letter to a young philosopher

 LETTER TO A YOUNG PHILOSOPHER 

 

Dear James,

After reading your proposal for a book on black aesthetics, I raise four common sense questions:

WHAT IS NECESSARY?

WHAT IS GOOD?

WHAT IS TRUE?

WHAT IS BEAUTIFUL?

If you paste these questions on your wall as you investigate "black aesthetics," you might write a mind-opening book.  That is the only worthwhile kind of book any of us ought to try to write.  Good thinkers use the gravity of simple questions to ground themselves.

Standard American English invites us to be careless as we pretend to be rigorous.  Take a clue from the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, who merits applause for publishing The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century ( New York: Viking, 2014). No sentence in his book refers to Black American English.  That is a damned fine thing.  By ignoring an ethnic use of English that flavors styles of contemporary American thought, Pinker alerts us to exclusion as an option.  In academic commerce, we opt to exclude or ignore as we shape reality in an image that we deem pleasing and proper.  For example, he tells us "the graybeard sensibilities of the style mavens come not just from an underappreciation of the fact of language change but from a lack of reflection on their own psychology"(4).  Should you opt to ignore the ethnic history of the word "aesthetic," and what that history reveals about use and abuse in doing things with words, you will make common cause with Pinker in mavenship. Be at once more cautious and more radical than he, and reflect on your own psychology.

The English language can be treacherous.  To write about aesthetics in a meaningful and necessary way, you have to weed the garden of Western thought.  As far as I know, aesthetics was not a worshipful category prior to the 18th century.  And since you up the ante by using  the slippery adjective black to modify aesthetics, remember that African peoples did not think of themselves as "black" prior to their sundry contacts with color-deficient peoples.  They thought of themselves as people who used their minds and bodies as instruments to sense what was external.  In this regard, they were no different than people unlike themselves in expressing how body and mind could deal with material objects and environments and flashings of the spirit.  Western thought is predisposed to fix what is not broken and to let weeds choke roots.

As a philosopher, you may have studied how etymology  is related to epistemology and use of words. From the Oxford English Dictionary, a source of some authority, we learn that aesthetic comes from Greek.  It originally meant "of or pertaining to...things perceptible by the senses, things material (as opposed to...things thinkable or immaterial."  In 1735, the German thinker Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, being pro-Aristotle and anti-Plato in sensibility, used episteme aistetike to mean a science of what is sensed and imagined, a nice violation of the original meaning. According to some reports, Immanuel Kant was not pleased with such philosophical violation.  He was a purist. But when the word " aesthetic"  gained currency in English usage after 1830, thinkers  maximized the sense of taste (minimizing other senses) and designated it to mean "philosophical inquiry, the object of which is philosophical theory of the beautiful."  The word's  journey from the Greek to the German to the English is ethnic and also coloured by the paint of race. The word is now used most exclusively in  discussions of art.

It pleases me that you are taking up an unfinished project of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), namely exploration of diverse changes in how  African American make aesthetic choices as they respond to life and to art.  It became fashionable in the 1980s to demonize the "political" features of  BAM, to dismiss the phenomenon as a cultural temper tantrum or a suspect reification of African and African American mythologies.

 BAM did have flaws and contradictions, of course, but they were not so irrational that discussions of the Black Aesthetic and aesthetics in the anthology The Black Aesthetic  (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., had to be murdered  in a rush toward a reconstruction of instruction and the salvation of theory. Many  anti-BAM critics, energized by the vernacular signifying of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,  deemed it a virtue to be "theoretical"  in the way Jacques Lacan,  Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida were always already postmodern and deconstructionist in the theatre of philosophy. Their opposition was a sign of how rational they were.  A smaller number of them embraced the blues-informed ideology of Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s history-bound  brand of theorizing.  Few of them, I suspect, read Derrida's characterization of metaphysics  in The Margins of Philosophy (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982) as "the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason" (231). Had they engaged Reason from this angle, they might have been more sympathetic to BAM's efforts to say that perceptions have a racialized historicity. They might have been less anxious to foreclose the unfinished  metaphysical project BAM initiated regarding aesthetics.

