rations

↕                   ↓                                                ⅗ person

 

 

Repair/rat/ion (ale)  s

                                  ↕

                           Railriper(ape)(rope)

 

 

Re(rap)ation

 

                      (for us/them

                       for them July 4^th

                       for us 4^th of July )

 

 

Repair/rat/ions

                    ion(s)/>is on<(rape)(nations)

 

                       /(for us/them

                       for them July 4^th

                       for us 4^th of July )/

 

 

Re(pai)<(r)<ations      rationales     rat/ion (ale) s

 

 

Repair/rat/ions

                    ion(s)/>is on¸<(rap)))(((nations)

 

Re(pai)<(r)<ations      rationales     rat/ion (ale) s

 

Is on

 

REPARATIONS: a process poem

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            July 4, 2014

James Baldwin

THE JAMES BALDWIN REVIEW

1963

It is Summer 1963 in Moss Point, Mississippi.  My mother and I are sitting on the front porch of my grandfather’s house at 1010 Barnett Street.  Although we owned it, in my mind, the house always belonged to John Henry Ward.  He bought the two acres of land on which it sat. He built the house. He died in the house. His son, my father, was born and died in the house. It was their house.

I am reading The Fire Next Time.  Aloud. My mother is listening intensely as I dramatize Baldwin’s prose.  My mother thinks James Baldwin is a man who has “good sense.” I agree. I do not recall exactly why I am reading the book aloud.  Perhaps I want to prove to my mother that she made a wise investment of the hard-earned pennies and dollars she earned to get me through Tougaloo College. Baldwin is full of moral authority.  He has more authority than the priest at St. Peter the Apostle Roman Catholic Church in Pascagoula.  Protestants say some things better than Catholics do.

2014

It is summer in New Orleans, a season for local, national, and international confusion and  warfare.  After 51 years, I still grow stronger for listening to James Baldwin’s uniquely voiced authority. I was much pleased to discover the following CFP for the James Baldwin Review:

 

 The James Baldwin Review (JBR), an annual peer-reviewed journal, is seeking submissions for its inaugural issue. An Open Access online publication, The James Baldwin Review will bring together a wide array of peer-reviewed critical and creative work on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin. JBR publishes essays that invigorate scholarship on James Baldwin, catalyze explorations of the literary, political, and cultural influence of Baldwin’ writing and political activism, and deepen our understanding and appreciation of this complex and luminary figure.

Deadline for submissions: Sept 30th, 2014. Submissions must be accompanied by a 250-word abstract. Detailed submission instructions can be found on our website:

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/journals/jbr

It is the aim of the James Baldwin Review to provide a vibrant and multidisciplinary forum for the international community of Baldwin scholars, students, and enthusiasts.

 

Next year I will read JBR with James Brown’s “Say It Loud” in the background. “Yes, Mother. I am still reading aloud. But I have my own house now.”

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            July 3, 2014

Southern Question/ Deep South Answer

Given Hurston's and Wright's popularity, how do they serve as gateways to other Black Southern writers?

Your question can lead to a micro-sermon and hard critical questions: for whom do Hurston and Wright serve as gateways or windows? And do we walk through the gate or look through the window with conscious or unconscious gender adn geographical biases?

THE MICRO-SERMON

It is likely that interest in Wright and Hurston may lead to interest in Sterling D. Plumpp and Angela Jackson. But a probability is not a certainty. Wright's works may lead one to be very much interested in the works of John Edgar Wideman and Gwendolyn Brooks. The Hurston canon may direct someone to study the works of Edwidge Danticat and Colson Whitehead. Plumpp and Jackson have legitimate claims on being Black South writers; Wideman, Brooks, Whitehead, and Danticat do not. Thus, I wish to complicate your thinking about gateways and the roads taken. Individual readers/critics make choices that are not always theory-friendly. The more individual choices frustrate theoretical expectations, the better.

APPLICATION OF THE SERMON

I say unto you and other members of the congregation, observe with care which paths male and female thinkers walk after they have passed through the gateway. It may be easier to nap in a mustard seed than to hibernate in a field of corn.

Larry Brown (1951-2004)

Larry Brown/His South and Mine

 

Should America become adult enough to read Southern literature, become wise enough to call out Southern mythology for the honeycomb of prevarication that it is, and become intelligent enough to take the blood pressure of the real thing in a Southern story ----- should that improbability occur, American will value Larry Brown more than it currently does. It will value the exercise of dealing with his South, my South, and our South.

