Jesmyn Ward's Memoir

Jesmyn Ward’s Mississippi Memoir

Had Jesmyn Ward been raised elsewhere than DeLisle, Mississippi, she might still have written a memoir infused with dread.  A writer’s temperament, contrary to popularized beliefs, is only partially shaped by environment, and much of what she deems crucial or he decides is stylistically purposeful lies hidden in genetic histories.  But Ward was raised on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast in a family whose genetic profile is New World ---African, European, and indigenous.  In twentieth-century Mississippi (and rest of the South), such a profile can only be Black or White, because Southerners pretend to be ignorant of nuances of mental color and world authorities on skin colour.  Thus, in Men We Reap (2013), Ward writes a story capable of inducing pre-future catharsis.  Her bite-the-bullet prose and brutally honest presentation of self precludes any consolation of tears.  Neither complicit guilt nor deceptive hope results from reading Men We Reap. What one does gain is a cold, sub-zero perspective on what life offers a certain class of African Americans in the South and what it withholds from them. Ward writes well.  Her gift is the agony of dread, the best anodyne for the contemporary human condition.

Ward’s memoir brings a crucial difference to the writing of Mississippi life history and the writing about the deaths of young Black males, because it seems her sensibility is more at home in the superhighway of rap than on the dusty roads of the blues.  In Men We Reap one does not find the defiance of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, the womanist testimonials of Anne Moody’s classic Coming of Age in Mississippi and Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s From the Mississippi Delta, the sweetness and light of Clifton Taulbert’s Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, or the photograph-inspired quest for resolution in Natasha Trethewey’s Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  Ward does incorporate some recognizable blues strategies in her writing, but they are a far cry from the negotiations with reality to be heard in the voice of Koko Taylor or in the blues poems of Sterling D. Plumpp. Ward is brave enough to endow her writing with the amorality of Nature itself.

Ward prepares her readers well for a season in dread in the “Prologue.” She is very clear about her objective:

My hope is that learning something about our lives and the lives of the people in my community will mean that when I get to the heart, when my marches forward through the past and backward from the present meet in the middle with my brother’s death, I’ll understand a bit better why this epidemic happened, about how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread here.  Hopefully, I’ll understand why my brother died while I live, and why I’ve been saddled with this rotten fucking story” (8).

Readers learn what she has learned, and they are stronger for this education in writing.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

March 4, 2014

Honoree Fannone Jeffers

Library of Congress

101 Independence Ave. SE

Washington DC 20540

March 4, 2014

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Poet Laureate Selects 2014 Witter Bynner Fellows,

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Jake Adam York

The 19th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, Natasha

Trethewey, has selected poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers as the recipient of a

Witter Bynner Fellowship and has named poet Jake Adam York posthumously as a

fellow.

Trethewey will introduce a program celebrating the fellows at 6:30 p.m. on

Wednesday, March 26, in the Montpelier Room on the sixth floor of the James

Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20540. The

event is free and open to the public. No tickets are needed.

Jeffers will read her poetry, and Trethewey will read the work of York, who died

in December 2012.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, “These fellowships—to poets

whose distinctive talents and craftsmanship merit wider recognition—provide a

wonderful way for the Laureate, the Library and the [Witter Bynner] Foundation

to encourage poets and poetry.”

Commenting on her selections, Trethewey said Jeffers and York “are two American

poets whose work deserves a wider audience.”

Jeffers will receive a $10,000 fellowship. This is the 17th year that the

fellowship has been awarded.

Jeffers is the author of three books of poems, including “Red Clay Suite”

(2007), “Outlandish Blues” (2003) and “The Gospel of Barbecue”(2000). Her

other honors include the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry for her first

book and the 2002 Julia Peterkin Award for Poetry, as well as awards from the

Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Rona Jaffe Foundation and fellowships from

the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the

MacDowell Colony and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. A founding member of

Cave Canem, the writer’s colony for African-American poets, Jeffers teaches at

the University of Oklahoma, where she is associate professor of English and

creative-writing coordinator.

York was the author of four books of poems, including his forthcoming book

“Abide” (2014), as well as “Persons Unknown” (2010), “A Murmuration of

Starlings” (2008) and “Murder Ballads” (2005). He also published a book of

literary history, “The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech

in American Poetry” (2005). A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts

Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry, York also received the 2005 Elixir Prize

in Poetry for his first book, the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry for his

second book, and the 2010 Third Coast Poetry Prize for his poem“Before Knowing

Remembers.” Founder of the online literary journal storySouth, as well as the

online journal Thicket, York was a contributing editor for the literary journal

Shenandoah.

