Alas, Poor Ernest


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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

violence and male narratives

VIOLENCE AND AMERICAN MALE LIFE HISTORIES Our constructions of "reality" convince us, a bit too easily, that violence is an essential feature in the lives of American males and as "natural" as is the history of violence in the founding of our nation.   The same constructions sponsor the myth of gender, allowing us to contend that women are naturally less violent than men.   We are socialized in the United States   to be gullible, to be worshippers of under-examined truths and full-blown lies.   This seems to be our fate, our destiny, our normalizing of cowshit and bullshit . We can imagine relatively violence-free   male visions, as did Clifton Taulbert in Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored   and subsequent installments of his autobiography, but the aesthetics of hubris retard our doing so.   The American majority   has an unholy, acquired taste for the sounds of explosions and gun-fire   and the lurid patterns of blood leaking...
Read more

Blog2.14.2021

  Blog2.14.2021   The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. Isaiah 11:6   Humble yourself and follow the lead of the child, but first teach the child to read.   Reading narratives to the child while it is still in the womb is a project for preparing children who will be born in the 21st century for what they are condemned to expect:   the heavy burdens of history as narrative prior to history's becoming equipment for daily life, instruments for probing inevitable uncertainties.   Always discuss with the child the centrality of narrative in the state of being human.   If this sounds to you like dream-work and   platitude your hearing is accurate. As what we once knew as American democracy slowly becomes a fascist desert, we must arm ourselves and our children to do battle with inconvenient truth. ...
Read more

Blog1.3.2021

      "And then some white man hearing about oppressed Negroes on television will ask you for a little rational conversation on the subject.   This will be a man (this hypothetical questioner) who probably does not know that policemen are menacing subhumans, whose sociological conditioning ---because they are usually grandsons of immigrants, i.e. poor whites   --- has usually prepared them to hate niggers even before they get the official instructions (like James Bond) that they are 'licensed to kill.' " LeRoi Jones, "The Last Days of the American Empire" (1964)   In the pandemic-afflicted American Empire, the words of Jones/Baraka burn with prophetic fire as they remind us that prophets have been displaced by panderers.   This situation makes our work in 2021 delicate and dangerous.   So much sorting of false propaganda from true propaganda.   So much spinning of moral compasses in chaos. Who is killing whom with systemic immunit...
Read more