requiem for human dreams

Requiem for Human Dreams

"Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved."  This sentence from W. E. B. DuBois's article "A Negro Nation Within the Nation," Current History 42( 1935 ): 265-270 has been quoted by Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016).  DuBois's assertion sounds in 2016 like a lament from a person in ideological pain, and there can be no doubt that Kendi quoted DuBois to remind us of the implacable and always changing conditions of human existence.  There are indigenous nations still within the United States of America, but we who have no membership in those nations  remain ignorant of them by choice.  Perhaps, the ignorance is more a reflex action than a rational choice, an unconscious motion of marking the authenticity of being an American.  Such ignorance and indifference, or selectivity in our commerce with facts, is not innately necessary or sufficient, a part of unadulterated biological functioning. It is a part of social and cultural engineering.   No doubt we remain unmoved by knowing this fact, because the excruciating pain of being an American paralyzes common sense as well as the qualities of charity, hope, and faith which manifest themselves in most of the religions of this world.

Stamped from the Beginning, like any book,  may only awaken a few dozen Americans and disturb the bliss of ignorance.  Nevertheless, Kendi's book may awaken a handful of Americans to recognize what such widely discussed books as Kevin Powell's The Education of Kevin Powell, Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow,  and Ta'Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me and such infrequently discussed books as Dennis de Rougemont's The Devil's Share, Sam Greenlee's Baghdad Blues,  Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America and Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd work toward by indirection: the abject cognitive  poverty of sentences in which the word "race" is the subject.  There can be no doubt that  Americans  remain indifferent and unmoved by arguments in Charles W. Mills's The Racial Contract, arguments that are as crucial as the fictions about terrorism which circulate internationally.

As an irreversible new ordering of the world descends upon us , cognitive poverty ascends.  In 2016, Americans and other human beings  know only two facts: (1) Nothing is neither true nor false, because it is nothing and (2) Everything is either true or false, because it is everything.  Know that these magic propositions ordain a requiem for human dreams.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 18, 2016

Poems by John A. Williams

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Poems by John A. Williams

It is common to identify a writer with a single genre --- W. E. B. DuBois with nonfiction, Toni Cade Bambara  with fiction, and August Wilson with drama, failing to remember that accomplished writers do not live in one penthouse or prison cell.  They, like non-writers,  explore, undertake  imaginary and real expeditions.  It is common to recognize that John A. Williams (1925-2015) wrote The Man Who Cried I Am, but quite out of the ordinary to know that he published Safari West: Poems (Montreal: Hochelaga Press, 1998), which won the American Book Award in the same year.  It is as uncommon to identify him as a poet as it is to identify Charles Johnson as a visual artist.

For readers in my generation, reading the forty-five poems in Safari West can be a rewarding exercise in discovery and renewal, in noting relocations of long-term dislocations.  One of the earliest poems "The Age of Bop" (1953) takes us back to the territory of attitude, innovation, and music associated with post-WWII events and the thematic  adventures of searching in Western worlds.  According to Williams,

Bustling Bop in retreat from Baroque

Finds it own answer, free from the yoke. (36)

Being "free from the yoke," however, is an ephemeral condition, because as Williams challenges the proposition in one stanza of  "Nat Turner's Profession" (1995)

All men whom others hold in bond

must one day know a time is near,

when they will meet their Babylon

in those with little left to fear. (19)

This irregular ballad stanza of thirty-two syllables gives voice to a promise that crashes into a Rococo delusion, a bourgeoisie entrapment that, in the language of Sterling D. Plumpp, is ornate with smoke. Reading Safari West is ultimately refreshing in its affirmation that as a poet, journalist, novelist, cultural critic, and witness of time, John A. Williams brought relentless common sense and clarity to the existential dimensions of being.  He really nailed wisdom in the brevity of "In Private" (1972) -----

Knowledgeable of myths

we create our own

seeking truth halfway. (47)

Safari West brings reality back to the promiscuous assignations we insist on having with poetry.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 13, 2016

political pornography

Political Pornography

A few decades ago in the Black South, it was not uncommon for black women who did domestic work to speak of "our white folks" as if they actually owned those people.  Such womanist talk involved subtle, racial codes.  It was easy to misinterpret what they were saying, to think they were speaking in terms of affection and intimacy about members of the family.  Their observations were based on proximity rather than endearment.  Love was not a part of the conversation.  When it is alleged that Donald Trump said "look at my African American,"  is it  reasonable to think he was talking like a domestic worker?  Hell, no.  His utterance was informed by the codes of the slave auction not those of the kitchen. "Donald, did you buy the dude at a discount?"

