Jerry Ward's Blogspot

READING   YOUR   READINGS Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die,         and I know it. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 2018 ---   forget nothing; work; read; maximize critical thinking; volunteer; vote; demand that elected officials account for their daily actions; remember how unfree freedom is and who died/dies/will die for it; vote; read; ponder; focus as you live with dawnmare, noonmare, and nightmare   ---   2018 Jerry W. Ward, Jr. "Cosmic Orientation," December 31, 2017. After reading   (1) PMLA 134.1 (January 2019), a gathering of articles on what's trending in "Cultures of Reading" and (2) Wole Soyinka's replies to questions from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in "   'There's One Humanity or There Isn't': A Conversation," New York Review of Books (March 21, 2019): 32-34, you happen upon Namwali Serpell'...

LITERACY AS A TOOL TO COMBAT INCARCERATION Each mouth can liberate its own story . One of the adult prisoners at Orleans Justice Center (OJC) whom I'd been helping to prepare to take the HiSet Exam handed me an essay entitled "Alone."   It was not a required assignment.   He wrote the piece as a way of dealing with his experience of   trauma, the profound tragedy which destroyed his grandmother, his parents, all of his siblings except one, and his three sons.   It was an excellent first draft,   and I urged him to submit it to Peauxdunque Review . The editors loved it, and it will be published. A gifted writer, the prisoner used   literacy as a tool   to combat the agony of incarceration. He used literacy and creative thought to tell his unique story and to deepen our   awareness of why "incarceration" is as much a mental state as a physical one. Awed by his honesty,   courage and bravery,   I wrote a kwansaba fo...

READING ELLEN DOUGLAS, Part I When you hear me moaning and groaning, You know it hurts me down inside . Willie Dixon (1915-1992), "I Can't Quit You, Baby"   While Huck Finn speaks for Jim throughout his novel,   Tweet gains her own voice in Can Quit You, Baby …..At the end of her novel, as at the beginning, Douglas depends upon texts from black culture to comment on the relationship between black and white.   Willie Dixon ultimately clarifies the relationship in a way the narrator admits she cannot.   Even at the end of her novel, Douglas's narrator recognizes her own inability to represent fully the experience of her black characters, thus avoiding the farcical nature of Twain's ending and likewise avoiding Twain's return to essentialist ideology.(179) Jeff Abernathy, To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003) Q :   Through the writer/narrator, you almost make the ...

Accusation Absolves   How Whitman is the Western camera, wild-angel wide-angled, enthralled by the ego of the instrument, the will to negate the nuances of the acts, the shadows, the facts all entangled in photo shopped memories. What confession condemns, Accusation absolves. How miracle weird's the mind of a poet-god resolved to glorify theft and genocide to birth a nation. Satanic-baptized verse is an image to reverse and rehearse, a blind close-up of its immortality. What confession could condemn Accusation abjectly absolves. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             March 14, 2019

A Sankofa Review of Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry (1997) NCBS Conference, March 7, 2019 If the objective is to create a new book that complements the 21st century mission of African American poetry, the enterprise might begin with a critical, Sankofa review of the 1997 anthology Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry and with a blueprint of what a pragmatic, appropriately rooted new anthology should be. It can be taken for granted the work will be encompassed by impassioned debates, skepticism, and academic dismissal, because there is no consensus (general agreement   I know about ) (1)that   African American poetry has a mission, a   redemptive   purpose   (2) that   a significant non-academic population has a need and appetite for a "representative" anthology of poems (3) that use of periodicity from 1619 (oral and aural)/1746 (print) to 2019 is adequate in discriminating among tr...