Jerry Ward's Blogspot

To respect the rain train violent grass and soil: summarize the yard.

CHINESE MEMORY IN AMERICAN FORM Review of Jianqing   Zheng.   Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution .   Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2018.   ISBN 9781680031768, pp. 36.   $ 15.95     (paperback).                 Jianqing Zheng is an Asian American writer who quietly makes a difference in American poetics and literary history.   Despite the burden of administrative duties as chair of the Department of English at Mississippi Valley State University, Zheng founded and still edits Valley Voices , a literary journal, and the peer-reviewed Journal of Ethnic American Literature .   He is a talented photographer, who like the cultural historian   William Ferris, has produced striking visual documentation of sites and life in the Mississippi Delta.   His special interest in poetics , ethnic literatures,   and   haiku as ...

Review of Milton A. Cohen's The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. Milton A. Cohen. The Pull of Politics: Steinbeck, Wright, Hemingway, and the Left in the Late 1930s. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2018.   ISBN 978-0-8262-2163-6,pp, 373. $50.00   (hardback)                 Given the urgency of explaining how art and politics have a long history of being linked and of illuminating how the pull of early twentieth-century American politics shapes peculiar problems of interpretation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, Milton . Cohen has made a genuine contribution to ongoing literary and cultural discourses.   His primary objective is to direct attention to what one might argue is a fortunate occurrence   in American literary history, namely the confluence of John Steinbeck's The Gra...

LITERARY HISTORY USA: ETHOS AND ETHNOS In the post-World War II and Cold War years   (roughly 1945-1991), it was "normal" for scholars and students of American literature to assume that they knew what truly described American literature as a national literature.   Their indispensable source of information was the   Literary History of the United States (1947) and its subsequent editions.   In their "Address to the Reader," the editors of that particular history aptly noticed that "[l]iterature can be used, and has been magnificently used by Americans, in the service of history, of science, of religion, or of political propaganda.   It has no sharp boundaries, though it passes through   broad margins from art into instruction or argument….History as it is written in this book will be a history of literature within the margins of art but crossing them to follow our writers into the actualities of American life" (xxi).     In some degree, ...

A CATHOLIC KLANSMAN'S PRAYER [[White Rainbows in Black W(holes)]] Holy St. Dymphna,   Nighthawk #666, begs your help. We, for all our trumping of godly truth, have been forced to do hard time in the face of judicious avoiding of mortal sin: we burn crosses to incense the Lord; we do not burn the crucifix of Jesus the Jew, and yet be we punished, divinity knows, for propagating sacred righteousness. Dear St. Dymphna, pristine as Yseult the borrowed Persian, Irish as blood spurting white when you beheaded were, help. Help, paragon of purity of our Klan, help the God who knows we suffer beyond remedy, beyond redemption and implore thee, help;   fetch for us a blessing, a mercy for our daily deeds; barter for reparations; bring a second coming of honor, a little light to let our fallen souls arise.   Amen. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             May 21, 2019

POWER OF SOUNDS (for the jazz-makers) The ebony voice is stone hard and ink soft, a fated film shot in thunderbird weather. Ears are awed as its art contours the range of joy, the scope of suffering. Mouths water as its variety unsettles the blind. Minds palpitate as its improvising makes the dumb assume the poise of prayers. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             May 19, 2019

Prelude for Poem 76 The face challenges the mirror; the mirror, the face. The space between has no wind, only an absence, the given probabilities   gambling in a vacuum of grief and alleged transgressions. Sirens of moonset become arrivals: ancestors burning signals of returning, of unrequested volitions, you deem, in jest, a mystery of performing. Are you now bereft of shame as David Walker and James Joyce speak your name? Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             May 17, 2019

HEILE GERIMA: A Lesson for 2019 I have just finished watching Ashes and Embers , an instructive and riveting 1982 film by Heile Gerima. An expert film critic might give the film a low rating.   It is a cinematic sermon;   the cinematography is not eye-shattering; it fails to deliver the aesthetic pleasure of Afrofuturism; it is political. Basically ignorant of the standards and hidden codes used to evaluate contemporary films, I give the film a very high rating.   The sermon is timely, particularly for viewers who may be narcotized by fascism and fantasy. It is David Walker's Appeal rendered in visual and sonic terms of engagement which are necessary for the 21st century.   The veiling of muted colors actually enhances appreciation of the ethics of ambiguity and the vision of masculinity which constitute the film's rind and pulp; it delivers the cognitive pleasure of ancestral wisdom and elevation of consciousness.   Filmmakers and general spectators ca...

  NOSTALGIA Late night and early morning, appropriate times for clouds of nostalgia to make a slow progress through the mind, leaving in their wake the non-physical pains of loss and the lost in our 21st century: the art of writing letters. Reading Selected Letters of Langston Hughes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel with Christa Fratantoro, induces nostalgia for the quality of ink, the motions of penmanship, the texture of paper, the weight of the pen, the rhythm   and labor of typing. I remember the moods the editors attribute to Hughes's letters ----"lyrical, romantic, flirtatious, ironical, sardonic, allusive, casual, objective, or businesslike" (xiii) shaped communication with relatives, friends, associates, and strangers.   The semi-privacy of the letter encouraged robust instances of   intimacy and honesty among people which is thin and lukewarm when they are transmitted by email, Facebook messages...

WHAT COUNTS AS AMERICAN POETRY IN 2019? Any assessment of what counts as American poetry in 2019 must be based on specificity and marked by a brutality that academic poets who wish to remain in good standing with other academic poets avoid. It is a cardinal sin to announce that a poet who has won prizes and has been applauded by the Establishment is remarkably bland and   ordinary, remarkably gifted in being pseudo-universal, remarkably capable of turning cognitive tricks.   Refusal to celebrate can condemn one to severe punishment, the vengeance Wanda Coleman suffered for making her honest assessment of poetry by Maya Angelou.   Having integrity is more important than having commerce with correctness by way of singing uncritical praise-songs.   In the domain of American poetry (and especially in its ethnic sectors), we seem to have a surplus of blind mice sniffing about for artisan cheese. Truth be told, what counts as American poetry at the moment in A...