On the other hand,  it might  have mattered very little  if they had read Derrida, for they were determined to give  credibility to an assertion John Dewey made in Art as Experience (1934; New York: Paragon, 1979): "Usually there is a hostile reaction to a conception of art that connects it with the activities of a live creature in its environment. The hostility to association of fine art with normal processes of living is a pathetic, even a tragic commentary on life as it is ordinarily lived" (27). Dewey understood that aesthetic experiences were first of all about living (sensing of materiality) and only secondarily about "correct" contemplation of objects in the visual and plastic arts and motion in ballet;  eargasms and rapture  in the presence of "classical music" or opera; or in the case of literature, formal and deceptive  ahistorical inspection of  verbal icons.  James, I urge you to read Dewey as well as Cornel West's enlightened commentary on Dewey in The American Evasion of Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).  Dewey knew how to weed a garden.  You may also want to read Barnor Hesse, "Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies." Ethnic and Racial Studies 30.4 (2007): 643-663.  Hesse pulls up weeds nicely as he discusses the racial metaphysics of presence.

Above all, I strongly recommend that you read Carolyn Fowler's brilliant introduction to Black Arts and Black Aesthetics. 2nd Edition (Atlanta: First World Foundation, 1981).  Better than any other thinker associated with the Black Arts Movement, Fowler understood that the term "black aesthetics" is historical and non-exclusive.  Like the terms "Chinese aesthetics" or "Persian aesthetics," it belongs to a history of philosophical discourses.  The idea of aesthetics is fluid not fixed. And our talk about aesthetics should not lead to the belief that we can have a total accounting of how people perceive and think about things material.  We are limited to approximate accounting for the human sensorium in time and space.  Emphasize in your book that you are making an inquiry about history (narratives regarding the endless process of change and continuity) and that philosophical propositions are not omniscient.  It is necessary and good to make  acknowledgements with grace.  I believe you are trying to articulate "a truth" rather than "the Truth."  Ultimately, I am suggesting that you use common sense to write in uncommon ways about the flowing ontology of black aesthetics, the river where consciousness connects with the beautiful.

With very best wishes,

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 8, 2015

 

Let disorder ramify

LET DISORDER RAMIFY:  A Note for October 12, 2015

 

O.K.  If it makes you happy, we can do it. We can spend a few moments remembering something on October 12, 2015 and then quickly return to business as usual.  In Mexico, it is Dia de la Raza, a national holiday for remembering how the Taino and Arawak  peoples discovered a lost sailor named Christopher and how his salvation was a sign of destruction.  In the United States of America, it is Indigenous Peoples' Day.  Should we celebrate or weep that warfare, disease,  massacre, and uninvited assimilation have made millions of indigenous people quite literally invisible?   In Canada, it is Thanksgiving and time to eat pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, and Brussels sprouts.  Why can't Canadians be normal and wait until November to give thanks?  O.K.  We have remembered.  Let us return to football games and thirty-one days of Halloween and agonizing over what to buy for Christmas.  And  no, we don't need to remember that October 24, 2015 is United Nations Day.  In Louisiana, that is Election Day. We have to cast ballots for a Governor and proposed constitutional amendments.  Isn't it disgusting when people ask you to show a bit of intelligence about world affairs?

