Jerry Ward's Blogspot

TRANSPARENT PERFECTION/ T AND Z   PRESIDENTS (an unfound poem) You did terrific, boy, terrific.   ( Yes, I used your skills ). You exceeded   presidential regress. ( Yes, I used your knowledge). You want to drain your swamp. ( Yes, I am glad you failed to fill it in ). Don't trust nasty woman Merkel,   boy, or nasty man Macron; buy Javelins from us. And mission possible playlists .   ( Yes, I am willing perhaps, willing perhaps to sign, seal, and   signify ). And do me a favor, boy.   Instigate Biden and son. I really mean post-vegetate the   Bullstrike and bitch-brewed   faux-news. and unholy   ghosts.   They re-danger me.   Do me a favor . (Yes, you think me   an incompetent performer ?) I'll send Rudy to sniff you out, boy,   and send   no aid if you don't dark-damn the witches well . ( Yes, did you think I have no morals, no in...

ALAS, POOR ERNEST He reformed, so said his last wife, Milton's Paradise, hammered into Eliot's tradition his rich anxiety, his guilt regarding the whiteness of supremacy. So enlightened, in 1961, or perhaps aggrieved by insatiable arrogance, he penetrated his mouth with a shotgun, pulled the trigger. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             September 23, 2019

On three epigraphs from Playing in the Dark Writers use epigraphs, short quotations from other writers, to indicate the tone of their own texts, or to establish a thematic range.   Epigraphs can secure both literary kinship and literary difference.   Perhaps the epigraphs Morrison used in Playing in the Dark promote curiosity, a desire to know what she thought her kinship as a writer and thinker was in relation to three white American males who were esteemed for various contributions to American literary tradition.   Warren and Williams were less esteemed than Eliot, but the inequality dims upon our inspection of how, and for what purpose, Morrison links them to her critique of what was under-acknowledged in the canon of American literature. The four lines Morrison chose from T. S. Eliot's "Prelude, IV" set a thematic focus for Lecture 1 "Black Matters," itself a prelude for her project on the literary imagination.   Divorced from the context...

SOME KIND OF BLACK After viewing Stanley Nelson's documentary   Miles   Davis: Birth of the Cool , I rub in my hands such words and phrases as genius, implacable passions,   tragic sublime, daemonic genius, sacrificial creativity, and duende (traits of which we locate and appreciate   in the persons and works of absolutely gifted African Americans ).   And it is a motherfucking shame that our world chews up and spits out the genuine geniuses we are blessed or damned to know.   Nothing is free.   Everything is stamped with a price. I salute Stanley Nelson for creating a documentary that isn't   cluttered with suffocating information, that is an audiovisual equivalent of a Eugene Redmond   kwansaba.   The film does not murder us with awe. It offers instead multiple dimensions for critical /creative   thought about human beings and art. About a short, very incomplete list of 20th century   folks who have been model...

THE POEM UNDONE To be addressed at a beach she thought most square. To be called to a window to see what ought to be heard. What might sting like a mosquito infecting one with knowledge. She thought of Yeats, of Leda, of time, the coming of a terrifying swan. Did he say the sea's calm, tamed by moonbeams, when sound visualized is turbulent? Is music's allegory of war no more than conceits of violence gathering to clash in the death of light? How violated can a body be? What's put in pain by a mosquito's ignorant gift, by its eternal tweet of sadness, by retarded misery's ebb and flow and slow torture of climate changing? Such faith, such hope, such charity did Antigone, imitating Isis,   sprinkle on a corpse. Honi   soit qui mal y pense and mea culpa invades the heart. Tragedy has gone with the breeze somewhere to fall apart in another country, t o alarm with ...

Reading Notes for September 23, 2019 Eighteen years after the tragedy of 9/11 as I re-read Amiri Baraka's "Somebody Blew Up America" (2001), two meanderings occur: 1) a chance temptation to ask what the term "pro-Semitic" can mean in the contexts of (a) Israeli and world politics and (b) to what extent the amount of foreign aid the USA donates to Israel truly matters, and 2) a more focused temptation to ask if Morrison's Playing in the Dark sheds light on the motives that govern projects devoted to discussions of slavery beginning with 1619. I suspect those projects are at once very literary and very political. Such speculations arose during a September 12 conversation with one of my former UNCF/Mellon mentees whose research on redemption now teaches me, the former mentor, a few things about the urgency of scholarship in the twenty-first century.   The journey forth happens in the cognitive territory of "universal enslavement," ...

THERE IS NO MAGIC HERE Words don't sweat.   They bleed and breed passions more ancient than God, more ancient than pain awakening when a knee addresses a crucifixion. Words, don't sweat.   Bleed. Breed. Give birth to something like the time/ghost of a future. Redeem your face. Reclaim a locus in the disorder of stuff. Mean nothing.   Just be. Or guess who is. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             September 8, 2019