On Poetry

Literature is no parasitic language game. It is discourse designed to inform, persuade, incite, reassure, and so forth. Many new black poets wrote with just such aims in mind and with the understanding that they and the acts (poems) they performed had consequences. They regarded their use of language as serious, and it was a serious condition of good faith that the author’s “fiction” be commensurate with “fact.” So in theory, and in fact, the new black poetry intensified the normal illocutionary forces.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr., “Illocutionary Dimensions of Poetry: Lee’s ‘A Poem to Complement Other Poems,’” The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, ed. Joanne V. Gabbin (Univ. Press of Virginia, 1999), 138.


•Poetry as a sign and a signified event activates something, even if the something is a consciousness of nothing. As a pre-future writer, reader and critic of poetry, I maintain that poetry is a making and using of languages for purposes of entanglement in the scientific understanding of how particles and motions of life are constantly interrelated. Poetry is a unique paradox, liberating and enslaving the desire for nowness and historicity, our penchant for remembering and forgetting.

Sound is the core of poetry; it is the material state with which we struggle to derive meaning (s) from structures and linguistic units that we agree represent content. The less we talk about poetry, the better. Our greatest profit from poetry is living in and learning from a poem.

Anne Moody (1940-2015)

Anne Moody (September 15, 1940-February 5, 2015)

Four years after graduating from Tougaloo College, the young Anne Moody published Coming of Age in Mississippi (Dial 1968).  It is noteworthy that this autobiography has been “in-print” and acclaimed since its initial publication.  Similar life histories of civil rights workers, both autobiography and biography, have come and gone, getting enthusiastic receptions when they first appeared.  After a few years, enthusiasm wears thin. The eagerly received life histories age rapidly and virtually disappear.  Moody’s autobiography escaped this fate.  The title tipped its hat to anthropology, and Moody’s vernacular prose is quite readable.  Moody exploited the dramatic possibilities of first-person voice and perspectives.  She charmed a nation of readers who wanted to know what growing up female and black in Mississippi entailed.  Some of us who had been her classmates were slightly alarmed by her minimal love for our alma mater, but we had to affirm the rightness of how she saw Civil Rights Movement people and events in Mississippi and in New Orleans. Coming of Age in Mississippi had staying power.  It is a keeper of memories that some post-civil rights writers would be happy to have disappear. Certain forms of “truth” may hibernate, but they refuse to disappear and give aid and comfort to fickle tastes.

In Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (1989), Joanne M. Braxton suggests that Moody’s book belongs to the tradition of Ida B. Wells’ Crusade for Justice and that Moody, like Richard Wright and Maya Angelou, had intimate knowledge of Southern racial horror.  It is also probable that what Zora Neale Hurston theorized about women’s forgetting and remembering in the opening sentences of Their Eyes Were Watching God opens a special window on how Moody speaks from a multi-gendered space that entrapped women (and men) in Mississippi rather than the dream space Hurston constructed in her novel. Women do seem to retain more details about events than do men. Moody provides rich details about the critical turning points in her life up to 1968.  She records the names, particulars, and dates of all that happened to her as the daughter of sharecroppers in a part of Mississippi located around Woodville and Centreville, as a person who began working at a very young age to keep herself and her siblings in school.

Moody’s autobiographical voice often has the exactness of discourses in cultural anthropology; it justifies the echoing title of Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa. Moody makes a “thick description” of her life, layering detail upon detail, working out a full description of her Self as vulnerable and subject to be denied opportunities if she did not fight to control her destiny.  Readers must ponder what Moody says in Chapter 11 about the origin of her misanthropic tendencies in 1955. Readers who piece together what is not in the autobiography, what Moody chose not to say in another book about how miserable life can become once a person achieves fame, will note that misanthropy sponsors nightmares, mental imbalance, and death of the spirit as a preparation for death of the body.

