Jerry Ward's Blogspot

TO LIVE AGAINST THE TIMES On Wednesday, April 4, 2018, I shall remember an assassination on April 4, 1968.   As I fly from New Orleans to Chicago, the finality of death will monopolize my thinking.   The end is promised, and it never fails to deliver.   I shall remember and protect myself against the cultural amnesia that the Tribe of Trump bids our nation to embrace.   I shall not forget.   And I have yet to arrive at a point from which I can forgive our nation for its dedicated barbarity.   Although my mother's name was Mary, my conception was not immaculate.   My name is Jerry not Jesus. I am not obligated to perform salvation on a cross. To the extent that I embrace a fluid, Roman Catholic understanding of how sin is constructed and why it flourishes within the operations of capitalism, I am aware that I belong to a sin-saturated Church , that I have citizenship in a nation wherein sin is a palpable virtue.   There is small profit in being orthodox by any measur

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

BLUE JAZZ October Poem for Amiri Baraka When the Word is                                                                            Nommo No more                                                                                               Then the Word is Amiri b                                                                                                  Amiri b Whole man, visible man                                                                               His people’s manifesto Unbroken                                                                                             Unbroken Wave and particle Healing, reeling the real, and feeling through, He is moved to be magic/medicinal To boptize the Word, hear Scratch wise/dom in the mind’s ear” Language as found Flips and founders and flaps Till the fire next time Burns Blasts Burnishes The Music to bloom Defiant Defined and Definer Our poet, h

ALONE (a kwansaba for Prisoner # 2440943) Alone, when you alone, speak of alone as spasms of light in black holes. Or else, alone, you visit unknown dread, itself alone in a blood black fist that pounds against even odds of fate. Did you ponder, alone, how your spirit, being an egg, alone refuses to crack? Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             March 16, 2018

INTRUSIONS The Outsider : A Note on Productive Frustration of Reading for Older Readers   Authorial intrusion is a literary device wherein the writer of a fictional work disrupts the narrative or story in order to address the reader directly.   Although 18th and 19th century readers of novels did not often object to being informed, edified, or preached at by novelists, 21st century readers may be annoyed by authorial intrusion.   It destroys the "pleasure" of the text, the imaginative dwelling in a "world" that imitates or represents the world in which we actually live.   When I referred in a previous memo to Wright's insertion of "language typically used in non-fiction in a context of fiction," I was referring to authorial intrusion. It's my opinion that Richard Wright used authorial intrusion to create a   productive frustration of reading .   His intrusion   is very obvious in Black Boy; it is nicely marked off for us.   But

HR THEATRE IN THE AFTERNOON The 21st century encourages a frantic and unnerving consumption of time.   It was a relief from all that to attend the performance at Dillard University of two one-act plays by Willis Richardson.   The director, my former colleague Ray Vrazel, added the ensemble performance of   two African creation myths ----a Gabonese, Fang story and a Mali, Fulani story.   The four-part aesthetic consumption of time on a Sunday afternoon provided respite, the illusion of returning to a very different time and place.   Ancient Africa provided myth; Richardson, morality. In his director's notes, Vrazel reminded us of how Richardson sought to reorient American drama in the 1920s.    Instead of writing plays for white audiences, "Richardson believed …that plays written by African Americans should focus on the black community and not on racial tensions and differences.   He sought to utilize drama as a means of educating African American audiences.

El Dias de los Muertos Soon, mea culpa; soon, mea culpa; soon and very soon, mea maxima culpa. USA: 400 million ghosts screaming for no one to hear. Our will is done; our abandoned bodies are unburied. Octavio Paz, how beautifully you sang in the labyrinth of solitude. We did not listen to death. The flies and the roaches and the worms go about their business. They do not listen to death. They eat it. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             March 6, 2018

    Sarah Webster Fabio: (Re)Covering the Rainbow [1]                 Sarah Webster Fabio (1928-1979 ) was highly esteemed by some(but not all)   readers   for her contributions to Black Arts/Black Aesthetic discourses in the 1960s and early years of the 1970s. Although neither her prose nor her poetry was included in the groundbreaking   anthology Black Fire (1968), edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal,   her essay "Tripping with Black Writing" in the foundational anthology The Black Aesthetic (1971), edited by Addison Gayle,   did position her among those Ameer Baraka (LeRoi Jones) deemed "the founding Fathers and Mothers, of our nation."   In "Afro-American Literary Critics: An Introduction" ( Black Fire , pp. 57-77), Darwin T. Turner listed her as one of the new critics who were "explaining theory rather than merely commenting on practice" (75).   Turner might have been thinking of her essay "Who Speaks Negro?," which first