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 6, 2015

The Education of Kevin Powell

Reading Kevin Powell's Education 

 

Powell, Kevin. The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood.  New York: Atria Books, 2015

 

Autobiography is one of the more intriguing mixed genres of American writing.  Elizabeth Bruss' Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (1976) may lead us to believe that the "rules" governing autobiography are stricter than those which pertain to drama, poetry, and fiction; awareness that generic  "rules"  are based on abstractions from histories of reading, however, invite us to amend them in our acts of interpretation, in the acts we commit in order to grasp the meaning of texts. We  are willing to break them.  We allow the writer of autobiography great latitude in arranging language and rhetorical devices in her or his effort to bear witness to "a truth, " because we  associate the truth of what happened  with the  individual's confessional, psychological ego-investments. Adjustments, exaggerations, forgetting and remembering, and selective  displacements are in motion as part of the shared authority of the writer and the reader.  Our own egos and needs are implicated in judgments about what is true or false.  So too are our ideas about  collective features of  life histories. What social and cultural conditions are the powerful motives in the act of writing?  What counts most in our reading and interpretation of autobiography, perhaps,  is the sense that the narrator as well as the persona who stands in for a  Self are reliable.  We demand, in most cases,  assurances that the autobiography is more than an absurd, commercial gimmick or a game of linguistic wilding. If the assurances fail, we are not devastated.  We all understand how American citizens "play" one another. These considerations allow us to have a rich transaction with The Education of Kevin Powell.

Even before we begin to read Powell's autobiography, we may be given pause by his strategic choice of a title. The Education of Kevin Powell echoes the title of an older, privileged, and seldom read autobiography, namely The Education of Henry Adams. Perhaps the choice was not merely accidental.  Perhaps the twenty-first century Kevin Powell actually wanted to expose the vast and crucial differences between his journey and the one taken by the elitist nineteenth-century descendent of two American presidents. To imitate a well-known metaphor from Booker T. Washington's autobiography, we can say that as writers Powell and Adams are connected in a literary enterprise;  as American citizens, they as separate from one another as the little finger is from the thumb. The exact circumstances of Powell's choice are, and should remain, a tantalizing mystery.  It suffices that The Education of Kevin Powell is a magnificent deconstruction of the fiction named the  "American Dream."  Powell's autobiography or memoir is a trenchant disrupting of the enabling grounds that inform The Education of Henry Adams.  Thus, Powell secures his niche in the tradition of American autobiography by maximizing the oppositional potency of the African American autobiographical tradition, the  telling a free story about what is universally recognized as unfreedom. And we ought not minimize the fact that Powell gives us both subjective and objective evidence of his character and courage through writing as an act of brutal honesty.

It may be apparent to discerning readers that The Education of Kevin Powell is a gendered, medium-crossing,  asymmetrical companion to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Ruffhouse Records CK69035), a musical witness that conjures Carter G. Woodson's The Miseducation of the Negro (1934). Other readers may think of The Education of Sonny Carson (1972) and the 1974 film of the same title, of the education that is actually  located in the mean streets of our nation rather than in its "celebrated "institutions of public schooling and higher learning.  The value of such associations is to highlight  what an American  education outside the questionable  "safe" zones of formal institutions really is.

Focusing on American education prevents  an automatic reading of Powell's book as yet another African American saga of abject disadvantage and noble struggle to transcend.  His writing pertains more to flight into than flight from something.  By way of learning-oriented approaches to his text, we might discover  what that something might be and why we need to be better informed about it than most of us are.  Giving priority to our education as readers  frustrates the banal tendency to stereotype American and  African American autobiographies as stories of radicalization and identity politics and racialization. An unorthodox reading of The Education of Kevin Powell  can expose how phony is  a  tearful and self-serving reception of the book.  Reading against the grain reduces  indulgence in the delusion and bad faith of pity.  It liberates us to grasp how raw will power enables an American male  to prevail in the endless, uneven, traumatic attempt to reach the telos of being  human, of being a good citizen in a chaotic universe.

 Powell's autobiography makes a strong case for the power of the will. He reinforces the idea of responsible agency which is central in the essays he collected and edited in The Black Male Handbook (2008) and in his own essays in Who's Gonna Take the Weight?: Manhood, Race and Power in America (2003) and Someday We'll All Be Free (2006).  Indeed, we can learn from this autobiography what the American entertainment/ disinformation industry wants us not to know about the essence of  being hip-hop or the transformational  complexity of oppositional stances.  Powell exposes the education America imposes upon it male citizens.