Moody’s life story from 1955 to 1964 is the record of how she sought through education at Natchez Junior College and Tougaloo College and through her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Council of Federated Organizations, and the Congress of Racial Equality to control the resentment, the anxieties, and the self-hatred that was her legacy from Mississippi.  Her descriptions of place are intimately connected with political activity or the people who at various times were comrades in struggles.  When she closes her story from a bus headed to COFO hearings in Washington, D.C., her feelings about Mississippi and what the freedom song “We Shall Overcome” proclaims are ambivalent.   As the autobiographical narrator listens to the heart-gripping words ----“We shall overcome, We shall overcome, We shall overcome someday”---, she whispers skepticism into the charged air: “I wonder. I really WONDER” (348).

The contemporary conditions of life in American and in Mississippi justify the doubts Moody had in 1964.  Much has changed.  Social and political changes have been at once blessings and curses.  It is obvious that the day of overcoming is still waiting for Godot.  As we remember and honor the bravery of Anne Moody and read her partial record of her combat with life, we find ourselves chanting “We wonder; we really wonder.”

Jerry W. Ward, Jr., February 21, 2015    

Plove

PLOVE

Thoughtful. Timely.

Unusually original, this

Innovative transferential,

Significant and unique

Complicated route

Is ambitiously imagined.

COOKING NOTE: You can/improve/the plove/just add/ plum clove.

The go-to way articulates,

With depth, with acumen,

Tremendous ground/

Breaking seeds.

Important, too, is nuanced growth.

Distinct, first-rate, theoretically sharp,

Graceful, learned, and light-provoking

The gone-off went off

On interrogation of investigation.

COOKING NOTE #2:  Critique and deploy tropes ---cool antanaclasis,

Sweet apophasis, salted catachresis----when you incense the kitchen

With brilliant, compelling, radical, deep and rich profusions of prodigal economy.

Taste the plove.  Strangle the question:

“God, are we human yet?”

Forget.

Forgive.

Smoke the joke.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

February 7, 2015

Shakespeare His Blackwashing

SHAKESPEARE HIS BLACKWASHING

Many years ago, most people who earned a Ph.D. in English had to study the works of William Shakespeare.  That was a good thing.  The requirement ensured that a British-rooted variety of cultural literacy would circulate in the Profession. It could trickle down, through the public schools and Classic Comics, to the American common reader. The wheel of Fortune has turned. 

In 2015, people who are earning Ph.D.s in English can bypass Shakespeare. They may remember something from Hamlet, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, or King Lear ---plays they may have read in middle school and/or high school.  Unless the Ph.D. candidate is specializing in theatre or British literature or desires to become the next great authority on Shakespeare, she or he may not be required to refer to Shakespeare on qualifying examinations. We don’t blame our Ph.D.s for having minimal interest in Shakespeare, because the twenty-first century demands that they give more attention to what the living are saying than to what the dead have said.

Neither the Profession nor the humanities should fear that Shakespeare does not get attention.  He does. The American common television viewer has replaced the American common reader. The viewer profits greatly, as a result of what screenwriters produce, from the resilience of Shakespeare’s legacy.  For example, the ghetto-fabulous Fox network serial “Empire” is an elegant rewriting of Shakespeare’s King Lear, replacing Lear’s dementia with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and his kingdom with a parcel of the crime-infected and enormously lucrative American music industry. The very popular AMC series “Breaking Bad” obviously incorporated Polonius’ advice from Hamlet and Iago’s advice from Othello: Mr. White was most certainly true to himself as he put great amounts of drug money in his purse.  “Empire” and “Breaking Bad” are good examples of how bourgeois realism works in television and film. William Shakespeare, the masterful plagiarist, has achieved immortality in the Western imaginary. We have done an excellent job of blackwashing him more thoroughly than he blackwashed himself.  And he did a damned good job of blackwashing in The Tempest. N.B. –blackwashing stands in diametrical opposition to whitewashing. Go figure.

In the spirit of blackwashing, we should invest time in reading Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s major contribution to the genre of revenge tragedy, and in viewing the clever film adaptations of that play from 1997, 1999, and 2000.

