Jerry Ward's Blogspot

THANKSGIVING AND NATURE Be thankful.   You can see mystery. Start.   Armor your heart.    Fly west on a turkey's breast. Own kin without and within. Be thankful.   Know how atoms glow with anger. J. W. Ward, Jr.                    November 22, 2017

QUEST/QUESS? QUESTING You have the frankly advantaged disadvantage of being the oldest person in the room when Michael "Quess?" Moore performed Sleeper Cell on November 19, 2017 at Mercer Manor (1000 N. Rampart, New Orleans).   The performance was based on Moore's second book of poetry, Sleeper Cell ( Ascension, LA: Next Left Press, 2016).   The performance was a book of poetry trying to become a one-man theatre piece.   It is a work-in-progress , watered with all the puns "progress" might contain.   So be it. You have the frankly disadvantaged advantage of being the outsider in a small crowd of younger people who finger-snap approval of slam poetry.   The oddness of the moment does not prevent your using lemons to make punch.   You happen to like some of Moore's work, and you do respect his intelligence, his activism, his determination to use poetry to teach something to somebody (some bodies). Lawd, today.   Language fragments into ...

MAPSHOCKS (   tweets from the blondehouse ) No, the pride-fatal East does not gospel the beautiful mind; it parents pampering dross. In the moss-freed North, moral greed and sacred lust birthmark   billions; thus, so soon "In God We Trust." In the ghost-justified South, love, or a false facsimile, is a dead madam snoring in the heat of the night. In the brass-plated West, the empire of envy, wizards and witches inflate microchips of paradise lost. Yes, the blood-tortured Midwest, corn-fed and wheat-weighted, is a pristine land-whale chewing the cud of gluttony. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             November 18, 2017

ISSTORY Donald J. Trump is neither Lenin nor a czar.   He is a catalytic function, an unhinged and very dangerous function that is loved by millions of American citizens.   He is beyond law, beyond lies and truth, beyond reason and insanity.   He is merely beyond.   In the American imagination of 2017, President Trump is the amoral parent of isstory . In the domains of political and cultural thought, isstory displaces herstory and history. The simplicity of isstory is devastating, leaving the mind in an implacable state of gasping.   Isstory has no gender and every gender that can be imagined.   Isstory has no location and exists everywhere.   Isstory prevails as an elegant equation ---- cosmic evil =cosmic violence. We are slowly recognizing that isstory is the great MF (mother/father) of a great and terminal revolution and reconstruction in the United States of America and other geopolitical sites.   Isstory is a tantal...

USA FAIRYTALE   #1 His [Poe's] laugher was of a single order: it was inhuman, and mixed with hysteria.                 Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character In a time and space of never was her blues consumed   his mind. Her songs corkscrewed DNA in his NRA bone-house. A wild woman of decadent joy, she twisted him into a consenting toy Singing traumas, she mentored him in the logic of absurd   faith. All snow and roses was her face, sweating drops of tepid grace. And he, confused in love, misunderstood her charity. Branded for a fool, he fell upon a sickle and spiraled into hell. Splendid goddess of American fate, carnal knowledge came   far too soon and much too late. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.              ...

ONCE IN TEXAS THEY HEARD ten tweets from the mountain in the drones of doom, in the trumpets of truth, and   noon-lighted with anger they counted their faces for righteousness. How was it then reckoned, in lurid glass, funky bullets should find home a flaming house in America's past? And who death-wise ordained that sins would have reward in the caskets of their skins? Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             November 7, 2017

THE ELEGANCE OF GRACE Alexander, Stephon.   The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link between Music and the Structure of the Universe .   New York: Basic Books, 2016.                 In her 2007 poem "In Search of Grace," Quo Vadis Gex Breaux makes an elegant plea for an enabling virtue.   Those lines which trigger my imagination are I pray for grace, as I dance on life's tabletops, as I scale the stairs to my mind's attic or descend into its dark and eerie cellar. The well-spun metaphors have the   simplicity that Stephon Alexander associates with "the very aesthetics of doing theoretical physics research" (54) in The Jazz of Physics .   He suggests                 An elegant equation is refined , slimmed down to the bare essentials, simple and concise.   ...