Larry Brown is a natural part of my Mississippi mindscape, that perplexing geography which has more talent per square inch than most of the United States has per square mile.  Exaggeration has a purpose.

I discovered Larry Brown in the 1980s and became very impressed with his writing in the stories collected as Facing the Music (1988) and in his novel Dirty Work (1989). I had never seen his photograph before I telephoned him to announce that he’d won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 1989 award for fiction.  I liked the modesty I heard in his voice as he thanked me for conveying the news and assured me he would attend the award ceremony in Jackson, Mississippi.  When he appeared for the ceremony, washed and dressed as appropriately as a good ole Mississippi boy who does not qualify as gentry can be, I had a not unpleasant shock of recognition.  Brown (July 9, 1951-November 24, 2004) looked like the incarnation of a Confederate soldier fresh out of a sepia daguerreotype. The man, the fireman, with whom I was speaking could accept fate for whatever it is.  Here was an ordinary man who discovered he had an extraordinary talent for writing sturdy sentences and intriguing stories.  What did it matter that he was not a person of color?  He could write. He could tell me a great deal that I needed and wanted to know about a South that lived behind thick rhetorical veils.

His ability to write did not protect him from the bitchy criticism of one Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters board member who objected to his receiving the award.  She passionately complained that Brown is not one of us. “He does not represent us.”  But that was typical.  The same woman was upset when Robert Townsend Jones won the MIAL award for photography. This woman of no-color, famous for broadcasting that Eudora Welty was one of her “closest” friends, was beneath the dignity of a response.  I ignored her and praised Brown for his noteworthy grasp of what drives humanity.  Perhaps I should have said to her “Of course, he is not like you. He is not a woman who just might have a grandmother in her bloodline who has to be hidden behind the kitchen stove.” Brown was not a pretentious barbaric Southern aristocrat. He was an uncensored truth-teller.

Larry Brown was a Mississippi male writer who was clearly influenced by William Faulkner, but he was better than Faulkner in writing about Southerners who were just plain, fractured, unprivileged people; his characters in the novels Big Bad Love (1990), Joe (1991), Father and Son (1996), Fay (2000), The Rabbit Factory ( 2003  ), the unfinished  Miracle of Catfish (2007) did not represent the full range of Southern humanity. Nor, as far as I know, did Brown ever claim he was trying to write about the whole God-damned and fantasy-enthralled violent and occasionally non-violent South. They represented with uncanny accuracy in speech and behavior the people Brown knew most intimately.  It is a mistake to say he wrote grit lit. in the tradition of Erskine Caldwell or Southern gothic literature in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor. He wrote literature as Willie Morris, Richard Wright, Ellen Douglas, and Barry Hannah did, as Charlie R. Braxton,  Alice Walker, Richard Ford, Minrose Gwin, C. Liegh McInnis, Frank X. Walker and John Grisham still write fiction and poetry.  He followed his moral compass.  His two non-fiction books On Fire (1995) and Billy Ray’s Farm (2001) tell us much about his forte: the plain sentence.

Larry Brown was a Southern writer who wrote for Americans who do not volunteer to be blind, who choose not to be suspended in the innocence of their infancy.  When we truly grow up, we may be able to use Brown’s legacy as part of the equipment we need for living.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 26, 2014

Email to Harold Ellis Clark

On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Jerry Ward <jerry.ward31@hotmail.com> wrote:

Dear Harold,

Uncle Bobby '63 makes a gripping statement about human consciousness, about our casual assumption that we know the story of civil rights struggles. Your play-in-progress challenges us to admit that we do know the story in a general, superficial way but that our understanding of the "impossible" complexity of the story is wanting; we do need the focus Uncle Bobby '63 to the local, the specific. It applies the brakes to our penchant for generalizing. How you use the brakes in some final version, however, requires you to cut away the interesting but excessive tangents and to create a riveting focus on who Uncle Bobby was and why people like him continue to be of great importance in struggles for civil and human rights. I realize that younger audiences may not know very much about the Civil Rights Movement. I am not sure that the surplus of information you try to cram into two acts makes the play an effective vehicle for communicating an effective lesson. Yes, the play is about the Civil Rights Movement and what has been dim in the telling of that story. Nevertheless, the real contribution you can make to African American drama is refocusing us on how the specific story of Uncle Bobby informs the continuing and rather general drama of our struggles.