Titus Andronicus is a stunning situation report on the twenty-first century human condition and its meandering passions, including our confusion about virtues, viruses, and vices. It is a consciousness-catching play, an effective emotional trap. It generously answers this question: Who is Shakespeare and what was he, that all your elders commend him?

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            February 3, 2015

30 Jan 15 poem

Poem 1.30.15

When the flesh is gone

& the breathing stopped to be

Hard as fried stone

YOU SAY

When flesh do be gone

& breathing a silt-clogged drain

Soft as demon butter

YOU SAY

YOU SAY

“I am the sound

That grows the Earth.”

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 30, 2015

2015 Read-In

African American Read-In, 2015

This year, the National African American Read-In begins on Sunday, February 1, and ends on Saturday, February 28.

Access “2015 National African American Read-In” at http://www.ncte.org/aari/ for details.

This year marks the Margaret Walker Centennial.  Many of the readings during Black History Month, as well as the 2015 calendar year, should involve programs on Walker’s life and works.  For My People (1942), Jubilee (1966), and This Is My Century:  New and Collected Poems (1989) are at the top of the list for reading in February. From  March through December , one might find pockets of time for reading Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988), How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990), On Being Female, Black and Free (1997), and A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974).  Anyone who wants to enjoy communion with Walker’s extraordinary intelligence should read “The Humanistic Tradition of Afro-American Literature.” American Libraries 1.9 (1970): 849-854.

This year marks the 70^th anniversary of Black Boy and the 75^th anniversary of Native Son.

Non-scholars and scholars alike have given critical attention to Wright’s masterpiece since 1945. They have applauded Black Boy; they have quarreled with it.  It has existed as a superb instance of black writing, of American literature, and of work that people from many nations have translated into their native languages.  It will continue throughout the twenty-first century to be a source for cautious hope as well as, to borrow wording from Wright’s novel The Outsider, “that baleful gift of the sense of dread.”

Black Boy is one of Richard Wright’s major gifts to time past, present, and future.  It is a gift to be treasured.  It is a gift for everyday use and equipment for living and for dealing with one’s trublems.

Black Boy is a powerful model of how to think about one’s location in historical time and complex environments and of how to write about one’s location with an honesty that is at once aesthetic and didactic.  Teachers of rhetoric and composition can use the text to help adolescent writers, in particular, to gain mastery of grammar, syntax, vocabulary, images, and figures of speech as they struggle with the problems of narrating their life histories.  All writers, of course, can learn valuable lessons about perspective from Richard Wright, just as visual artists can learn about excellence in drawing from Charles White and musicians can absorb how to use physics in the composition of sounds from John Coltrane.  All of us can learn from Richard Wright what Chinese sages have known for several thousand years ---the flow of dao and tian and yin and yang that gives positive meaning to our suffering beneath the stars.

Readers have given a substantial amount of critical attention to Native Son, a novel that is essential for understanding how American fiction of the 20^th century so often embraced the primal ingredients of what escapes specific time and drives change in the United States of America.  Fifteen years prior to the publication of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (1955), Richard Wright was shining the light of disquietude upon a thankless world.  The world of 1940 did not listen carefully enough to what Wright was saying in Native Son.  Thus, thirteen years later he issued a second communiqué in the form of The Outsider.  Read in tandem, Native Son and The Outsider provide us with the strongest clues pure fiction can deliver about why our world seems to be swimming like a shark in butter-milk toward its Omega Point.  In the post-whatsoeverness of 2015, only an insignificant number of people will fail to hear Wright’s messages.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

January 25, 2015

reading for the government

Recommended Reading for the Government

Senators and Congresspeople should read or reread Sissela Bok’s Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (1978).  If they must play the game, they are required to know how the rules are constructed.

The Supreme Court justices should read and reread A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (1999) by John Rawls.

The White House should read The Limits of Scientific Reasoning (1984) by David Faust.