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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Christmas, Kwanzaa, 2018

Blog 12.19.2017 CHRISTMAS I have a reason for not being anxious to celebrate Advent and Christmas Day.   Sixty years ago, my father died on December 25.   Fifty-nine years ago, my favorite uncle died a few days before Christmas.   I do want other people to be happy, but I am most at peace when Christmas has gone with the snow, the sunshine or rain, the wind.   I still say "Merry Christmas."   The only genuine happiness I experience, however, is listening to Handel's "The Messiah" and a few songs I've treasured since childhood,   attending Midnight Mass, having home-made fruitcake   after Mass, and eating a special meal with relatives on the excessively commercialized holiday. KWANZAA Umoja ---Decide with whom you should seek unity. Kujichagulia --Expand the terms of engagement for 2018. Ujima ---Cooperate on a project with people you can trust. Ujamaa --Be frugal.   Shop selectively. Nia ---Remember ou...
Read more

implacable violence, part one

Implacable Violence, Part One The death of Senator John McCain quickens our   interest in how to deal with contemporary   narratives of life history.   McCain's touchstone story pertains to American conservative values, the consequences of trauma,   military and public service, violence, and   a sense of honor.   Barack Obama's differently remarkable narratives direct attention to the absence of military service, class and caste violence, the audacity of hope, centralist values, and diversity in the history of "race."   Narratives about McCain and Obama stand in noteworthy contrast to future narratives about Donald Trump, stories that may place ego in the foreground as they unfold tales of sexism, constipated values,     inadvertent racism, the violence of capitalism, sleight of mouth, and avoidance of military service.   Ego, self-fashioning, and boldness are apparent in the three sets of narrative, but excess lynches the Trump set...
Read more

DuBois and Black Reconstruction

  PROPAGATION OF HISTORY AND FAITH   DuBois, W. E. B.   Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 . (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1998).   Dr. DuBois knew what was problematic about his revisionist history in Black Reconstruction .   He made his intentions clear in his note "To The Reader" (December 1934).   His ideal audience consisted of people who believed a black person in America "and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings…"   DuBois was not trying to convince those who regarded " the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization…"   Indeed, the Negro, in my mind at least, is the chief architect of civilization.   Is it only a matter of accident that Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro was published   two years before Black Reconstruction ?   No.   It wasn't an accide...
Read more