Poetry and the New York Times

American Poetry and the New York Times

 

Noted for the patriotic attention it gives to wholesome American poetry, the New York Times raised the bar by publishing David Orr’s review of Directing Herbert White: Poems (Graywolf, paper, $15) by the “all-around celebrity” James Franco.  David Orr claims that Franco has 2.2 million Twitter followers. Orr might be appealing indirectly to that audience as he asserts that Franco’s book “is the sort of collection written by reasonably talented M.F.A. students in hundreds of M.F.A. programs stretching from sea to shining sea.” If each of Franco’s Twitter followers bought a copy of Directing Herbert White, Graywolf would be pleased and Franco would be amused. America would set a publishing record unmatched anywhere in the world.

 

Unfortunately, David Orr spoils the fantasy with the “total slaughter” of a penultimate sentence in his Sunday Book Review piece of July 17 (online) and July 20 (print): “Poetry is the weak sister of its sibling arts, alternately ignored and swaddled like a 19^th –century invalid, and that will change only by means of a long, tedious, and possibly futile effort at persuasion.”

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

July 18, 2014

Ramcat Reads #4

Ramcat Reads #4

 

Allen, Jeffery Renard. Song of the Shank: A Novel. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Like James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird (2013), Allen’s most recent book signals how innovations in the twenty-first century African American historical novel challenge the American penchant for the ahistorical. Judicious criticism of Allen’s novel depends in part on knowing the real life history of the musical genius Thomas Greene Wiggins (“Blind Tom”) and in part on struggling to know how M. M. Bakhtin’s ideas about the dialogic imagination and speech acts might be joined with Georg Lukacs’s thinking about the role of the historical novel in the production of consciousness. Let it suffice, for the moment, that Allen has offered us an exemplary model of what purposeful black writing can accomplish.

 

Ali, Shahrazad. The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman. Philadelphia: Civilized Publications, 1989. Ali’s confessions of a woman’s low valuation of self was sternly critiqued in Confusion By Any Other Name: Essays Exploring the Negative Impact of The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman (Chicago: Third World Press, 1990), edited by Haki R. Madhubuti. Anyone who wishes to analyze contemporary “reality television” and the progressive pathology of American mass media in general can acquire historical perspectives from reading or rereading these two books.

 

Boyd, Herb. Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin.  New York: Atria Books, 2008. Boyd’s survey of Baldwin’s intellectual engagements with such figures as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Norman Mailer, and Harold Cruse is judiciously provocative.

 

Brown, Leonard L., ed. John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.  This collection of thoughtful essays lends credibility to T. J. Anderson’s assertion that “all creative artists are cultural anthropologists, documenters and interpreters of culture” (vi) and to Coltrane’s informing Don DeMicheal in a letter of June 2, 1962: “We have absolutely no reason to worry about lack of positive and affirmative philosophy. It’s built in us. The phrasing, the sound of the music attest this fact” (17).

 

Cobb, Charles E., Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.  New York: Basic Books, 2014. An important contribution to revisionist history of the Civil Rights Movement.

Greene, Brian. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Greene provides charming and readable explanations for non-scientists of theories regarding observations of how subatomic particles behave. The aesthetic results of his intellectual adventures, however, must be tempered by consideration of human judgment and its limits, by the corrective arguments necessary for critical thinking about the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Thus, reading David Faust’s The Limits of Scientific Reasoning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) helps us to remember the “inherent limitations of scientific judgment.”

Jeffers, Trellie James.  Up and Down the Greenwood.  San Bernardino, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.  In this novella, Jeffers demonstrates that strong ideas derived from late 19^th century nationalism can inform 21^st century fiction.

Koritz, Amy and George J. Sanchez, eds.  Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Arts-based initiatives can simultaneously fail and succeed as they address issues generated by the processes of urbanization and gentrification.