Unfortunately, we seem to lack reliable conservative voices to explain what Trump is saying about the opening of the American mind.  There is dead silence when it comes to discriminating between what Trump is selling and what Allan Bloom tried to market in The Closing of the American Mind (1987).  Yes, the neoliberal voices babble endlessly about Trump, but the attention they give him is informed by perverse blindness.  They seem not to see what Ralph Ellison inscribed about politics and the sociology of race in his beloved novel Invisible Man (1952), especially in the battle royal episode.  Those who are not visually challenged seem to have taken a vow of silence.  It is unfortunate that William Bennett, once one of the more important white conservative voices in America, loss his moral compass and can now say nothing that has credibility.

If you have read Invisible Man, you may recall that in the battle royal episode, "the most important men of the town" ---"bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants…[e]ven one of the more fashionable pastors" were enthralled by "a magnificent blonde  --stark naked, "  a sex object who danced "a slow sensuous movement." The representative male citizens salivate, gazing upon her body "where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V."  Trump is not a character in fiction, but he slobbers with alacrity in the presence of an immaculate, fictional symbol of the United States of America.

Our current political story is more gender-bent and intriguing than the one Ellison's narrator told.  As the great white Republican hope, Donald Trump is the narrative voice of the visible man poised to engaged in a bloodless battle royal with the visible woman, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic champion.  Perhaps as we move toward Election Day, American voters will confess that politics can be kinky, sublimely vulgar, and erotic.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 11, 2016

a speaking novel unspoken

A Speaking Novel Unspoken

"If you don't like the novel," LBJ told me, "you oughtn't write about it."

LBJ has a generous heart and a Harlem Renaissance mindset.  We have to protect writers who get published in the right places.  Cast no shadow on their achievements.  Would you allow a single negative comment to throw an entire ethnic group into a ditch?

LBJ said I should not write about the novel that I happen not to like.  He didn't say I should not write around the novel.

I do not especially like novels where each paragraph is a cinderblock, related only to other cinderblocks by virtue of proximity.  The novel doesn't lack intelligence and design.  It lacks the fire I expect to find in an upper middle class confessional.  It gives me as much pleasure as an annotated telephone book.

I did find one thing to like in the novel.  The reverse revenant of a narrator mentions Sissiretta Jones.  Like Paul Laurence Dunbar's Malindy, Miss Jones could sing.  The late Ja Jahannes knew that when he wrote a play about Sissiretta Jones.  As far as divas go, she was a diva's diva.  It pleased me that the narrator rescued a jewel from the barnyard.

"O.K., LBJ.  I did not write about the novel."

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            May 20, 2016

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Note for two writers

A NOTE FOR TWO WRITERS

                After our conversations earlier this week, I recall that once the exchange of letters helped to sustain friendships.  The absence of hand-written  letters doesn't make a friendship less genuine.  It simply leaves a friendship bereft of ritual, the art of penmanship,  imagination with a feeling. The latter was most important when letters were in vogue.

                By accident, I found several instances of creative sparkle in some letters Hart Crane wrote in the 1920s to people I assume were his friends or close acquaintances.  In a letter to Harriet Monroe,  justifying phrases in his poem "At Melville's Tomb,"  Crane made well-designed comments on the reader and metaphor: "The reader's sensibility simply responds by identifying this inflection of experience [ Crane referred to inflection of language] with some event in his own history or perceptions  --  or rejects it altogether.  The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology."  Crane had the common sense that many young and not-so-young  makers of popular culture  often lack; he knew the operations of writing and reading are not democratic or universal but constrained by time , culture, and humbling knowledge of tradition.

How can one write, and expect to gain approval,  if one is dismissive of a tradition of extending and/or challenging?  When I consider that some third-class work earns top dollar, I realize the question is lame.

We older writers can only suggest to those who come to us for advice that standards, values, and discipline do matter.  Many of them have obese egos. They  over-rate their skills and talents.  Many of them are not brave enough to risk getting a rejection slip.  So be it.  If they do well in the world with  work that repeats what they don't know has already been done and  that appeals to the sensibilities of people who don't give a damn about inflection of language, so be it.  I don't want to block their success.   Why do they bother to ask for our approval?

Finding Crane's poem "Black Tambourine" in the same paperback with his selected letters was also a fortunate accident.  He did not ask Jean Toomer's approval to borrow images and metaphors from Cane in the first stanza:

The interests of a black man in a cellar

Mark tardy judgment on the world's closed door.

Gnats toss in the shadow of a bottle,

And a roach spans a crevice in the floor.

