Jerry Ward's Blogspot

DOING TIME IN NOLA Here is miracle: a cage of paper where a bird does not just sing but thinks from dawn to blue noon to dusk to night's demise of seconds and in a second line --so rare-- which can be happy dancing   this last return from death to freedom's holy sunrise. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             February 27, 2018

EPISTLE TO THE HUMANISTS February 25, 2018 Dear____________:                 When that excuse we call a POTUS pandered to his tribe and hissed a less than original poem about a snake, the circus we call American politics in 2018 had a climax rather than an orgasm.   No doubt the POTUS thinks the poem is a fine example of American verse, equal in accomplishment to D. H. Lawrence's "Snake," a better than typical British lyric.   It is but wishful thinking that Fate would deliver a copy of Lawrence's poem to the WH, which of late has become the GOP   " s---house," and force the POTUS to recite these two lines from "Snake" each day: "I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act! I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education." (Stanza 17, lines 63-64) But enough of fantasy bereft of jouissance as we return to a future.   The curse of human education is sufficient.              

April 4, 2018 Be wary. Be wise. Stand far away from anyone who suggests that you celebrate anything on April 4, 2018. It is not a day to celebrate. It is a day to remember. Remember how thoroughly dead the King of Love is dead. Listen to Nina Simone. Teach our young to remember. Help our young to remember. Remember how thoroughly dead the King of Love is dead. April 4, 2018 is a day to remember. It is not a day to celebrate. Stand far away from anyone who suggests that you co-opt yourself with celebration. Be wary. Be wise. Listen to Nina Simone. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             February 25, 2018

TELL THEM WE ARE RISING TAKE ONE/ 16 February 2018                                                                                       Scene: Ash é Power House, 1731 Baronne Street, New Orleans, LA Act:   PBS/Indie Lens Film Screening: "Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges and Universities" Purpose:   To view a short version of Stanley Nelson's most recent documentary, a visual narrative of many narratives, designed "to tell the dynamic story of Americans who refused to be denied a higher education and ---in their resistance --- created a set of institutions that would influence and shape the landscape of the country for centuries to come." (quoted from Ash é Cultural Arts Center newsletter, February 2018) Brief report on TAKE ONE                 My impressions of this documentary were prejudiced by (1) the advertising of the film, (2) my intimate knowledge of HBCUs from having been on the faculty of two of them fo

ERASING the poem resides in a process,   the secret of spit becoming enchanting for our times, which parody and paradox themselves with need of erasing. enough.   go. inhabit minds. polemic them with prisms and prisons where lambs lament a pound of cantos and ferment carrots. dance a wall street rag with a virgin hag. assess the season inside the trick bag. demons disappear in reason when an ear listens to wine shatter in a pretense of class. still, old mother, wit lives in the sample of example, in the idiot a tale yearns to trample. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             February 16, 2018

SCHOLARSHIP Old people drying, bagatelles dying: scholarly sadness. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             February 12, 2018

alternatives I can become brave to say my dream to the world. Jiang Zejin, 1 December 2016 On a cold day say your dream to me in the silk of red water. I shall speak it into transparency. If it flows in a riddle, I shall make use of it, painting possibilities more promising than photographs. Backgrounds of clean azure shall shock the eye to recognize what can hatch when music clears your throat. The pristine white of my design shall be a phoenix soaring more truly than an eagle, or a sparrow who, having nothing to tweet against the stars, shall banish cages and erase the bars.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr. February 10, 2018

Ramcat Reads #17 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.                 An elegant equation is tastefully written in the mathematical language of numbers, letters, and             symbols.   An elegant equation is superi

Letter to Marcus B. Christian (1900-1976) Dear Mr. Christian: I am writing to inform you that you shall be remembered in various ways during 2018. As I begin to examine some of your published and unpublished works,   I begin to see how you wrote nothing in vain.   You wrote everything with gruff purpose ---for example, The Common Peoples' Manifesto of World War II (1948). That long poem is as compelling now as it was seventy years ago.   Thus, as I deal with 300 years of New Orleans history, I must deal with your inserting the manifesto between the proem "Men on Horseback" and the apologia "The Ballad of Rebellious Men."   What you were saying to Harry S. Truman's   Jim Crow/Cold War America is an aesthetic condemnation of Donald S. Trump's White Supremacy Drifting Into Fascism America.   It is my duty to witness how the black fire of your imagination cuts forward and backward. You placed a card with   the following request in some copies o

  WORDS AND BEING                                                                        July 26, 2016 draft/jww Chapter 1: Literary and Social Positions             Writing about boundary conditions from his position as President of the Modern Language Association, K. Anthony Appiah quotes a sentence from Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy wherein the phrases "the best that has been thought and known in the world" and "sweetness and light" delimit Arnold's Victorian idea of culture. "The word culture can mean many things (and nothing)," Appiah suggests, "but Arnold is talking here about the ideal of a liberal education, an education for free women and men"(Appiah 2016, p. 2).   Aside from   the philosophical exactness of Appiah's proposing that the word culture might mean nothing, it is noteworthy that his statement is a particular instance of doing something with words, an instance which positions his immediate aud