September 7, 2015

 

September 7, 2015

(for Lenard D. Moore)

 

In those digital domains

worry did reign.

Labor's guilty light

gave summer day

to wintry sagas:

sentences strung in cursive,

the art work of hands

ennobling undocumented dirt,

tired feet, and  weary hearts.

Often, eyes contrite

in pain await

poetic  blessings

for the mechanical brain.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Centennials

CENTENNIALS

 

Thanks to the troublesome  "magic" of instant communication which informs us about  what happened prior to its spatial and temporal manifestations, we might  welcome the rest and recuperation that a centennial can offer.  Yet, remembering and reassessing  what happened one hundred years ago can only  make going from the new frying pan to an old skillet a paradoxical exercise in hopeful despair.

Consider this year's Margaret Walker Centennial, the shuttling between the strengthening message of "For My People" and the agony-laden news of "Jackson State, May 15, 1970." Implacable, absurdly hungry Death triumphs over the godless trinity of class, race, and gender in the twenty-first century. Rereading Walker is to suffer knowing our young are "Not rich with gold but priceless truths of life and death, of/ giving self and sharing love for this is all there is."  Lives of all colors matter, with or without hash tags, dog tags, car tags or tags period.  Margaret Walker was one of many poet/bridges between the oral traditions of the enslaved Africans  and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the multiethnic  break beat voices of 2015.  All, including refugees straight out of Syria, Palestine and Iraq,  are compelled to voice and revoice  Walker's closing stanza from "Jackson State...":

Now all may see their faces in a marble monument, and

                walk this plaza where they died in vain; but we will not

                forget, for nothing is the same; never ever be the same

                since that blue-reddened night.

The specific "where" in the stanza is Lynch Street  (named for John R. Lynch not for an obscene verb).  The name bleeds, however, in the fates of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas (1916) and  Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi (1955); it casts a lurid gloom on daily violence and death in the streets of the United States of America, in the global landscape.  Death must be proud of how effective it is in making our remembering of the past an uncanny projection of our futures as it clobbers John Donne's Holy Sonnet X: "Death be not proud."

After December 31, 2015, centennials may provide hours of hope and ancestral celebration for some African Americans and twelve months of anguish for others.  We can use what is left of free will to select angles of vision and revision. 2016 is time for remembering Alice Childress, John Oliver Killens, Frank Yerby, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and the founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History.  The population of ancestors to remember will be increased in 2017 by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ossie Davis, Thelonius Monk, Jacob Lawrence, John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, Lena Horne, Bruce McMarion Wright, and Ella Fitzgerald.  I beg the unnamed and forgotten to pardon my lack of omniscience.

The spiritual centennial locus for 2017 shall be near Ferguson and its hypertension-inviting conditions --- East St. Louis, July 1917, replete with democratic  American hatred, riot, and death.  There people will be saturated with music, visual art, theatre, and poetry yoked  the  prose of Killens and Yerby from 2016.  People will recall how jazz swept the United States in 1917; that Freud published "Introduction to Psychoanalysis" and only 38 Negroes were lynched;  that migration was in motion as the Original Dixieland Jass Band made the first jazz recordings for somebody's Jazz Age,  and F. W. Mott proposed a theory of shell shock to account for the odd behaviors of some WWI soldiers.

If we are lucky, we may be renewed and empowered  from observing centennials.  May!!.  As with all things influenced by time and  the emotional gravity of moon and  sun, absolutely nothing is guaranteed.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      September  4, 2015

 

Strong Readers Reading

STRONG READERS READING THE DIFFICULT LONG POEM

A metronome does not measure the pleasure of reading a long poem.  The pleasure exists, outside of time, in a reader's total aesthetic experience of bringing something to the poem and taking away much more than she or he arrived with.  Only  strong readers survive,  and some of them opt to transform knowledge gained  into actions.  Others hoard their intellectual wealth.   In American time-and-capital-driven cultures of reading, one might argue that becoming a strong reader is often a luxury enjoyed mainly by the incarcerated, for they are condemned to live in "abnormal" time. While they may open their readings to the sufferings of history, they do so without the Kabbalistic gestures Harold Bloom ascribes to strong readers in A Map of Misreading (1975).  They employ fierce independence and common sense.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Blue Fasa. New York: New Directions, 2015.

In Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (1993), Mackey provided theoretical foundations for grasping why his poetic practice diverges from the orthodox frames of referentiality described in Stephen Henderson's groundbreaking Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973).  Nevertheless, attentive readers of this book can detect that Mackey's practice is not alien in the tension-marked dynamics of modern African American poetry.  The relatively uncanonized works of Russell Atkins and the canonized ones of Melvin B. Tolson, for example, are prototypes of what conservative academic  critics might judge to be the transgressions of Mackey's poetics.  They provide evidence that difference and difficulty are inherently normal in our poetic tradition, normal to the extent printed poetry can replay music.

 Aware that his work appeals most to a small,  specialized readership, Mackey warns in Discrepant Engagement against "the totalizing pretensions of canon formation"(3) and urges us not to dismiss  "reminders of the axiomatic exclusions upon which positings of identity and meaning depend" (19). Ultimately, however,  we can account for where and why he is included by paralleling the critical efforts of Brian McHale, T. J. Anderson III,  and Aldon L. Nielsen with those of Carolyn Rodgers and Kalamu ya Salaam and using Amiri Baraka's writings on black music to walk the thin line between the blues and jazz that paradoxically includes what it excludes . Note well that paralleling is not identical with comparing. 

Do not take my word for it. Use independent  common sense to parallel

Anderson, T. J. , III. Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2004.

Baraka, Amiri. Black Music.  New York: William Morrow, 1968.

McHale, Brian. The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Rodgers, Carolyn M. "Black Poetry --Where It's At." Negro Digest (September 1969): 7-16.

ya Salaam, Kalamu.  The Sound(ing) of Black Poetry: A Study Guide to the Theory and History of Black Poetry (unpublished 1995)

[[Much of Kalamu ya Salaam's writing on poetry and music can be studied by accessing  the poet Rudolph Lewis's ChickenBones at   http://www.nathanielturner.com/kystable.htm and ya Salaam's "Breath of Life" at http://www.kalamu.com/bol .  We are deeply indebted to Lewis and ya Salaam  for their  unique efforts to document African American literature and culture.  It is unfortunate that academic pretensions "silence" their  contributions to literary and cultural discourses.]]

 

Prefaces or introductions to poetry books are often lightweight, but Nathaniel Mackey is generous and wise in making his preface heavy.  It is a tutorial for reading Blue Fasa that drops knowledge, that plies the slipping string.

The syntax of his prose is itself instructive:

 "Blue Fasa continues Nod House's continuation of Splay Anthem and the work that came before it, braiding the two serial poems Song of the Andoumboulou and "Mu,"  It continues a long song that's one and more than one, "The/one song the songs all wanted in/on, all inwardness inside out.  The/ one song the songs, added or/ not, added up to, song any one song/ was," as "Song of the Andoumboulou: 68" puts it (xi)

Mackey painstakingly explains that the vibration one might hear in the music of Rahsaan Roland Kirk "brings multiple senses of string into play." Mackey takes care to position the words lyric/lyre/liar, so that his desire to integrate poetry and musicality is not lost upon his readers.  Neither is his yoking of the West African musical tradition of griot epic with Brazilian bossa nova.  Following his pull, a reader can swim in quantum (recall the string theory of contemporary physics) and the waters  of rag to reach the shore where the voices of refugees from history speak in Blue Fasa, where "the wandering 'we" of this if not every long song, this if not every long poem, especially this if not every serial poem, this extended lyric, dream and would usher in a new history" (xv). Strong readers will say we see what you are pulling our coats about. Reading Blue Fasa demands that we take small steps and savor the particles before we dare engage the whole.

Ultimately, we can read Mackey's Blue Fasa by willing ourselves to  think in jazz, by subordinating totalizing pretensions to what we will into being.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

September 2, 2015

 

to pimp an iceberg

TO PIMP AN ICEBERG

 

Gifford, Justin.  Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim.  New York: Doubleday, 2015.

 

In the first quarter of the 21st century, American literature and literary criticism have no immunity against the "viruses" that afflict the American body politic.  Indeed, it might be argued that as elements of culture, literature and criticism can be made to serve the interests of an imagined literary Center for Disease Control, the criticism being a Petri dish for growing intellectual viruses for covert experiments in the managing of American popular thinking.  A reading of Justin Gifford's biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr. (aka Robert Beck/aka Iceberg Slim) suggests the book has less-than-accidental kinship with the film "Straight Outta Compton," a Hollywood virus.     Under the guise of being legitimate expressions of popular culture, the film and the book achieve sinister, divisive ends.