Likewise, I'll not seek the approval of Hart Crane's ghost when I write about the evil of a white man on a screen,  about a carpenter known as Z-Mann  Zimmerman.  Perhaps we are asked for approval  because we know what a letter can mean and have the skills to steal as effectively as William Shakespeare.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 19, 2016

Death and Fame

DEATH AND FAME

Being deliberately out of touch with much that is trendy and fashionable in the world of 2016, I am not impressed with outpourings of grief each time a person who has accomplished something dies.  Did you know the person as more than a name in a newspaper or magazine or a reproduction on a television or cinema screen?  Did you have meaningful conversations with the person?  Did you have a meal, drinks, tea or coffee, laughter or tears with the person as the two of you discussed issues of mutual interest?  Was the person your teacher or mentor?   Did you exchange correspondence ( letters/emails) which was personal rather than just professional?  Did you publish constructive criticism of the person's work?  If the person was a fellow writer, did you review the person's  book (s)  or an isolated work that gave you insights about genius, craft, wisdom or just plain common sense? Did you try to help that person get a job or a fellowship by writing recommendations?  Did you publish the person in a magazine or an anthology  that you edited?  Did you explain, first to yourself and then to the person, why her or his artistry or argumentation is more than a throwaway item in cultural, social, or intellectual histories?

If you can't say "yes" to most of these questions (and to others I've not itemized), I suspect your grief is not genuine.  I suspect you are an opportunist, lacking a judicious measure of respect or honesty or humanity.  I am so old-fashioned, old school, or downright antiquated in my navigation of feelings as to believe you should share the esteem you have for people when they can see, hear or read it.  In some instances the expression of regard is quite private and remains forever unknown by a public.  That's cool.  It is more important that the person knows where the regard is coming from.  After the person is dead, cremated or buried, your weeping or your wording of grief contributes nothing to the person's happiness or spiritual balance.  Your chatter  is an ephemeral gesture of  self-serving desire.  It is merely your ego calling  attention to itself. Publishing well-researched, thoughtful critical assessments of a dead person's achievements and legacy to humankind is quite a different matter.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 13, 2016

The Kwansaba

Discovery and Discipline in East St. Louis

To obtain an informed  view of what is happening in American poetry and poetics, you have to do a lot of work.  One task is to attend to matters of discovery and discipline in East St. Louis and the directions traced in

Roy, Darlene. Afrosynthesis: A Feast of Poetry & Folklore.  East St. Louis: Kuumba Scribes Press, 2015.

Roy, a co-founder of the Eugene B. Redmond Writers Club,  has compiled a guidebook to the kind of African American experimentation and lore which is seldom mentioned in such  critical discourses on the status of our literature as the anthology What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey.  Roy's book is evidence that our literary culture is vast , always contributing the American  historical narrative which is myopic and unfinished.  The yearly "Da-Dum-Dun" gatherings that pay homage to Miles Dewey Davis, Henry Dumas, and Katherine Dunham enliven triple consciousness regarding sound, words, and motion, but that consciousness can only be transmitted by such a creative document as Afrosynthesis, which allows us to discover the rewarding discipline of the kwansaba,  a fixed poetic form that originated in East St. Louis.

"The kwansaba," Roy explains , "is a form composed of seven lines of poetry, each of which has seven words, with each word containing no more than seven letters.  It was developed by Eugene B. Redmond and refined in an EBRWC summer workshop in 1995" (60).  The forty-three  kwansabas  in Afrosynthesis, which are prefaced by free flowing poems, blues, toasts, haikus and tankas  ---preparatory works for dealing with the challenges of the kwansaba, illuminate how to both conform to and depart from the strict rules.  In "Appendix: Guidelines to Writing Effective Kwansabas" (60-61), Roy enumerates permissible exceptions to the rule of seven and suggests using alliteration, assonance, neologisms, and onomatopoeia to maximize variety.

 It is pleasant to discover from careful readings of Roy's kwansabas how discipline within a tradition inspires remarkable innovations  ---re-w(rapping), for example, of consciousness into conch-us-nests.  Through the dedicated play with language and form, Roy teaches us how shape historical clues about the April 1, 1865 founding of East St. Louis or the July 2, 1917 race riot (a prism for Ferguson, August 9, 2014); craft  praise poems for Mrs. Ezora Gertrude Woodard Duncan, Josephine Baker, Barack Hussein Obama,  Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe;  remix Paul Laurence Dunbar's phonetics with the humor of Langston Hughes.  Ultimately, Roy teaches us that the discipline demanded by fixed poetic forms begets stronger authenticity and encourages sustained meditation on the conditions of now.  Ah, yes. Afrosynthesis gives us proof that innovation in a nest of complex African American imperatives  is a beautiful thing in need-plagued time.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 11, 2016