From listening to the reading of the script, I was led to think that you are really exploring habits of the heart and what seems to remain constant in being heroic. At the same time you are (re)presenting psychic wounds from the 1960s that we hesitate to discuss. Such an effort is brave and necessary. What I sensed is missing is a sufficiently sharp focus on Bobby. You do succeed in making us aware of how attitudes about Uncle Bobby ---Zenobia almost worships him and her husband Dwight is determined to hate what he sees of himself in Bobby. There is symbiosis between the private tensions in the marriage and the more public tensions in the history of civil rights work. Cutting some of the dialogue ----especially Joseph's burden of heritage ---and ensuring what remains is always riveting the point about symbiosis might enhance the play's power. Ideas about the heroic and the tragic are very, very important in Uncle Bobby '63, and greater unity and economy of words is needed. Don't overexplain as August Wilson was wont to do. Take a lesson from Ali -- sting our consciousness rapidly. Cut the fat and make the language of the dialogue as memorable as prose poetry. Let the language stun us! Let it enthrall us into bitter recognitions.

Here are some of the notes I wrote during the reading:

1) Make the speech of characters more individual; attend more to idiomatic phrasing that distinguishes one character from another ---I need to hear more difference

2) Visualizing injuries on Zenobia's body is good ---the story of scars. The dress that is discarded is a nice symbol; so too is the bottle of wine as a fetish that says something about Zenobia

3) Baptism of urine and acid ---good correlatives for exteme white obscenity as well as the horror of war (mustard gas in WWI, atomic bombs in WWII, napalm in Viet Nam) --in relation to the Civil Rights Movement (CRM), war was more than a metaphor

4) Soul force and non-violence is a good foil for the "violence" of Dwight's homophobia. Am not sure Dwight realizes his verbal violence against Bobby is a mirror of the violence of racism

5) Do more with Bobby's having interviewed James Baldwin --make the subtext regarding tolerance and human rights stronger

6) Dwight's being raped by a cop throws issues of masculinity into the face of the audience --- a very good move --good illustration of what is criminal, psychosexual, and savage in police practice even in 2014

7) Joseph's long story about Sir Thomas Bedford and Rhode Island and Providence Plantation recalls the sordid orgins of wealth that established Brown University (a subject of recent research), but his story detracts from what is most significant about the main idea in the play ---drop or minimize this distraction

8) Who in this play is enslaved to what?

9) Use of specific place names, the black press --very good

10) References to La Marseillaise and the Arc de Triomphe are quite lost on an audience might not know "La Mareseillaise" is a bit of sculpture on the Arc de Triomphe showing the French volunteers of 1792. Perhaps a very brief monologue from Bobby about French history in his life is necessary or his singing what from the lyrics of the French national anthem is most meaningful to him

11) Use of Darlene Love's "Please Come Home" is a nice surprise for those of us who expect "Please Come Home for Christmas" ---if not for Christmas by New Year's Night.

12) Ike is a minor character but I like him because he is a drinker. The ending of the play would be so much stronger if Ike refused to leave Bobby. I am so weary of reading again and again in our literature that the black male hero dies alone. It would be a real plus, a real innovation in black theater, if Ike decided not to leave Bobby and shared Bobby's inevitable fate. That would cement a point about gay friendships, about the equality of those friendships with those of combat soldiers who die together.

Harold, I'll be using these notes --I hope they are a bit helpful ---at some later time in writing about your work. For now, I urge you to get on with cutting and polishing Uncle Bobby '63 into a play that matches the classic economy of Tom Dent's Ritual Murder.

By the way, Chakula Cha Jua wants to read the script.

All best wishes,

Jerry

Birthday Poem

Poem 71

 

Caught unaware

Gazelle borrowed my language,

Flew, leaving me grounded in gravity.

 

Farewell, I thought to think,

Damn you, drilling a grave

For finite hours on Earth.

 

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 20, 2014

John A. Williams

John A. Williams: An Observant Artist

 

John A. Williams is a great writer. 

It is easy to forget that John A. Williams is a great writer as our attention is consumed by such recent writing as Jeffery Renard Allen’s Song of the Shank, Keenan Norris’ Brother and the Dancer, and James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird.  Our memory of writing that prepared us to read these three novelists with some intelligence grows dim.  Thus, we are obligated to thank Ishmael Reed for his intervention, for his reminding us several years ago of a duty to rediscover what is good and lasting in the works of John A. Williams.  We can be led to the water. We can’t be forced to drink. So too we can be directed to the path of right reading.  We cannot be forced to journey along that path.  Mindful that Williams was writing blackly before, during, and after the ascent of the Black Arts phenomenon, we must will ourselves to discover or rediscover his literary geopolitics.