Lewis, Peirce F. New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. 2^nd ed. Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places, 2003.  This book supplements Lawrence N. Powell’s The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).  Read together, these books create a sobering perspective on how histories, the Mississippi River, and the social geography of New Orleans dovetail with racial tensions and encrusted mythologies which make the city a place of blissful abnormalities.

Ludwig, Samuel, ed. On the Aesthetic Legacy of Ishmael Reed.  Huntington Beach, CA: Parade Books, 2013. The essays in this collection are provocative assessments of works by one of America’s most provocative intellectuals.

Thomas, Ebony E. and Shanesha R. F. Brooks-Tatum, eds. Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era.  New York: Peter Lang, 2012. These essays are rigorous critiques of metanarratives that shape social thinking and policy.

White, Jane Barber. Lessons Learned from a Poet’s Garden: The Restoration of the Historic Garden of Harlem Renaissance Poet Anne Spencer. Lynchburg, VA: Blackwell Press, 2011.  Rich with poems written long after the Harlem Renaissance transitioned into social reality and extensive photographic documentation of Spencer’s family, house, and famous garden, this excellent book is required reading for anyone who wants to know who Anne Spencer (1882-1975) was as poet, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.        

July 14, 2014

On a novella

ON A NOVELLA BY TRELLIE JAMES JEFFERS

 

 

 The space of black writing is densely populated, its neighborhoods of poetry and non-fiction being less comfortable than its suburbs of prose fiction or its sprawling estates of drama.  Thanks in part to new technologies of publishing, magnitude overwhelms us and makes the choice of what to read annoyingly difficult. Savvy readers often ignore what various authorities tell them they should read, what they will enjoy reading, or what they must read so as not to be out of fashion. Really smart readers navigate the vast territory by following their uncommon commonsense tastes.  They take risks and enjoy the informative thrill of the dangerous game.  Even when the thrill is gone, they find comfort in not being nondescript members of a herd. Those who elect to read Up and Down the Evergreen Tree (2014) by Trellie James Jeffers can applaud themselves for having walked through a portal of return to the source. This novella restores confidence in the instructive power of black writing.

 

Although the novella as a genre is less popular than the novel, it has the advantage of enabling readers to discern what is really there and how the writer makes a cognitive “there” possible. Up and Down the Evergreen Tree exposes the structures of story and storytelling as it reinvents the explicit message of “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes in the contexts of 1967.  The relatively simple story of how Jackson Greene, a gifted Black doctor in New England, struggles to transform his Deep South mother’s dreams into “realities” is marked by aspects of the nouveau roman.  The temptation to interpret the novella within a modernist French tradition, however, is merely an act of bad faith, a pretentious gesture of wanting to claim for the international African Diaspora what is located by virtue of textual specificity and narration squarely in the domains of African American cultural and political nationalisms. For readers who have digested post-racial and post-black and post-identity nostrums, Up and Down the Evergreen Tree may conjure rich nightmares.

 

 The significance and value of the story is accessible to streetwise readers who do not genuflect in the cathedrals of the Academy or make the sign of the cross with the holy water of forgetting but who battle with the brutal economies of womanism and masculinity.  The meaning of the story does, however, have a special weight for readers who have studied Claudia Tate’s Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century. “What is especially important to observe,” Tate remarked in her groundbreaking discourse on what was explored in late 19^th century domestic novels, “is that such exploration was not simply gratuitous escapism; it offered the recently emancipated an occasion for exercising political self-definition in fiction at a time when the civil rights of African Americans were constitutionally sanctioned but socially prohibited” (7). To be sure, the sensorium of post-Reconstruction America is not available for writers and readers in 2014, but traces of that sensorium lurk in our contemporary mindspaces despite aesthetic arguments which pepper and salt literary meditations. Not disposed to have commerce with nonsense, Trellie James Jeffers offers Up and Down the Evergreen Tree as a life-oriented intervention for a question multiethnic America finds difficult to answer in the English language: Y tu abuela, donde esta?

