Jerry Ward's Blogspot

    DO NOT UNREMEMBER TULSA (1921-2021) or COLFAX, LA (1873)   Do not be remiss in teaching children Eden bloomed in Africa before the Fall.   Listen.   St. Dymphna smirks at the face of POTUS, the Antichrist image of evil incarnate and   at the smell of what humans mistake divinity to be.   Listen.   St. Dymphna tweets: "Read the text of time and the testimony of COVID. Recognize dispensational design. Taste the bitterness of distance between executive orders and papal bulls. Orders eat neither grass nor grain as they manufacture blindness in Plato's infamous cave and in graves Caucasian demons dig for the world.. Random death and calculated terrorism are patriotic prayers as your demons make God great again ."   Should the children refuse to listen, allow them to dance with COVID in another country.   August 30, 2020

  FOR US/BY US/TO US: Quick notes on CLAJ 63.2   Dana A. Williams and Kendra R. Parker, the co-editors of College Language Association Journal 63.2, along with the contributors who wrote essays for that issue,   deserve our gratitude.   The issue motivates us to think more deeply about what matters for citizens who are constantly assaulted by data and narratives we continue to call "news."    Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina and in the midst of global pandemic, Williams and Parker recognized the urgency of addressing racial unrest and cultural transformation.   Those topics are intimately related to public health and health care; domestic terrorism, economic disarray, and violence;   drug traffic, lurid entertainment, and mental health; political divisions which are immune to reason or repair.   The co-editors   did not back down from asking an accusatory question:   Do black scholars "use language, tropes, images and ...

  The Resurrection of   Gayl Jones   She was a widely discussed poet and novelist a few decades ago,   esteemed by Toni Morrison and Michael Harper and other people who recognized the value of neo-enslaved narratives.   The publication of her essays on poetry and fiction in Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991) established her cosmopolitan authority to provide insights about orality and innovative literary traditions.   In the early years of the 21st century, she was not forgotten, but much of her work was shrouded in silence. And that silence was compounded by her personal tragedy and her penchant for nurturing privacy by not saying much about herself.   After reading Calvin Baker's essay "No Novel About Any Black Woman Could Ever Be the Same After This" ( The Atlantic , September 2020),   we have reason to believe the long silence will be broken when Beacon Press publishes her epic novel Palmares . Baker as...

  IN HIS SKULL   His skull has no birth certificate, only webs and traps aplenty to let maimed thoughts go postal, turn a paler shade of white.   COVID   loves this space of dead letters and gifts that have naught to do with love that has nothing to do with it. His skull is an immaculate womb   of insane salvation.   August 17, 2020

  ARRIVAL   Love of numbers introduced love of words   Love of words introduced the taste of a truth   After discovery dread stuffs your mouth with wisdom for arrival.   August 14, 2020

  REFUSE TO MOURN   When cancer attacks COVID, when people kill one another to hasten the ends of Nature grow up.   Get  used to it.   Things always become better in their efforts to become worse. After all, nothing happens that God has not ordained. Grow up. Get used to it.   August 14, 2020

Rescued Fragments "Anger has fire.   And fire moves things." Nina Simone on BBC HARDtalk , 1999. It sufficed to excuse … lust of giving birth in quarantined farmlands to metaphysical   COVID. It sufficed… for blind light and a tweeting hog to torture life… It sufficed to erase the sophistication   of slaying ….. with a mule's jawbone and then …. answers in a cesspool. It sufficed … for them to be….. which defied …. August 3, 2020

Fantasy Televised Wesley Morris' article "The Reconciliation Must Be Televised" ( New York Times , August 2, 2020, Section AR) is indebted to Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 song poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," but Morris neither tips his hat to Scott-Heron nor to The Last Poets who judiciously criticized people who would "party and bullshit" before a revolution occurred.   Listen to Scott-Heron and to the Last Poets performing "When The Revolution Comes."   And do read Morris's article to gain a sense of the return of the defensive posture and regretful begging to the arenas of racial discourse. Morris (b. 1975), like many thinkers in his generation, is fascinated with the hegemony of the visual, and it is "normal" ( a word to be used with caution) for this younger generation to assume reconciliation is normal and that it can be televised.   Television is reality, is it not?   Of course it is.   But television...