According to the symbolic gestures used in American higher education, Williams is “canonized.”  Segments of his novel The Man Who Cried I Am (1967) appear in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, a book widely used in the teaching of what is currently deemed “literary.”  Segments of his nonfiction are absent.  Literature and the literary, we do remember, are subsets of the vast field constituted by practices of literacy and cultural expression. The representation of particles of a writer’s work in an anthology is not sufficient and necessary evidence that the writer has a secure place in cultural memory; much that is included in an anthology is not actually taught in our efforts to increase cultural literacy.

It is probable that Williams’ greatness manifests itself more powerfully as a body of writing than as individual works, some of which are ostracized from the territory of the literary and the aesthetic.  To experience the force and necessity of his greatness, we have to read and interpret much more of it than any anthology can contain. We should read Williams at once inside and outside a canon.

Williams’ concise biography of Richard Wright The Most Native of Sons (1970) is an example of an observant artist at work in documenting the achievements of an ancestor.  The perceived  relationship of the biography to The Man Who Cried I Am gives us clues about how deeply invested Williams is in observing, hearing and seeing and illuminating strategies of detection. We learn from him how to see better.  He helps us to discriminate visual and cognitive acuity from what American literary commentators so casually code as anger.

The title Williams chose for his first novel was One for New York.  That choice was overruled by the publishers, who with profit in mind renamed his manuscript The Angry One (1960). American readers were manipulated into believing that Williams was a typical/stereotypical angry and bitter Negro writer climbing a racial mountain. “Angry” was a dirty code word that authorized readers to say that Williams and other black writers were “forcing us to remember all those unpleasant things our society prevented us from forgetting or refashioning as non-threatening entertainments.” Such limitation of critical vocabulary fogged appreciation of Williams’ technical prowess, his nuanced imagination.  His revenge was to become a better writer.

One of the few critics who had sympathetic understanding of what Williams was aiming for, Bernard W. Bell wrote with critical sensitivity about Williams’ fiction in The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (1987).  He was not immune to speaking of anger and bitterness, but he was smart enough to give notice to the primal importance of how Williams used experimentation and mastery of realism’s array of techniques.  For him, Night Song (1961), Sissie (1963), The Man Who Cried I Am (l967), Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light (1969), Captain Blackman (1972), Mothersill and the Foxes (19750, The Junior Bachelor Society (1976), and !Click Song (1982) constitute a spectrum from competent to excellent. I suspect he might have said the same for The Berhama Account (1985), Jacob’s Ladder (1987), and Clifford’s Blues (1999).  We can observe a special excellence in how Williams wove together the horrors of Dachau and the Hebraic tribulations of being a gay jazz musician in Clifford’s Blues. Only a gifted, observant artist can pull off such an achievement. Observe that this novel amplifies a long-forgotten meditation on gayness in The Man Who Cried I Am.

  Bell recognized fusion of individual and historical perspectives does not always succeed, but one would be hard put to say that Williams “failed” in his use of craft to deal with experiential diversity.  As Bell observed, Williams’ novels are “in the tradition of realism” and they “reveal a growing radical consciousness and preoccupation with form” (253).  Bell helps us to notice that Williams succeeded in rewriting Sutton Griggs into twentieth-century modernism; that he took us to the interior where art is born in struggle by alluding to Miriam Makeba’s performing the Xhosa click song in the title! Click Song; that he played with time in Captain Blackman by engaging the gravity of actual history with a brief nod to Virginia Woolf’s time-twisting in Orlando: A Biography (1928), a funny bit of androgynous writing. We might also notice that Williams fused the discipline of keen-eyed journalism with the looser discipline of fiction.

  We have scant evidence that engaging Williams’ works is a commonplace practice in African American literary histories.  His name is mentioned neither in Gene Andrew Jarrett’s Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature nor in John Ernest’s Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History. He is mentioned once (page 12) in The Cambridge History of African American Literature. In a desirable future sustained engagement with the greatness of John Alfred Williams might increase. Engagement must include critical attention to his nonfiction ---- This Is My Country Too (1965), The King God Didn’t Save (1970), Flashbacks: A Twenty-Year Diary of Article Writing (1973), If I Stop I’ll Die: the Comedy and Tragedy of Richard Pryor (1991) and Dear Chester, Dear John: Letters Between Chester Himes and John A. Williams (2008). The prospect, however, is contingent.  We have no guarantees it will actually happen. We only have the agency to make it happen.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 19, 2014