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

July 12, 2014

Black Studies Reconsidered

BLACK STUDIES RECONSIDERED

 

Although the text may well incorporate the social norms and values of its possible readers, its function is not merely to present such data, but, in fact, to use them in order to secure its uptake.  In other words, it offers guidance as to what is to be produced, and therefore cannot be the product.

 

Wolfgang Iser. The Act of Reading. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973. 107.

 

 

Iser’s point about what the text cannot be is germane if you return to

 

Alkalimat, Abdul and Associates. Introduction to Afro-American Studies: A Peoples College Primer. Chicago: Twenty-first Century Book, 1973.

 

and then turn to

 

Alkilimat, Abdul et al. African American Studies 2013: A Nation Web-Based Survey. 29 pages. University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Department of African American Studies, 2013. Available at http://afro.illinois.edu

 

The survey poses the question “Is Black Studies a permanent project in higher education, or a passing fad?,” and the authors delay an answer.  They refer you to facts derived from surveying 213 public colleges and universities and 148 private one.

 

Fact #1: “Black Studies seems to have achieved more permanence  in public colleges and universities than in private ones.

Fact #2: “…the West has proportionately more departments  (46%) and the South proportionately more programs (64%) than other regions.”

Fact #3: “…programs are more typical across all sizes of colleges and universities. Large institutions are more likely to have departments (42%) than the other institutions.” The survey report was not designed to inform you about pedagogy and learning within Black Studies.  In a future, some study will indicate how instructors teach Black Studies as a discipline and what is the range of learning experiences students have.

 

The silence of the survey report about how Black Studies functions in the lives of Americans who are not even remotely associated with institutions of education higher and lower is a teaser.  It guides you to conjure ideas about navigation between the 1973 didactic Introduction …. and the 2013 objective reporting.  You find the conclusion of the 1973 text to be instructive, a charting for action. Pages 348-351 permit discovery or rediscovery that a 1973 reader was told that questions concerning a future (consider 2014 the future) could only be engaged “through how you lead your life and how you influenced others to lead their lives.”  There was no biting of the tongue about obligation, no hedging. The authors used the Langston Hughes poem, “Let America be America Again,” as the final verbal text and a fuzzy aerial photograph of “March on Washington, August 1963” as the closing visual text. The reproduction of the photograph was fuzzy because the book was printed on what Black South vernacular called “cornbread paper.”  The Hughes poem references three colors –black, red, and white, intensifying your wondering forcing you to wonder why Langston Hughes chose not to throw yellow and brown into his melting pot.

 

Putting the survey report aside for the moment, you scan the topics the book invites you to ponder:

·         Africa before and after the slave trade ---note that indigenous Africans and the Arabs had a continental slave trade prior to uninvited European penetration

·         Colonialism

·         Melting pot of African peoples ---Michael Gomez’s Exchanging Our Country Marks (1998) and Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (2005) are excellent studies of melting

·         The rural experience

·         The urban experience

·         Black workers and the labor movement ---being locked out of non-Black trade unions in significant numbers

·         The black middle class

·         Black culture and the arts

·         Religion and the black church

·         Black women and the family ---it is o.k. if you panic because “Black men and the family” Isn’t a parallel category of analysis

·         Education and the school in the black community  ---it is not perverse in 2014 if you replace “education” with “miseducation,” “the black community” with “loosely confederated black communities of shared interests and their post-racial, post-black enclaves of dubious interests”

·         Black power and the U.S. political system----you feel a bite of inwit pertaining to the uses and abuses of your Kenyan-American President and sing a sorrow song

·         Civil rights and the struggle for democracy ---you supplement “civil rights “ with “United Nations-defined human rights” and “democracy” with “practices appropriate in a non-Platonic republic”

·         Nationalism and Pan Africanism ---how you sweat from thinking international cartels, Islamic and other varieties of terrorism, ancient African ethnic enmity, and Eurasian neo-colonial enterprises minimize or preclude the evolution of Pan Africanism on the African continent