Street Poison is a breezy life history which positions itself to canonize Iceberg Slim, rather than to present a judicious literary biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr. or Robert Beck.  It is a narrative of a commodified self-fashioned persona.  As the poet Dave Brinks said recently, we are now dealing with "magic materialism."  His quip points to the Spinglish usage of "magic realism" as a category for critical analysis, the gesture Justin Gifford makes in his effort to pimp an iceberg.  Gifford's alabaster motives, and those of other scholars who are complicit in servicing neogliberal agendas, warrant censure rather than censorship.  Despite the antics, the cacophony of the literary marketplace and cultural studies that affect all of us, a few of us have the ancestor-anointed right to standards of judgment and the pursuit of honesty.  To acknowledge that pimping occurs in international politics, academic discourses, the sex industry, and the conduct of everyday life is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for minimizing opposition to what is morally reprehensible. 

Gifford's book is predicated on an insulting, outrageous claim, for he wishes to argue that for nearly half a century "Robert Beck's works have quietly, from the underground, transformed African American literature and culture.  There would have been no street literature, no blaxploitation, no hip-hop they way we know them today without Pimp: The Story of My Life.  We might appreciate Beck's contributions to American life more fully if we consider the everyday people who he moved" (223). The automatic question Gifford refuses to answer is "Moved to do what, to think what?"

Without gagging on the oily reference of "we" in Gifford's claim, astute readers might indict him for incendiary rhetoric and profiling hyperbole in his cultural performance.  The history of African American literature and culture and their multi-leveled transformations must be told by way of principled explanations of accommodation, resistance, assimilation, and damnation of hegemony in the American public/literary sphere.  Gifford's claim is devoid of nuance.  It borders on thuggish arrogance.

Three key terms in the motivating claim Gifford proffers  for venerating if not canonizing Beck are underground, transform, and would have been no.  "Underground"[please listen to track #4 on Curtis Mayfield's album Roots (1971)]  ----underground is no exclusive African American location in the American cultural imagination.  It is the locus of Wall Street insider trading and Ponzi schemes, labor exploitation, health-threatening practices in the food industry, the drug traffic abetted by secret government agencies, the viciousness  which taints the music and entertainment corporations, and the protocols of fascism.  "Transform"  --any change for which Beck's writings can serve as a cause is not divorced from inter-ethnic struggles for human rights and equitable action and the companion ethnic discord in ideological trends.  "Would have been no" ---it is three inches beyond omniscience to proclaim that street or urban literature, hip-hop phenomena, and blaxploitation could not have developed without Beck's writings.  Gifford's claim is disingenuous.  

Despite his failure to apply due diligence in constructing a literary biography of Robert Lee Moppins Jr (August 4, 1918-April 30, 1992), Gifford brings inevitable attention to links between  American writing and commercialized American sexualities.  He does depict arresting development and implacable abuse of women,  and he does model the pathology which is undermining the credibility of so-called mainstream cultural exploration.   Had he demonstrated greater awareness of the speculative, theoretical  work in Street Lit.: Representing the Urban Landscape (2014) and Susanne Dietzel's commentary on black literature and Holloway House in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Street Poison would be a stronger and more persuasive book.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

August 31, 2015

 

The media ignores us

THE MEDIA IGNORES US

 

Seventy-two things are racing to be finished before midnight, but I gave priority to only one of them this morning: attending "The Media Ignores Us: A Human Art Exhibit" at Crescent City Boxing Club, 3101 Erato, New Orleans.  The title is intriguing.  Curiosity demanded that I find out what an exhibit devoted to young, gifted, and Black youth in New Orleans encompassed.  It is fashionable to demonize young Black people in the United States, to pepper Internet, television, and print media each second with negative, dehumanizing images and narratives about them.  On a post-Katrina Saturday morning, we needed positivity.

 

The exhibit, conceptualized by Kim Dilosa, founder and executive director of the YOUTHanasia Foundation, Inc., did not disappoint me.  It featured twenty-six young people who stood silently under or in proximity to an awesome mural of Mohammed Ali at the Boxing Club. As I looked at them and read the placards which explained who each was and what she or he had done since August 29, 2005 and what he or she was determined to accomplish in life, I was deeply moved.  They were the polar opposite of Herman Melville's Bartleby.  Their silence was very loud.  They were brave, willing to risk a certain irony in "exhibiting" human aspirations.  They were twenty-six stars forming a constellation against my usual blue-black cynicism.  What I saw was unconditional, unmitigated hope and strength and the young lifting themselves in affirmation of what their ancestors, immediate and remote, lived, suffered, and died for. Their iconic faces spoke to me.  Ashé.  Amen.

