Jerry Ward's Blogspot

TANTALIZING TRAGEDIES AND USA LIFE Were we sufficiently informed about the classified   designs of the NIH,   FBI, CIA, CDC, NSA and a few other government agencies, we would flavor each meal or snack with dread.   Each tick of the clock would be the noise of a bullet or of an eardrum shattered by a massive explosion; each ballot, an opportunity gone wrong.   How normal it would be to burn our absurdly priced garments and footwear and   baptize ourselves with those ashes.   Without discrimination among genders, ethnicities, and economic status,   the posture of Job would be the only posture.   Neither "The Star-Spangled Banner" nor "Lift Every Voice and Sing" would ever be heard.   Either Dinah Washington's "This Bitter Earth," Curtis Mayfield's "Underground," or Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" would be the anthem of choice. The most revolutionary patriots among us would protest and sing praise hymns for th

Neo-Delta Blues/the pink-neck version Ole Miss woman be low-cotton wild around midnight, white lightening talking to her tongue about the boy she tricked to hang when Prince Charming failed to rise, an insult to her peach-green eye, an anxiety for her thigh. She be boll-weevil evil around midnight, a brass maiden in an icebox of desire, an algorithm of woman scored and scorned as her lust came dripping down. Ole Miss woman be strange fruit wild around midnight, when her blues belch in her groin, and the trump losers use her for a Faulkner rug designed for a golden shower and a shrug. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             May 28, 2018

Cold Duck Donald On a Prism Farm (I/O, I owe, I own) SNAFU stuff arrives without invitation after midnight.   This is but one example of how the mind functions in the Crescent City with regard to "progress" in American poetry, the enormous ocean of discourses wherein we drown in the Age of Trump.   Actually, drowning in this instance proves to be pleasant. Listening to National Public Radio commentary on American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (New York: Penguin, 2018) by Terrance Hayes begets memory of Wanda Coleman's American Sonnets , which was co-published in 1994 by Light and Dust Books and Woodland Pattern Book Center.   Read. Names matter, do they not?   Names ---light, dust, wood, land, Petrarch, Spenser, Shakespeare, sonnet as a 14-line transmitting object ---- to carry ideas to somewhere when time calls them forth. Like kwansaba and haiku in the fabric of African American intellectual histories, forms and content are purposeful.   Ar

Preface for Poem 75   anxiety when the dead marry the dead waste no chance to hear demise, to celebrate   the splash of wine where blood once flowed waste no moments of pleasure as if beauty hesitated to laugh in stone's bone marrow is it not true anyhow any who will do anywhere uncork mind, suspect, conserve anxiety when the dead marry the dead Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             May 19, 2018

The Imprisoned and the Prisoner May 10, 2018 GP to JWW Dear Mister Ward     I gave as much as I had, trying to get ready for the Hiset Eaam.    But I know my limataions.   My failure done'nt come from you as a teacher.     But from me being an over age student.     I thank you for everything that you have given me.     I have always said that I came here with nothing; But I leave with so much.     Once Again Thank you. GP JWW to GP Dear Mr. P_______: I refuse to accept your decision to abandon preparing for the HiSet Exam on the grounds that you are an "over age" students.   Had our great, great grandparents said " We are too old to yearn for freedom ," it is likely that you and I would be enslaved males on a plantation of somewhere.   I refuse to condone your failing yourself.   I do not deem your excuse regarding age to be either necessary or sufficient.   While your rate of learning diff

FATE AND NEW ORLEANS FICTIONS Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's debut novel   A Kind of Freedom (Berkeley: Counterpoint 2017) did receive more than a demitasse of acclaim.   It was a 2017 National Book Award Nominee, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017, and a New York Times Book Editor's Choice, a choice commended for shining "an unflinching, compassionate light on three generations of a black family in New Orleans, emphasizing endurance more than damage."   The critical gods and goddesses who cavort in public discussions of fiction can only ensure that we know titles.   Praise alone does not persuade us to read novels.   Word of mouth, the innocent gossip that circulates among select groups of African American and American readers, is often more effective in tantalizing us to read a novel.   As the Tricentennial celebrations of the Crescent City   move forward, one hears virtually nothing about A Kind of Freedom .   Nor does one find it on the shelves of local fa