This autobiography has two parts.  Part 1 "trapped in a concrete box" contains seventeen chapters which deal with the spatial origins of Powell's long, unfinished journey; the thirteen chapters of Part 2 "living on the other side of midnight" give specificity to the temporal, to the events and people in the unique trajectory of Powell's life to the present.  The introduction establishes the dominant image of violence and being beaten, the image that haunts us frequently in the autobiography and in our everyday lives.  Powell's words "the beating as punishment for my life" operate in unsettling concert with the line "trapped in a concrete box" from his poem "Mental Terrorism"  in Recognize (1995) and his plain assertion that "writing is perhaps the most courageous thing I've ever done."  Through writing Powell instructs us time and again that "there is something grotesquely wrong with a society where millions of people face daily political, cultural, spiritual,  psychological, and economic oppression by virtue of their skin complexion." His recognition of what is at once explicit and implicit in an American education justifies his desire to have writing "open up minds, feed souls, bridge gaps, provoke heated exchanges" and authorizes a yearning, present throughout world history, to have writing "breathe and live forever."  Without saying so directly,  Powell challenges Allan Bloom's  famous lamentations  in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and subverts Bloom's complaint by writing to open the imagined mind of the United States of America.

Critics who cohabitate with aesthetics have no reason to fear that Kevin Powell minimizes craft in contributing to the production of knowledge, because he is appropriately literary in shaping autobiography.  The title of his book is a very literary gesture, a discriminating invitation to use uncommon cultural literacy about the nature of American autobiography.  He is even more recognizably literary in using the device of the catalog of discoveries (as Richard Wright used it in Black Boy) to hammer ideas about the journey from boyhood to manhood -----"like the rupture...like the longing...like the bewilderment...like the hostile paranoia...like the cryptic sense of great expectations." And the latter allusion is one result of Powell's having read both Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens in his youth.  Powell's anaphoric use of "I remember...I remember...I remember" attests to how he inserts his poetic sensibility to serve the rhetorical ends of creative non-fiction. And it is remarkable that he rewrites a passage from Black Boy about how adults use alcohol and words to "corrupt" a child for their careless amusement  to dramatize an educational moment.

 Like Wright, Powell uses what purports to be remembered dialogue to intensify our sense of the affective properties of historiography and to suggest historical process always comes back to us as narrative not as objective reporting that is in denial of its inherent subjectivity.  Powell is crafty and exceptionally skilled in creating literature that does not hesitate to critique the limits of moral imagination.  Or, for that matter, the innate immorality of twenty-first century societies, and those wretched  circumstances, so permanent in our heritage of social and racial contracts,  which cast light on the moral dimensions of  his profound struggles with his own sexism and his anger, his male American identity.

 The Education of Kevin Powell and Ta-nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me are indebted to Wright and to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a fact that legitimizes comparison.  But the comparison ought to be tough-minded and should make a special note that Coates and Powell are writing from different but convergent class positions.  Interpretive association of Coates with Benjamin Franklin and of Powell with Henry Adams enables us to have fresh perspectives on representing  privilege, race, and power without falling into  merely  tendentious  literary and cultural criticism or drowning in lakes of fickle public  opinions.  But we must remember that an understanding of these autobiographical writings also imposes upon us the need to assess what we know or do not know about  our own existential choices which pertain to leadership and activism.  The books complement each other as we try to make sense of individual plasticity in human response to Nature and multiple environments.  Reading both compelled me to make a choice.  I admit that the vernacular qualities of The Education of Kevin Powell instruct me more thoroughly about the genre of autobiography.  His writing  encourages me to learn more about aligning the building of knowledge for everyday use with critical aesthetic response.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 4, 2015

The old new conceptual space

The Old New Conceptual Space

 

