Jerry Ward's Blogspot

Poem 77 ( for   birthday July 31, 2020 ) I join my ancestors in knowing virus, our minds as sturdy as icy fire to confirm a universe. I join my ancestors. Our tears are stones, wary-wise stones that break no windows as they whisper to the wind: enough, enough of death eternal, enough, enough of   defensive failures which offend the dignity of breathing. I join my ancestors in knowing   profoundest virus thriving in icy origins of flame, surviving in ritual of remembering an enough, enough for dignity to proclaim. I join my ancestors in knowing virus, our minds as sturdy as icy fire to confirm this universe, the dignity of breathing. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             June 26, 2020

African American Literary Thought Four Decades Ago December 4, 1981 Dear __________________:                 Please accept my thanks for your response to my questionnaire "Inquiry for the   1980's."   I have enclosed a pre-publication draft of the document I compiled for your information and approval.   Please let me know   immediately if you wish to make any changes in the remarks I quoted or in the wording of your contributor's note.                 I hope this document will inspire discussions in the African-American literary community; I hope too that others will undertake projects to provide the data we need in our efforts to explain African-American literature and thought. Sincerely yours, Jerry W. Ward, Jr. Chairman Department of English   [Tougaloo College] Dec...

Hurston, Wright, McCullers, and Literary History             Mentioning Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright in the same sentence is an invitation to engage heated disagreements, and these are based most frequently on one's passionate ideological commitments. Some Hurston scholars delight in accusing   Wright of being a misogynist, an unredeemed sexist, and a dupe of Marxist thought for what he said or did not say in his review of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God .     They minimize exploring Wright's early stances in judging literature. For them, it is of little importance to assess Wright's framing of his thoughts through the lens of "Blueprint for Negro Writing," the manifesto which guided his critical creativity from 1937 to 1960.   Equally important, perhaps, is viewing his critical stances from the angles of American literary politics to temper distortions. Accounting for Wright's insights...

The Prospect of Dying Forever On the brink of Summer 2020, you are entitled to be reductive and subjective   and convinced that the total population of the United States can be divided into Group A and Group B .   The people in Group A are Jesus-whipped believers, saturated with Christian empathy and willing to embrace their enemies with love.   They come in many colors.   It is difficult for them to balance OT wisdom with NT hype.   They believe it is God's will that young African American girls and boys, women and men, should be murdered weekly if not daily.   They believe it is God's will that they should be complicit in benign genocide, a phenomenon born during Reconstruction.   We find a number of heretics among them, the protesters in the streets   of our nation who find little profit in mere prayer and much solace in saying loudly that their lives matter, religious delusions notwithstanding.   Their ranks have been success...

KNEES My words are knees to mash your throat for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. Let us celebrate the common sense of my knees. My knees deliver gifts for the l ove you demonstrated when you stole us, when you dislocated and sold us, when you raped us, when you branded, whipped, and mutilated us, when you demonized us, when you mind-fucked us, when   your skin lynched us when your skin made us daily targets for malice, for your insanity, for your absence of humanity, for the twisted pseudo-sexuality of your desires. My knees worship no gods, reject the abject futility of charity, the madness of faith, the impotence of hope that fails eternally. My knees flush the excrement as faux-democracy diarrheas. Let us celebrate the common sense of my knees. My words are knees to mash your throat for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. You must die to understand the ethical ambiguity of knees. Jerry W. Ward,...

AFTER   A READING OF "THE BITTER RIVER" BY LANGSTON HUGHES ENOUGH. You knew, of course, Mr. Hughes knew rivers; knew still troubled waters ; knew dirt and gall-fat rivers; knew obscene waters;   knew blood-fat, anger-saturated rivers, black gold dying in the dying of the sun rivers; river rivers. ENOUGH. Scholar of deferred dreams, perpetual nightmares, Mr. Hughes memories 1942 Mississippi lynchings for   tormented minds of now, minds poisoned with racist death and daily tragedies   that dreams endow. Soon, the bitter river will once more water the will to kill. ENOUGH. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                             August 6, 2020

Rambsy, Howard, II.   Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers .   Charlottesville:   University of Virginia Press, 2020. Howard Rambsy's   first book, The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), examined many aspects of the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement and gave special attention to "publishing venues and editorial practices [as] the principle connectors in the far-reaching transmission of poetry during the black arts era" (160).   Since 2011, Rambsy has used his website   Cultural Front (www.culturalfront.org) as a mega-notebook for information on established and emerging writers (including comprehensive lists of reviews of their work) African American literary studies digital humanities and ongoing change in digital technologies reading experiments with female and male students at Southern Illinois   University, Edwar...

RECOMMENDED READING FOR JUNE 2020 Frederick Douglass, Narrative (1845) Richard Wright, The Color Curtain I. F. Stone, The War Years 1939-1945 Ishmael Reed, The Free-Lance Pallbearers Derrick Spires The Practice of Citizenship James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen Howard Rambsy, Bad Men Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not Kalamu ya Salaam, ed. New Orleans Griot: The Tom Dent Reader Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time J. W. Ward, Jr.