Cold Duck Donald


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.  Art is not for the arcane sake of art.  Art is for the pragmatic sake of preventing rage from murdering the mind.

And memory wanders back to the superb sonnet by Gwendolyn Brooks that begins with the line "First Fight. Then Fiddle."   Advice.  An imperative most needed now.  Uses of war and art, of aesthetics and politics. Abrasive affinities.  Situations that ordain the resonance of time as in four lines from Coleman's 24th sonnet

i  am the love wish of secret rapists/ the men

who break before they enter

they fight to maintain the myths I die by

(when underthegun, who has time to keep a war journal?)



SNAFU dares to say  "Ah, gender how quare thou art."  Better yet is SNAFU's devastating question: "Wasn't the First Crusade (1095-1099) the perfect prototype for 21st century Islamic carnage?"



Poetry as prophylactic against the  STD (sensually transmitted disease) of cultural amnesia.  In the porn of whatever in 2018, poetry is a condom. Protect yourself.







Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 23, 2018

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