epiphany at Crabby Jack's


Epiphany at Crabby Jack's



The question about the poem was legitimate and aesthetic in the sense of what is always aesthetic outside of the philosophy of art;  the answer was judicious and aesthetic in the context of American race-drenched conversations.  The poem, Clint Smith's "Counterfactual" -----Counting Descent (Los Angeles: Write Bloody Publishing, 2016), page 25 ---illuminates the aboriginal darkness that ensures the racial question shall never transcend its history in the United States of America.



The psychiatrist, Counting Descent in hand, obviously aware of his New Orleans whiteness, remarked that he found the poem to be sensitive.  He asked Clint Smith's father to explain the provenance of the poem, to explain how Clint Smith overcame the fear affirmed by his father's having "the talk" with him and deriding him "for being so naïve" and telling him he



"…couldn't be out here

 acting the same as these white boys----

can't be pretending to shoot guns

    can't be running in the dark

can't be hiding behind anything

    other than your own teeth."



A patient man, a lawyer, Clint Smith's father contextualized the genesis of the poem, detailing how the counterfactual emerged from his expert knowledge of racism and its consequences.  The question obligated him to teach the psychiatrist in the guise of providing biographical information for the sake of literary history.  Crabby Jack's became a classroom.



What ultimately came to the surface was why white aesthetic questions too often fail to deal with the implications of themselves and betray the integral dangers they pose for everyone.  After Clint Smith's father provided an excellent answer, I tapped a fellow poet on his arm and said: "  I am so weary of the obvious.   Do you think the psychiatrist is now prepared to confront his Tribe of Trump male kinfolk with their insensitivity  in failing to have 'the talk' with their sons, in failing to humanize their sons with devastating knowledge about perpetual American racism?"   The smile on the face of my fellow poet told me the answer is "No."



A poem such as "Counterfactual" is a very powerful aesthetic document.  It is enshrined in America's literary history to remind us what is beyond resolution or  transcendence in our fragmented nation.



Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            October 12, 2017

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

reading notes for September 23, 2019

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement,"
Read more

CLA paper

CLA,   April 6, 2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW:   Negotiating the Ideas of Seven Writers [1]                 Founded in 1983 by Dr. Maryemma Graham, "The Afro-American Novel Project" (AANP) had the initial goal of identifying all published novels written by African Americans from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century.   AANP became The Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) in 1990 to reflect an enlarged vision and a more ambitious aim.   PHBW want to make a substantial contribution to what we then spoke of as our "Profession" by organizing bibliographic information and databases, sponsoring institutes and seminars, and by encouraging our colleagues to have rigorous engagements with all genres of black (African American) "writing" within   frames   of historical inquiry.                              The Project's   working frame was an   adaptation of the paradigm of unity in African American Studies , f
Read more

Musings, February 8-9, 2021

    MUSINGS OF THE DAY   The mother- and father-ships of sanity have landed   Let our enemies of whatever color they be know this as we eradicate them with the tools of insanity.   Mr. Ramcat informed me this morning that I need to tie up loose ends and thank all the people who have made my life a rich and satisfying experience of 77+ years.   If you deserve my gratitude, you know who you are.   Four quotations to brighten the day------   "I don't regret my years as a prosecutor assigned to juvenile court.   In some ways, I think it is why I was put on this earth." ---Daphne R. Robinson   "While there are books and articles concentrating on young black men in the social sciences and education, thee has been comparatively little input from scholars in the arts and humanities/" Howard Rambsy II   "The hashtag 'black lives matter,' which now rings prophetically through various quarters of the United States of America and int
Read more