The Witter Bynner fellowships support the writing of poetry. Only two things

are asked of the fellows: that they organize a reading in their hometowns and

participate in reading and recording sessions at the Library of Congress.

Applications are not taken for the fellowships; the Poet Laureate makes the

selection.

The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry was incorporated in 1972 in New Mexico

to provide grant support for programs through non-profit organizations. Witter

Bynner was an influential early-20th century poet and translator of the Chinese

Classic “Tao Te Ching,” which he named “The Way of Life According to Laotzu.” He

travelled with D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence and proposed to Edna St.

Vincent Millay (she accepted, but then they changed their minds). He worked at

McClure’s Magazine, where he published A.E. Housman for the first time in the

United States, and was one of O. Henry’s early fans.

Previous Witter Bynner fellows include Carol Muske-Dukes and Carl Phillips

(1998), David Gewanter, Heather McHugh and Campbell McGrath (1999), and Naomi

Shihab Nye and Joshua Weiner (2000), all appointed by Robert Pinsky; the late

Tory Dent and Nick Flynn (2001), appointed by Stanley Kunitz; George Bilgere and

Katia Kapovich (2002), and Major Jackson and Rebecca Wee (2003), appointed by

Billy Collins; Dana Levin and Spencer Reece (2004), appointed by Louise Gluck;

Claudia Emerson and Martin Walls (2005), and Joseph Stroud and Connie Wanek

(2006), appointed by Ted Kooser; Laurie Lamon and David Tucker (2007), appointed

by Donald Hall; Matthew Thorburn and Monica Youn (2008), appointed by Charles

Simic; and Christina Davis and Mary Szybist (2009) and Jill McDonough and Atsuro

Riley (2010), appointed by Kay Ryan; Forrest Gander and Robert Bringhurst

(2011), appointed by W.S. Merwin; L. S. Asekoff and Sheila Black (2012)

appointed by Philip Levine; and Sharon Dolin and Shara McCallum (2013) appointed

by Natasha Trethewey during her first term.

The Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress fosters and enhances

the public’s appreciation of literature. The center administers the endowed

poetry chair (the U.S. Poet Laureate), and coordinates an annual literary season

of poetry, fiction and drama readings, performances, lectures and symposia,

sponsored by the Library’s Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund

and the Huntington Fund. For more information, visit www.loc.gov/poetry/<http://LOCPR.pr-optout.com/Tracking.aspx?Data=HHL%3d%3e%2c30%3e%26JDG%3c%3c9%40!OHL%3d8%2b62&RE=MC&RI=4441818&Preview=False&DistributionActionID=33335&Action=Follow+Link>.

The Library of Congress, the nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and

the largest library in the world, holds more than 158 million items in various

languages, disciplines and formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and

the nation both on-site in its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its

award-winning website at www.loc.gov<http://LOCPR.pr-optout.com/Tracking.aspx?Data=HHL%3d%3e%2c30%3e%26JDG%3c%3c9%40!OHL%3d8%2b62&RE=MC&RI=4441818&Preview=False&DistributionActionID=33334&Action=Follow+Link>.

River Poem

THIS MISSISSIPPI RIVER IS

 

A luminous conversation

Without an alphabet

 

Pregnant with snowflakes

A billion years

 

Coded visions

The blind see

 

Icy serpentine curves

On highway oblivion

 

Cast broadly ironic condolences

For the quick, the quaking awakening

The living for the double-dared absolute

 

We must be still until our bodies accept

 The emotion of water.  Only then can our minds

 Grant water permission to speak.

 

Gates, dams, locks, spilling ways

Shadows to be ignored

 

Darkness of darkness

So logical it shines

 

Water enters before a man enters water,

Rides an ark of bones in a space which never heard of time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Conversation with W. E. B. DuBois

Drinking Hemlock with DuBois

 

A few hours ago, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois and I had a fatal conversation.

 

The only reason he condescended to talk with me was our being members of the same fraternity.  We sipped hemlock and talked about higher education.  I had an interest in revisiting an old critique, namely “The Future and Function of the Private Negro College.” Crisis 53 (1946): 234-46, 253-54. Portions of the article are apt descriptions of 2014.

