Jerry Ward's Blogspot

THE STATE OF THIS UNION (January 30, 2018) As I listened to the POTUS deliver his first   "State of the Union" address, the subatomic particles of my DNA became angry.   All of us American citizens heard words baked in an oven of selected   truth and sprinkled with genuine tears that the Tribe of Trump appropriated for their political ends.   Please note that the parents put on stage to weep were not the parents of unarmed children   who have been murdered too frequently in our recent history by police people and   newly motivated racists and newly empowered supremacists. The platitudes regarding a tide of optimism and a righteous mission to make the American republic great again for all Americans created the music of pebbles raining on a tin roof.   A cold tin roof on the house that seven deadly American sins built. The POTUS did mimic, I admit, some of the better features of oratory.   That I don't deny.   Nevertheless, the persuasiveness of the address was unde

A JUG OF ANCESTORS                 It is tempting to agree with Arnold Rampersad   ( Ralph Ellison: A Biography , page 403) the   essay "The World and the Jug" is perhaps Ralph Ellison's "richest apologia for his life as a writer who happened to be black, as well as for the Negro culture that had made him….As such, I also defends all American writing that seeks to move beyond ethnicity and toward national or universal values." Rampersad's clever choice of words renders the temptation less enthralling.   Ellison's apologia is written in a defensive posture , a position which Lance Jeffers clearly described a few decades ago.   Read his seminal essay "The Death of the Defensive Posture: Toward Grandeur in Afro-American Literature" in The Black Seventies (Boston: Porter Sargent Publisher, 1970), edited by Floyd B. Barbour.   One part of Ellison's essay was published in The New Leader , December 9, 1963.   Why fifty-five years ago did h

DIVING INTO THE BLUE HOLE What bold, black, wolf-ticket-selling   thought of the day is taking you where? The answer, of course, is to the agony of cognition.   Or, to quote from the text of the sermon "You and me…we're like two divers tethered to each other, dropping down into an underwater cave. What they call a blue hole. …. "You're losing me, Lincoln." "Oh, you're with me.   You know what's at the bottom of that hole?" "What?" "The truth." Greg Iles, Mississippi Blood , page 29.                 You and I as readers of America's literature   shall never arrive at the truth.   We will come close to a truth, but the truth evades us in the forward and backward motions of critical duration.   At least that is the fib I need to bootleg. Pragmatic evasion.                 So, today in response to an email from a brilliant friend, I dive toward an ekphrastic poem---"

IN CONVERSATION                 In our profession, a few scholars have used the phrase "in conversation" so frequently as to empty it of useful meaning .   To impress a handful of readers, Scholar Z tells them that she or he is putting Toni Morrison in conversation with Margaret Mitchell or James Baldwin with Stephen King. What a joke! What is actually "in conversation" is Scholar Z's memory of reading a novel by Baldwin in the past with the current experience of reading a film based on a text by King.   Were Scholar Z truly in conversation with herself, she would produce genuine scholarship without benefit of rhetorical spectacle.                 As I read Mississippi Blood (New York: William Morrow, 2017) by   Greg Iles, I might claim that he communes with John Grisham ---as only one Mississippi novelist can with another. I would offer as dubious proof that Iles signifies with respect on Grisham   when the first-person narrator in Mississippi

SEASON FOR SEEING Galmi Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them . Psalm 139.16 Thus, David sang as his eyes were watching God.   But in our season of Arctic cold seeing, our inner ears hear lamentations which our hearts dare not stomach.   Let mind dominate body.   Neither Taliban nor Caliban shall travel bans restrain as horrors drop like music in the revenge of acid rain.   In churning 2018 be merciful.   Donate the PLOTUS, the FLOTUS, the base of the Tribe of Trump, the Congressional folly, and the insanity of the body politic ----donate the offspring of Mammon and Avarice to your God. Golem " We need constant vigilance in order to make the United States the great nation it wants to be ." Fr. Kenneth Taylor, "Statement by the President of the National Black Clergy Caucus in Response to the Remarks by

IN THE AGE OF TRUMP EXPECT TO SEE A school of bodies regimented on a tree: bagatelles dying.