Read

Benfey, Christopher. "The Wonder-Wounded Harold Bloom." The New York Review of Books (October 8, 2015):36-37 ----review of Bloom's The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime

Pound, Scott.  "Kenneth Goldsmith and the Poetics of Information." PMLA 130.2 (2015): 315-330. Scott argues that "Goldsmith's indifference to literary culture yields a method for generating texts that is as instructive as it is shocking because it requires us to face the strange prospect of a literature that chooses information culture over literary culture as its ground" (Abstracts 528)

 

Probable Outcome

You might become post-intelligently  sublime and indifferent.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

October 2, 2015

evasion and digital humanities

Evasion and Digital Humanities

 

                The 2015 Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities forum "Peripheries, barriers, hierarchies: rethinking access, inclusivity, and infrastructure in global DH practice," September 24-26, generated productive, open-ended questions about the future of DH.  It also broadcast warnings we ought not ignore.  As a field, DH has expanded beyond easy definition;  the only consensus is that scholars and other cultural workers are using new technologies and methodologies to do academic and non-academic work.  It should be noted, however, that some  fear of the "political" seems to be widespread within the field, although I'd point out that DH is an integral part of polis or the body politic. It generates its own version of "politics" by accident and design.  In this sense, the word "inclusivity" in the thematic description of the forum embodies a crucial code.  People who are making inquiries about African American literature and culture ought to deal with the code as a fair warning.  It is a good reason to step back, slow down, and rethink what is progressive and regressive (i.e., neo-colonial) in an operative sense, a reason highlighted by the University of Kansas.

Amy Earhart's presentation "Take Back the Narrative: Rethinking the History of Diverse Digital Humanities" was directly relevant to the mission and vision of the Project on the History of Black Writing.  and her reference to the developing  Charles Chesnutt Archive directed us to a model of what should be done at various institutions for individual writers.  From a different angle, Amardeep Singh's discussion "The Archive Gap: the Digital Humanities and the Western Canon" mapped another path to be taken.  His blog on race, the canon, and digital humanities provides quite useful commentary on how barriers and hierarchies must be navigated in serious examination of black writing texts and contexts. These two presentations highlighted why performative frames do matter.

Jacqueline Wernimont's "Performing archives: sensitive data, social justice, and the performative frame. " was an excellent example of how caution must be exercised in using digital means to document "histories" that require us to face  the horrors and shame of the past.  Her use of digital technology to give us sonic and haptic representations of data suggested that good intentions can slip into forms of evasion. Decontextualized  sound and  touch can preclude confronting  what horrors were attached to eugenics and the forced modification of a person's reproductive organs. Had she not provided ample context about her project on documenting sterilization in California, we would have thought her use of sound and a string one could touch was an effort to create postmodern art rather than an effort to show maximum respect for the victims of sterilization. Consider how counter-productive it would be to allow digital paintings based on photographs of lynching to replace the photographic evidence of how a 1919 Ellisville, Mississippi lynching was advertised .  We should not condone evasions in DH that wear the mask of respect for victims or that aestheticize our visceral and rational analyses of what happened.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    September 29, 2015

PHBW BLOG

 

racial recognition

A Frisson of Racial Recognition

 

November 21, 2015 marks the fifth anniversary of my outlining the structure of READING RACE READING AMERICA, a project that began long ago under the title "Responsible Iconoclasms."  The book will have four parts:  I. Autobiofragments, II. Evidence of Things Once Seen, III. Exploding Language and Beautiful Minds, and IV. Pre-future Beginnings and a total of twenty-two essays.  Twelve of the essays have been completed, and eight of those have been published.  The book is still in-progress for many reasons.  My nation is so preoccupied with "race," the legacy of European irrationality, that writing about a subject I have lived with for seventy-two years is downright draining and dreadful.  How should daemonic arguments be segregated from emotive platitudes?  Writing about race is the great staple of American publishing.  Nevertheless, it is reasonable to ask whether the world needs one more book on the subject.  Where is the redeeming value of the terrible subject  located?