 

“You were merely three years old,” Dr. DuBois said, “when I published that article.”  Removing his glasses, he scanned my face. “I am much disappointed that your contemporaries are so dense in your understanding of double consciousness, for you confuse a rhetorical gesture with a statement of reality. I am disappointed that you are incapable of distinguishing a spatial description from a temporal one.  The same poverty of reason colors your unscientific apologizing for the twenty-first-century HBCU, as you call it.  You need instruction.”  Like a buck startled by the headlights of an automobile, I felt paralyzed. Dr. DuBois carefully turned pages in The Education of Black People, 2^nd edition, 2001.

 

“It is reasonable that you should think my sentence

 

Today the private institutions are facing the fact that unless they receive increased contributions, not now in sight, and these funds reach large figures, they must either close or become fully state schools (182).

 

refers to 2014.”  He commenced to quoting his bullet points:

 

·         “,,,endowments are not eternal and can only be depended upon for relatively short periods”(184)

·         “…are these institutions worth saving?” (185)

·         “…is their fate either to become state schools or disappear?” (185)

·         “There would certainly seem to be a distinct place in the educational world for some private institutions whose support is such that they would be free to teach what they thought ought  to be taught, particularly in the critical and developing field of social investigations” (186).

·         “In their haste to become Americans, their desire not be peculiar or segregated in mind or body, they try to escape their cultural heritage and the body of experience why they themselves have built up” (187).

 

Before I could ask whether he was alluding to Langston Hughes, he said with great emphasis, “I am convinced that there is a place and a continuing function for the small Negro college” (187).

 

I swallowed two sips of hemlock. “But, Dr. DuBois…”  Ignoring my effort to speak, he read in a loud voice “They would not be subservient to the dominant wealth of the country; they would not be under the control of politics in a state now directed for the most part by prejudiced persons guide by a definite ideal of racial discrimination” (188).

 

“But, Dr. DuBois, the small HBCUs and small institutions in general are enslaved by global economy and special interests, and so too are large, handsomely endowed, research institutions.”

 

“You do not listen critically,” his words of genteel anger descending like a veil over my eyes. “I am convinced there is a continuing function for the five small HBCUs that shall survive the twenty-first century.” Stoned by the hemlock, I saw he was saying something of great importance but could not hear what he was saying.  Such is the effect of talented treason.

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

February 25, 2014

An Unholy Trinity

An Unholy Trinity

 

Writing,   literature, “literature.”  Everyone who has print literacy skills can produce writing.  The more creative try their hands at crafting literature.  The most ambitious and creative agonize to create “literature,” a prime candidate for disdain or praise. At any given time, these acts of representing may diverge, intersect, or overlap.

Many of us are conditioned to worship “literature,” to sneer at literature, to treat writing as a tool beneath the dignity of careful attention.  The conditioning is necessary for us to have civilization, a relatively successful repression of the choices and free will we would have to endure in a state of amoral nature.  The citizens in the United States who truly worship “literature” are few in number, because worship is a dreadful luxury indivisible from aesthetic constipation, and we tend to be a practical, pragmatic, and anti-intellectual people. The majority of us opt for a more democratic use of writing. Writing serves the ends of “progressive” science and technology and commerce.  It gets things done. It produces less stress than either “literature” or literature. It demands less use of cognition and critical thought. As manufacturers of propaganda know only too well, writing or its oral equivalent is a most powerful tool for achieving motives of all kinds. Few of us have the courage to acknowledge that writing, literature, and “literature” have hastened our transforming ourselves into post-whatever critters in the fist of an absent god.  Seldom is what you read what you get.

American literature serves as a buffer zone between the strident operations of “literature” and writing.  Literature is not innocent, because it possesses a full range of motives that can be as transparent, muddled, or hidden as those of “literature” and writing.  It should be obvious that I am not addressing American literature as a body of work that gets canonized and studied with lip-service within academic institutions.  I am speaking of an ever expanding body of work that is actually used in our society ---advertising, throwaway fictions and enthralling non-fictions, mass media, scribbling in social networks, schemes to fleece the unthinking and weak-minded of hard-earned money, discourses that satisfy prurient desires and assure us that hope and faith, however invisible, do spring eternal. I should amuse us that the cultural mobility involved in American literature’s becoming American “literature” is fickle. Why are Stephen King’s passionate explorations in the bloody heartland of the America mind not works of “literature?”