A( MUSING)                 Michael Lackey's draft of an autobiographical introduction for his unpublished book of interviews with biographical novelists (posted in Academic.edu Weekly Digest , 18 Jan 2018)   has an amusing title ---"The Agency Aesthetics of Biofiction in the Age of Postmodern Confusion."   The joke is Lackey's precise critique of how imprecise postmodern critics can be in discriminating among genres, because the confirmative aspect of his writing unwittingly reifies a sort of blindness of which he accuses others.   His humor pivots on the argument that we ought to make careful distinctions between the historical novel and the biographical novel.   Otherwise, we risk being undisciplined postmodern scholars who fail to recognize that in dealing with genres "distinctions are socio-cultural constructions rather than ontological realities" (17).   It escapes his notice that ontological realities are not givens or absolutes but special inst

SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED When you reach a certain age (over 70) , you may become overly sensitive to violation of decorum. Within the past two days, a friend and I have been slightly disappointed with certain expressions of value. Case #1, January 14 :   Ashe Cultural Arts Center presented "Lift Every Voice and Sing," a community sing-along to honor the people who made enormous sacrifices during the Civil Rights Movement at Ashe Power House Theater.   The event was well-attended.   It was reassuring that many very young children (the youngest was two months old) were present.   Such New Orleans   cultural figures as Sunni Patterson, Sharon Martin,   Tonya Boyd-Cannon, Ben Hunter, Renard Boissiere, Wendi O'Neal (daughter of the Civil Rights/Free Southern Theater icon John O'Neal ), Clark Knighten, Michaela Harrison, and the venerable   Zion Harmonizers group were featured.   So, what's to bitch about ?   Nothing more serious than the fact that approximate

January 20, 2018 : The Fiction of Our   Non-Fiction If we do want to write fiction set in the world in which we live, it is useful to study the works of authors who do have an ear for dialogue, for the locutions people use, for the accidental poetry with which humans express and conceal   their thoughts and feelings. Francine Prose,   Reading Like A Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books And For Those Who Want To Write Them (2006)                 For people who have the need and/or the desire to find respite, however brief, from the disasters, death-oriented plots, and various terrors   of living, the study of accidental poetry has purpose. Prose has a point.    That quite "literary" point   is nicely complemented by Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel ( 2nd ed., 2012), a "cultural" study based on some findings of cognitive psychology. Prose and Zunshine would probably agree that   we can learn to craft langua

THREE AMERICAN POETS                 When writers speak with one another, ideas come into being.   In a conversation I had with C. Liegh McInnis a few days ago, he mentioned William Henry Holtzclaw and Booker T. Washington.   His comments triggered a bit of memory about Holtzclaw and Edward Smyth Jones( 1881-1968), about Holtzclaw's extending aid to Jones in his time of need. Giving a helping hand to someone is not a literary act.   But in this instance, it is a minor act of compassion that gives birth to a certain literary brightness and radical commenting on the black writing we understand African American literature to be. We may refer to a few of us who swim with deliberate purpose against the tides of literary and cultural studies.                 Sterling A. Brown swam with the tides of his time, noting in Negro Poetry and Drama (1937) --- "Edward Smythe Jones' The Sylvan Cabin is pompously literary, none of his verses being a poetic as hi

Professional Activities 2017                                                         Jerry W. Ward, Jr. January 6 ----      Conversation with 3rd Graders, Grandville T. Woods Elementary School,                                 Kenner, LA January 10 ----Interview with Susan Larson, "The Reading Life," WWNO 98.9 FM, New Orleans, LA February 2 ---Reading FRACTAL SONG , Antenna Gallery, New Orleans, LA March 25 ---Orleans Parish Election Commissioner, Ward 14, Precinct 10 March 26 --"The Way of the Poet" panel, Tennessee Williams Festival, New Orleans, LA                 with Bill Lavender, Stacey Balkun, Peter Cooley, and Rodney Jones. March 28-31 ---Member, External Review Team, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences,                 University of the Virgin Islands (St. Thomas and St. Croix) April 29 ---Orleans Parish Election Commissioner, Ward 14, Precinct 10 May 11---Moderator, Screening of "Jam