As I revisit the outline, the paradoxical  answer is nowhere and everywhere.  Perhaps I should continue the project once I have finished co-authoring WORDS AND BEING with Reginald Martin. A frisson of racial recognition encourages me to continue, because so-called white Americans know as much about their being people of color as a horse knows the date of its birth.  Like Oedipus, they have blinded themselves to see better, and the cruelest joke is that the majority of them  see nothing that evolved human beings would deem worth seeing.  READING RACE READING AMERICA should eventually be in print to remind them that blindness is a blessing from their God.  They are not the Chosen; they are the Yet-To-Be-Created,  promises from Walt Whitman, William James, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and James Baldwin notwithstanding. And my thankless task is to create the features of their faces.

The book requires no raison d'être, because the histories of lynching and systemic domestic terrorisms,  election and re-election of Barack Obama, a Kenyan American,  as our President, American government's repeated  authorizations of capitalist criminality, and the current spectacle of Donald Trump are necessary and sufficient contextual  justifications. The progressive decay of American democratic values deserves nothing less than the absurdity of existential laughter. READING RACE READING AMERICA will provide generous measures of such laughter.  The essays will cover the benign genocide implicit in America's racial contract, William Faulkner's protest fictions, the deceptive ends of American educations, the prototypical status of Hurricane Katrina narratives, the failure of American satire, and the sublime paradox of race.  It would be unpatriotic for me to deny my nation the feast it has labored since 1619 to purchase at a cosmic restaurant.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.     September 29, 2015

Innovations

Innovations

 

Three anthologies

Coval, Kevin, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall, eds. The BreakBeat  Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop.  Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn and Lauri Ramey, eds.  Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry.  Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006.

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn and Lauri Ramey, eds. What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015.

send us on a mission of tackling difficult w(hole)s by way of revisiting the frames established by Stephen Henderson ( Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, 1972) and  Eugene B.  Redmond (Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A Critical History, 1976).

Forty years ago, Henderson could assume that African Americans shared something in common regarding how they did something in language and listened to music, the language and the music being shaped by profound shared experiences of life in the United States of America ; Redmond could assume, quite legitimately, that a folk spirit hovered "over the whole of Afro-American literary and cultural life ---sometimes calling it to its tasks, other times providing it with just the needed lift and magic (16). Forty years later, the frames  ---mission, speech, music ---remain valid as abstractions. It is our use of the frames that has changed dramatically over time; our uses of these frames will always specify our allegiances both ideological and aesthetic.  How we deal with the concrete totality of poetry, or with the slippery labels we attach to its manifest fragments, throws violent light on what human beings do not assume  in common.  If poetry matters in 2015, it matters in concert with "@#life matters."

In the interim between 1976 and 2001, the first year of a new century, the positioning of new black poetry was admirably represented by

Powell, Kevin and Ras Baraka, eds. In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers. New York: Harlem River Press, 1992.

a Sankofa book, acknowledging fidelity to mission as well as inevitable change in speech and music. To be sure, one could find innovation in this anthology, but innovation was not its primal feature.  Historicized unity within diversity was the major concern.  A decade later, increased attention to the experimental as a mark of diversity and personal freedom  exploded.  More overt  attention to the individual talent and less to tradition seasoned  poetry in the performance spaces of page and stage.  New assumptions, quite unlike those of Henderson and Redmond, came into play.  Innovation assumed urgency in gestures to promote inclusion in the making of American poetry.