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

February 15, 2014

Brenda Marie Osbey in Her Own Words

This interview confirms my belief that Osbey has the authority to guide us in the process of becoming enlightened by the profound structures of existence.

Arts & Culture

Brenda Marie Osbey: ‘At the root of the human tongue’

Visiting professor Brenda Marie Osbey operates at the intersection between poetry and history

By Emmajean Holley
Senior Staff Writer

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

• 

Courtesy of Brown University

Brenda Marie Osbey has taught AFRI 1620: “Modernist Africana Poetry of the Americas” and AFRI 1630: “Black New Orleans: A Research Seminar.”

Brenda Marie Osbey, distinguished visiting professor of Africana studies, has penned multiple volumes of poetry and prose, including “History and Other Poems” and “All Saints: New and Selected Poems.” In addition to receiving numerous awards and honors, Osbey was selected as poet laureate of Louisiana in 2005. Her work explores the cultural forces that shaped precolonial and colonial history in the Americas, especially in her native city of New Orleans. Osbey spoke with The Herald about the importance of confronting history and poetry’s power to illuminate the voices of the past.

Herald: You grew up in New Orleans, a city with a history of deep cultural pride and resilience, and I was wondering how this might have informed the vibrancy and sense of identity in your own works.
Osbey: Well, my family actually goes back to slavery and freedom here. We’ve been here since 1719, so this is the deepest history that I know. It’s everything I know, everything I have, and it’s the root of all things for me.

Herald: I’m sure you’re well aware that Brown’s founders and early benefactors were very much entwined with the slave trade. Conversely, Rhode Island prides itself on its history of religious freedom. How do you approach this unsettling contradiction, including its present-day implications?
Osbey: It isn’t that different from the rest of this nation’s history with slavery. The primary difference seems to be that in recent years at least, Brown has taken a very strong interest in the history of the slave trade in Rhode Island. That, I think, is somewhat unique. Other institutions have begun to do that, but it seems to me that Brown was among the first to look at the history of its own institution in the making and framing of slavery and the American slave trade.
Brown has a network of libraries that is absolutely fantastic. If you don’t avail yourself of the library resources that Brown University has, you’re doing yourself a great disservice. And in fact, if you’re particularly interested in poetry, Brown has one of the best poetry collections in the nation. I first used Brown’s American poetry collection back in the 1980s.

Herald: Your poems create a sort of running dialogue with the past by using snippets of voices and songs, which seem to traverse the gaps of time and space that often alienate history from modernity. Do you feel your readers need to already know the historical background of your poetry to fully appreciate it?
Osbey: I don’t know that you need that background, but frankly, we’re living in a society where there is not so great an appreciation of history. For instance, the extent to which people in my grandparents’ generation knew and understood history — we don’t have that kind of broad, general, overreaching public concept of history anymore. But that’s why every poem in my book “All Saints,” except for the first one, has a glossary. The glossary includes not just terminology, but historical information — dates, times, places — in addition to perhaps obscure allusions to strange myths, to literature, to geography and so forth.
I think that people who read poetry on a regular basis have a particular kind of sense of language to begin with. People who don’t traditionally read poetry frequently bring to it a fresher, cleaner perspective. At the beginning of classes, I always ask where my history and political science majors are. Because they understand work in the context of time and history and social development, those students are very good at keeping everybody else grounded. English majors, literary arts majors, people who are interested in literary criticism and so forth, frequently ignore those shaping forces, the forces of time and social movements. They jump straight into language with a certain sense that each work is a discrete item in and of itself — which is true, of course, but it’s also true that each work is related to other works and each author is related to other authors and no one’s really right in seclusion and total solitude.

Herald: I agree that a lot of people can be intimidated by history. One example that immediately comes to mind is the summer reading for the class of 2016, which was a history book by Charles Rappleye.
Osbey: Oh, “Sons of Providence”?