 

Chance arranged for a young man whom I'd met over a year ago when I spoke to Students at the Center to reintroduce himself and to give me some information about one of the exhibit participants, a future Icon of NOLA.  Our conversation convinced me to make a small donation to the cause.  I also asked Ms. Dilosa if any of the New Orleans newspapers planned to cover the exhibit.  She told me they would not. The papers did not like the exhibit's title.  They refused to cover it.  Ah, poetic justice.  I intervened by calling and leaving a voice message for one of the best journalists in New Orleans.  The media has the option of  ignoring  the exhibit, but the media ought not ignore the positive stories the twenty-six young people can tell to the United States of America and the world.  It is criminal to ignore the storytellers and the stories during the anniversary of the Storm they survived.  At the back of my mind, I hear a small, weird voice saying, "Fool, don't you know by now that criminality is the modus operandi of choice at every social , mass communications, and political level in the City of New Orleans?"  I answered, "Perhaps I do know that, but my work is to support the young, gifted and Black by speaking against the status quo  and the media that ignore them.

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

August 29, 2015

12:10 PM

 

Letter to the New York Times

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

1928 Gentilly Blvd.

New Orleans, LA 70119-2002

 

 

August 24, 2015

 

 

Mr. Dean Baquet

Executive Editor

The New York Times

620 Eighth Avenue

New York, New York 10018-1618

 

Dear Mr. Baquet:

 

Although the onus for what might be offensive in The New York Times does not rest only on your shoulders,  I direct my disappointment with Vinson Cunningham's "Can Black Art Ever Escape the Politics of Race?" (NYT Magazine online, August 20, 2015) to you.  This title is a red herring.  If Cunningham were familiar with the work of Frank Yerby, he would know some instances of black art long ago escaped the politics of race.  His apparent lack of knowledge and carelessness is reflected in his opening sentence; his assertion that Richard Wright was "late of Harlem and Biloxi, Miss." is a blatant bit of misinformation. When Wright moved his family to Paris in August 1947, he was late of Greenwich Village.  As far as Wright scholars know, he never set foot in Biloxi, Mississippi.  Cunningham's lack of care regarding his prose is signaled by such wording as "recusal from turmoil" and "Zen on loan." That kind of wording might be found in contemporary poetry; it is ill-chosen in serious journalism.

 

It is quite annoying to me and a few other African American writers that The New York Times published Cunningham's article without noticing the phrase "tribal pride" is offensive or attending to Cunningham's inability to construct a coherent argument.  His attempt to say something about "art for life's sake" versus "art for art's sake" is pathetic. 

 

A number of the articles and reviews your newspaper has printed in 2015 have accorded noteworthy disrespect to African American literature and writers, particularly in left-handed "compliments" about the legacies of Richard Wright and James Baldwin.  I hereby request that The New York Times in the future will use an internal consent decree and publish commentaries on black art, literature, and culture that observe high standards of critical thought.  Otherwise, we shall have grounds for believing the newspaper is involved in covert warfare on the integrity of African American cultural expressions.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Shakespeare and Baraka

William Shakespeare and Amiri Baraka

 

Many years ago at a dinner party I proposed that Shakespeare got too much attention,  that commentary on this Elizabethan writer was just so much bardolatry, that  Shakespeare's contemporaries and other writers deserved generous critical attention.  The honored guest at dinner happened to be a famous, very erudite Marxist.  He fixed his bright dark eyes on me, saying "Young man, Shakespeare has been read and misread, but he can never be read too much nor sufficiently."  The instructive arrow, shot by C. L. R. James,  is still lodged in my memory. Bold superficiality is one of the banes of youth.

For James, as Aldon L. Nielsen intimates in C. L. R. James: An Introduction (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), reading Shakespeare included making challenging theses and discovering how form in  great English language texts is not a mirror "but a metamorphosing lens revealing that which is invisible to the naked eye, and that  which is yet to come "(39).  Perhaps James chided my young Self for its want of transformative attention, and now my old Self profits from his spoken words and from his published criticism, especially of Herman Melville, just as it has gained much from Sterling Stuckey's enlightening commentaries on Melville.  From both James and Stuckey, those remarkable historians,  literary criticism ought to learn lessons about its own peculiar, dynamic  functions.  The seminal texts are Stuckey's  African Culture and Melville's Art: The Creative Process in Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) and James's Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and The World We Live In (London: Allison & Busby, 1985).