The question "What is innovation?" is not trivial, even if it is asked in our Age of Implacable Terrorisms, but the better question under such conditions is a forking one:  "How and why  does innovation occur?" Considered as parts of ongoing projects to discover what is "representative," Every Goodbye Ain't Gone and What I Say (two units of a whole)  complement The BreakBeat Poets.  At the same time, the three anthologies prompt our asking why the profound innovation of Asili Ya Nadhiri's "tonal drawings written in poetic form" is such an interesting absence.  Literature, especially poetry, is like light; it is at once wave and particles, artifact (what a poet creates)  and event (an unpredictable process involving materiality and sensation for a poet's audiences).  In order to be innovative, it is essential  that a work effect conceptual or epistemological difference rather than superficial visual or/and auditory difference. This is how innovation occurs.  Why do they occur?  Innovations happen because human beings abhor stasis, the boredom of aural or visual static. 

The absence of Nadhiri's  tonal drawings, and work by a few other poets who refuse to be properly unorthodox,   allows one to suspect that the counter-establishment also has tacit  rules of exclusion.  Even if that is not the case, the absence does serve to emphasize, yet once again,  that any anthology is a limited representation, a sampling that creates grounds for broader explorations.

 In the instance of What I Say, the  subtitle "  Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America" places the contributors in a national matrix, whereas  the subtitle "An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans" assigned to Every Goodbye Ain't Gone associates poets with genre, special interest groups among American poets,  and technique.  Thus, in 2006, Nielsen and Ramey justified their enterprise as "a break from the established disciplinary modes, a break from regnant pecking orders, and a breakthrough"( xxi)  for the period 1945 to approximately 1977. What is emphasized is both inter- and intra- dynamics of ignoring and excluding.  The justification for What I Say as a continuation of the original project  in 2015 is of quite a different order. "One of the crucial contributions of this volume, then," according to Nielsen and Ramey, "will be to provide a much broader context for understanding the poetic innovations  of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, permitting readers to map the independent routes by which various poets reached their particular modes of aesthetic experimentation "(xiv).  It is most strategic that they did not write the introduction about independent routes but gave that task to C. S. Giscombe, who fulfilled it with "Making Book: Winners, Losers, Poetry, Anthologies, and the Color Line," his 2007 MLA presentation for a panel on "Poetry, Race, Aesthetics."  I urge readers to scrutinize  Giscombe's introduction to discover what is currently the price of inclusion.

It is noteworthy that The BreakBeat Poets anthology represents a bolder taking of risks than does What I Say, primarily because it seems to return with maximum energy to the mapping of cultural utterances made in the Powell and Baraka anthology; one might have  discovered  follow-though mappings  in

Medina, Tony and Louis Reyes Rivera, eds. Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam.  New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

Medina, Tony, Samiya A. Bashir, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, eds. Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art.  Chicago: Third World Press, 2002.

Rivera, Louis Reyes and Bruce George, eds. The Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates.  Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2008.

Given that Douglas Kearney has work on pages 86-92 of What I Say and pages 117-126 of The BreakBeat Poets, it seems apparent that innovation as innovation simply ignores the artificial boundaries that literary discourses have not completely abandoned and re-valorizes William Melvin Kelley's message that Dunfords Travels Everywheres (1970).  One expects nothing more and nothing less from a book which represents "New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop."  Although neo-capitalism has co-opted and reductively "objectified"  many aspects of hip-hop, it has failed to eradicate the ancient collective spirit Eugene B. Redmond alluded to in Drumvoices or the referential power of speech and music Henderson evoked in Understanding the New Black Poetry.  The work collected in this anthology is nothing short of mind-blasting; it is an arsenal of aesthetic weaponry for the creation of new verbal and visual orders in this world.  It does not disappoint in effecting Kevin Coval's hope that the book is "a piece of the growing discourse on how art can be used to create a fresher world, a useful tool to further and extend and generate conversations in classrooms and ciphers, on the corner, in living rooms, in institutions, and in the renegade spaces young people carve out for themselves despite state control....This is a prayer book and a shank, concrete realism and abstracted futurism" (xxii).

Through the conduit of innovations, ashé complements amen!  If poetry matters in 2015, it matters in concert with "@#life matters."

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

September 22, 2015