Herald: Yes. And apparently almost no one read the whole thing. It was dry. But one thing about your poetry is that it is heavily researched, but it also has a sense of humanity and an almost Wordsworthian emotional urgency. The factual element is obviously important for context, but what role do you feel the intensity of poetry plays in molding research into something that feels more real than, say, “Sons of Providence”?
Osbey: That’s a very big one for me. I count myself among a number of poets in the African-American narrative tradition that looks at history and posits itself — that is, the work — as having what I like to call a “problem with history.” This history is the thing that drives the work that I do and any poem for me usually begins with a kind of problem with history.
But I think that just as we often think that history is dry, cold, hard facts that are unrelated to us, we often have a tendency to think that poetry is meaningless language that has nothing to do with real life. The work that I’m doing, and the work that many Africana poets are doing, is at that juncture of lived experience. And so sometimes when I’m researching and going through these original archival documents, the documents themselves have a kind of power of language in their own right.
In the poetry of the late, great Robert Hayden, for instance, in the famous poem “Middle Passage” — it’s because of that poem, by the way, that we use the term “middle passage” to mean all the things we use it to mean. It referred to a specific point in the transatlantic slave trade. It was a geographical and navigational and maritime term and nothing more. We use it now to mean all of the experiences of those captured Africans because of Robert Hayden’s poem “Middle Passage.” In that poem, what Robert Hayden does is he quotes the ship’s log of actual slave ships. So in that poem, we never hear the voices of the captured Africans. We only hear the voices of the white ship’s crew, the captains, the slavers. And when we hear the quoted passages from the ship’s log, from the captain’s diary, the rhetoric, the court testimonies in the Amistad case, for instance — what he does in that poem is he allows the slavers and traders and dealers to condemn themselves in their own words, in their own language. And all of the passages he uses are in fact from the historical documents themselves.
For lack of a better term, we like to talk about the magic of language, and I think it helps to create a certain kind of rhythm, a certain kind of harmony. One of the issues that’s important to keep in mind about poetry is that there must always be that musicality, and one of the best ways I think to achieve that is to look at the harmonics of poetry, not to focus simply on the lyricism. The long narrative poem allows the poet to address the harmonics of poetry and of language — all of that juicy stuff at the root of the human tongue.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

A Warrant for Doubt

Another Warrant for Profound Doubt

 

It is irrational to think the first-degree murder trial of Michael Dunn is merely another episode in a “STAND YOUR GROUND” reality series.  The subject matter of the trial is too painfully vile to be dismissed as just an accidental probability in what we shall be obligated eventually to call “global death-planning.”  Once the trial is concluded, regardless of the verdict, we shall have to locate it in relation to violence (especially male on male violence) as a primal American virtue.  American virtues, of course, are universal.  Ultimately, we shall find ourselves locating or mapping the negative fourth-dimensionality of the twenty-first century.  Despite the juridical necessity to avoid contempt for Florida law, the distorting filters of mass media and social networks sharpen our intuitions about Dunn’s intent from angles of critical race theory.  The trial of Michael Dunn serves as yet another warrant for profound doubt about the efficacy of American justice.  Like the trial and exoneration of George Zimmerman, the Dunn trial tempts us to inscribe permanent disdain for theories of justice as they manifest themselves in the worlds we inhabit.

Our ground for such disdain is predicated on a “reasonable inference rule” and on unambiguous historical evidence of white male recuperation of a bogus entitlement to murder non-white males.  It is on this ground that I stand and remark that we have a capital insult to intelligence in the fact that Mark O’Mara, George Zimmerman’s defense attorney, should provide expert analysis of the Dunn trial.  If the construct of justice were more than a figment of legal theory, O’Mara would have the professional decency to recuse himself. But decency is rare in the public sphere.

From an unchartered sector of consciousness, I hear the ghost screams of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin and twenty plus victims of the Atlanta Child Murders which occurred between 1979 and 1981. It is the bane of long memory that a few of us are condemned to hear in the unfinished song of crime and punishment in the United States, in the unfinished ancient opera of global violence. I have begun to think that the blatant acts of Michael Dunn, George Zimmerman, and other males who perform under the color of standing ground belong to the devil’s cut in the Book of Job.

It seems to be something other than a coincidence that Dunn’s trial unfolds during Black History Month. From the vantage of legal narrative, it seems to be a kind of anthropological reality-testing and rejection of myths of American progress authored by the State of Florida.  Common African American sense bids me to leave conclusions to a future where truth might be verified without prejudice.  But my male humanity tempts me to imagine that a few good men might join Nathaniel Turner and his comrades in sending a message to give eyesight to the color- and otherwise-blind citizens of our troubled and troubling nation. I hasten to assure the National Security Agency that my dream of revenge is an act of fiction.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.       February 10, 2014