The idea of a metamorphosing lens is nicely illuminated by Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespeare's Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), both in terms of how Greenblatt chooses to write about Shakespeare and what his motives might be in doing so.  It is easy to describe Greenblatt's argument but risky and polemical to address his motives.

Greenblatt's meditation on absolute limits, the idea of beauty, the limits of hatred, the ethics of authority, and autonomy in the works of Shakespeare constitutes one model of how a similar exploration of Amiri Baraka's works might proceed.  Admitting that as a human being Shakespeare, "notwithstanding his aura of divinity,"  was subject to limits, Greenblatt argues that "these limits are not constraints on Shakespeare's imagination or literary genius....No, the limits that he embodied are ones he himself disclosed and explored throughout his career, whenever he directed his formidable intelligence to absolutes of any kind. These limits served as the enabling condition of his particular freedom" (1).  Were one to substitute Baraka for Shakespeare in Greenblatt's wording, the explosive political subtext of his meditation floats to the surface.  I am provoked to ask how Greenblatt participates in the project of cultural and intellectual hegemony adumbrated by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993 ).  It would not be exactly prudent for me to answer my ambivalent question, because I need to conserve limited energy for multicultural battles of a different order.  Thus, I confine my interest in Greenblatt and Said to the level of structure and leave the matter of anatomizing their speech acts to others.

Juxtaposing William Shakespeare and Amiri Baraka is a challenging exercise that might be of some good for those of us who are committed to serious inquiry about aspects of literary history and our own historicity as readers in particular cultures.  Rereading all of Shakespeare and Baraka as well as weighing biographical and autobiographical evidence about their temporally remote lives would be an arduous project, one best suited for independent scholars who have the luxury of not begging for support from American institutions . Those institutions would probably fund the most specialized and exotic research on Shakespeare, his status within American cultural literacy being enormously secure. Baraka is not so "blessed."   His  position within our cultural literacy is still evolving, and widespread, diverse resentments about his achievements are quite operative in the United States.  The noteworthy scholarship of Theodore Hudson, William J. Harris, Werner Sollors, Henry Lacey, and others who have studied  LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka has little impact on resentment that flows like the Mississippi River, that hides as many secrets as the River.

 Even after his death, his integrity and autonomy are consistently misread as unmitigated anger when they should be properly read as spiritual disdain for America's long history of  human wretchedness sponsored by our experiments with democracy.  Why this should be the case is exposed in William J. Maxwell's F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), but full disclosure has to be obtained from scrutiny of the deadly macro- and micro-aggressions rampant in the Age of Obama.  In 2015, the United States seems to rival the duplicity of Elizabethan England. It can be argued, for example,  that our nation has an ideal climate for transforming vulgar  abstractions into dubious  policy and obscene practices. For this reason, I believe my Chinese, African  and European colleagues might read Baraka under the influence of ethical forms of criticism which it is difficult for most of my American colleagues to manifest or profess.  Juxtaposition is not comparison, and it ought to  be more than  a simple comparing of Baraka's plays with those of Shakespeare. Juxtaposition involves the whole range of genres, and Baraka produced remarkable works in far more genres than did Shakespeare. The results are beyond prediction or  certitude.  Nevertheless, the gesture of scholarly meditation might give a bit of  substance to what the naked mind has yet to conceive.

The problematic status of abstractions ---autonomy, criteria for beauty or the beautiful, authority as the subject matter for dialogic imagination and dialectics, the impossibility of absolutely locating freedom and justice, the psychological impact of narrations we call history, the elusiveness of hatreds and  limits----gives deep  meaning to the works of Baraka and Shakespeare,  although the ultimate significance of those works may be ideologically opposed, logically  incompatible.  Certainly, the two remarkably gifted men produced art under vastly different circumstances, but they are compatible in their search for Zeitgeist forms as dreams and nightmares, forms we use for speaking what we feel.  Exploring them in tandem is not a whim. It is a method for enlarging the arsenal we cultural critics need to defend ourselves and our Selves.

William Shakespeare and Amiri Baraka have been read and criticized, demonized  and misread, but they have neither been read too much nor sufficiently.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      August 23, 2015