·         Marxism and black liberation

·         The role everyone has to play

 

You are exhausted from pondering and speculating how a paradigm of unity in Afro-American Studies (1973) has slowly morphed into a digital paradigm of fragmentation in Black Studies (2014), especially in dealing with the logic and logistics of change and units of analysis in the study of African American literature and allied cultural expressions. You are exhausted from trying to make a text from a complex paradigm. Most exhausting is suspicion that higher education tends to defang Black Studies and limit its power to intervene effectively in the life and death issues in the United States.  Remember that higher education Isn’t immune to surveillance.

 

 

Nevertheless, your shuttling between the 1973 and the 2014 texts does yield a product: an idea.  It may be possible to use Black Studies digital tools to do meaningful work and assist other human beings, to live a valuable life in a “communiversity.” The practice of communiversity did thrive briefly in the 1970s; it still manifests itself in some reading groups and writing workshop that give scant attention to the performance of anxiety in academic circles. The anxieties you want to read from the epics of capitalist economies and the novels of the everyday which are always seeking a textual home are, in old school language, “as real as real can get.” Your rereading of Introduction to Afro-American Studies and reading of African American Studies 2013 persuade you to maintain a more than safe distance between yourself and hyperbole about reform and revolution.  Both reforms and revolutions often prove to be absurd, very cruel, and very deadly perversions of good intentions, especially in academic contexts. The best sites for manifesting Black Studies are the home, the neighborhood, the prayer house you attend weekly, organizations to which you pay dues or make charitable donations, the political circus wherever you live. In a global community damned to have an unknowable but adjustable future, Black Studies finds it permanence or sustainability in how you and others take matters into your own hands, transform acts of reading into acts of doing, and remember that Black Studies has life-affirming rather an death-bound universal imperatives.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

July 9, 2014   

racy radical reasons

RACY RADICAL REASONS

 

Jolly gee gosh, I am dumbfounded.  You guys are too intellectual for me.  I don’t know half these writers and I feel totally dumb.  I’m still trying to get through Mother Goose.

 

A reader from New Orleans, June 28, 2014

 

 

To minimize giving rise to such dumbfoundedness, the physicist Brian Greene announced in the preface to The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011):

 

“In writing The Hidden Reality, I’ve presumed no expertise in physics or mathematics on the part of the reader.  Instead, as in my previous books, I’ve used metaphor and analogy, interspersed with historical episodes, to give a broadly accessible account of some of the strangest and should they prove correct, most revealing insights of modern physics” (ix).

 

Mother Goose can get the drift.

 

Greene uses affective/effective prose to explain why “for braneworlds the distinction between loops and snippets is crucial” (116) and why “reality…may be akin to a hologram.  Or, really, a holographic movie” (238).  Admired for his work in superstring theory, Greene belongs to the minority in the general population of American scientists. He is not dependent on the mediation of writers for newspapers and magazines to ensure that laypersons might understand his fascinating work.  It might be argued that the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and the psychologist Steven Pinker belong to the same minority. It is often more pleasant to read and to learn from these scientists than to meander in the prose labyrinths that proliferate in the mindscapes of humanists, literary theorists, and critics of culture.

 

Pick at random a sentence from the works of Julia Kristeva, Stuart Moulthrop, or Homi Bhabha for comparison with one by Lewis Thomas, Tyson, or Greene. Eureka!

 

Yes, extraordinarily difficult ideas may require symbolic representation in equally difficult texts. Readers who put aside Mother Goose and fairytales when they left puberty may find genuine enlightenment in decoding convoluted expressions.  On the other hand, some writers who do work in the domains of literature, theory, and culture have the option of learning from Brian Greene what the bump, the grind, and the hidden reality of clarity might be. It is possible that clarity can sponsor empowering critical thought. Dumbfoundedness is not a disease for which we have yet to discover a cure.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

July 5, 2014

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