Margaret Waker's Ideas


(RE)SOUNDING RELEVANCE OF MARGARET WALKER'S IDEAS




Creative Arts Festival

Jackson State University

Friday, April 13, 2018



When I was invited in January  2018 to participate in this festival,  I vowed to speak briefly  about Dr. Margaret Walker's ideas regarding history, life, and culture.  I remember her insights about the necessity of incorporating Black Studies in the academy; her achievement in organizing the now legendary Phillis Wheatley Festival;  her prophetic vision in establishing a viable research institute at Jackson State University.  Her poetry ----the best of it ---is but one manifestation of how a creative mind works, of how it submits itself to a discipline of form as it pushes back against the trite, the trivial and the tragic which inhabit the domain of content.  The best of her poetic legacy may not be left to us as verse and verse forms; it may be ours to (re)cover and (re)sound from her journal entries, her letters, speeches  and essays, her conversations in interviews.  The probability that I am not lying is a lesson for 2018 and for  what I signify as the Age of Trumposity. Cast down your bucket where you are and leave us an institution that might prevail.

When Margaret Walker wanted to know what needed to be known about history, she spent four decades in researching and writing the novel Jubilee.

When she wanted to find the meaning of her life and the lives of others , she experimented with combining science, social science, and humanities , combining the habits of mind that allow us to make provisional sense of things in This Is My Century..

When she wanted to deal with culture(s), she focused on the always evolving and primal synthesis of African American cultures and on the dimensions of creative expressiveness that braids the political, the aesthetic, and the pragmatic in her signature poem "For My People."

Once when she and I were having a conversation about Richard Wright, she intoned in her unique voice that the most important thing about a writer is her or his ideas.  I (re) sound that bit of wisdom in my own devising of terms of engagement and my own cynical vision of how empty and ego-afflicted is the bulk of 21st century poetry.

But enough of my chattering.  I want to hear what other people think and to have meaning exchange of ideas.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

April 12, 2018








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