Jerry Ward's Blogspot

    RECKONING IN THE TIME OF COVID-19   Harris-DeBerry, Kelly.   Freedom Knows My Name .   New Orleans: Xavier Review Press, 2020.     In the current discussions of non-hoax mythologies, of   art and social justice in the contexts of COVID-19, we are required to think about poetry and crisis or the poetic management of trauma.   The measurable outcomes of our reading poems is anecdotal not empirical; as is the case with our being chastened by   DeMaris B. Hill's A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing (2019), our willingness to be "corrected" is strictly a matter of an individual's tastes.   The success of Hill's work indicates she has readers who are alarmed or angry or both regarding America's continuing and historically complex abuse of black women.   We don't have sufficient information about American readers to say much beyond that.   No matter how much literary success is measured by book sales, we still lack persuasive evidence   that rea

  Return to Orality   E. Ethelbert Miller's conversation with Whitney Fishburn   https://documental.substack.com/ p/ in-conversation-with-poet-e-ethelbert   is cool for its insights about poetry and policy, about contemporary   life in language.   For a very small number of my peers----stress very small ---the 21st century is drenched with bothersome,   barbaric and inevitable uses of language.   A fine description of our plight is Jean-Paul Sartre's NO EXIT. Our plight is worsened the White House's daily vomiting of lies, hoaxes, and perfected fascist rhetoric. The vomit   constantly erodes our ability to benefit from clear, critical thinking .    It denies that common sense thinking is a worthy goal. We carry the onus   The thin line between the actual   and reality is broken beyond repair, and that has been the case since before 2016.   Repair has no near-future.   Re-read or read   Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)   Re-read or re

  Had President Barack Obama behaved at any point during his time in office like D. J. Trump, we'd be sitting on the ground and telling sad histories.  Obama would either have been assassinated or kicked out of office and sent to a hospital for the criminally insane.  Either action would have been taken in the name of national security.  Before 2017 democracy mattered.  According to Trump, democracy matters very little.  He defecates daily on the dignity of his office, successfully cheapening the value of American democracy.  It is hard to be a patriot in a shithouse nation. Read the novels of Ishmael Reed to get the picture. Coping with pandemic is difficult, but living in a dying democracy is an implacable horror.  It does not help that American news media and our Congress are incapable of saying in plain language that Trump is pathological. Only those of us who recognize how he has enabled the "rule of law" to become an instrument of fascism can do the saying. We shoul

  15 questions posed by Sean Murphy, Executive Director of 1455/ a retreat from COVID-19 1.   The first book that made you want to be a writer? An anthology entitled THIS GENERATION . 2.    Your most profound artistic influence is? Reading Richard Wright and conversations with noteworthy makers of the Black Arts Movement. 3    Album or movie you recommend without reservation ? Casablanca 4.   Best first (or last) line of any book ever? "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." 5. Most underrated author? Kalamu ya Salaam 6.   Why have you not read MOBY DICK? I have read MOBY DICK. 7.   Is there a single theme or issue your work addresses? Implacable anger. 8. What 's your writing routine? Writing when the spirit moves me to do so. 9. Do you believe in writer's block? No.   I believe in writer's imperfection. 10.   Talk about the most significant setback   (artistic or otherwise) in your life? The impossibility

      A GATHERING OF RADICAL SAGES   "That was the chief trouble with Jesus: He was a troublemaker.   So anytime you are a troublemaker and you rebel against the wrongs and injustices of society and organize against that, then what may happen to you is inevitable." Benjamin Mays in My Soul Is Rested (1977)     Time was when blatherskite made us nod our heads in unison; hymns swam in our veins as we watched indigo, cotton, cane, tobacco and corn kill our kin with profits to spare, and then some blatherskite made our brains its habitat, our mouths its loudspeaker.   Preach truth in the closets of time. Will us to defy the quicksand of alien beliefs.   Time is when blatherskite and amoral pandemics imperil motherwit, tempt us to forgive we who are we, abandon our vows to never forget the current killing of kin. Blame blatherskite for the melting of our minds.   Let us make us new rituals out of old verities. Let us forge us

  The Dead/The Living   "Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the entire tide and direction of American culture.   Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it is felt to be wrong to admit him freely.   Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion." Richard Wright, "The Man Who Went to Chicago" in Eight Men   Mr. Wright, you have lit a match and set a fire in my mind.   When in the 1940 you annotated the 1930s, you spoke of a future, our future that is now a present.     What you say about the Negro (who now wears many names, some of them inscrutable) now applies to all of the organic parts or ethnicities   of the nation.   All the organic parts are simultaneously included and excluded, for time is enhanced the paradox

  COVID SPEAKS TO THE WIND   I neither see nor hear   need for you   to be or not to be   I neither smell nor taste nor feel   reason   for you to exist.   9/22/2020 11:04:50 AM

  UNDER THE COLOR OF MERCY   tua maxima culpa, mea culpa even now we are now even mea maxima culpa, tua culpa the devil in you corrupted the devil in me our hell on earth is paradise   9/21/20

  On the first issue of the Richard Wright News Bulletin (brief comments for Julia Wright, Malcolm Wright, and Maxime Desirat)   Dear Julia, In Volume 1, No. 1 (Spring 1991) of the Richard Wright Newsletter (RWN), you accepted the invitation "to become one of the founding members of the Richard Wright Circle," and you recommended that the Circle "extend its goals to a practical and dynamic insertion of Richard Wright's life, message and work into the mainstream of our Black community life and the nation's cultural centers of Black History."   Although the Circle and RWN have been hibernating since 2006, your founding of the Richard Wright News Bulletin (RWNB) resuscitates the work of inserting and remembering we originally intended. In Part One of RWNB, your phrase "the cruel imperfection of absence of closure" gains my passionate attention.   It is a fine reminder that closure , whether we are engaging your father's works or conte

  AMERICAN RITUAL   Shameless pandemic: cold barbwire flowers hanging, displayed like lynchings.   9/19/2020 5:32:44 AM

 v TERRORISM TOMORROW   COVID, most clever beyond cognition in restoring your virginity, in being the catholic iron maiden of now, in tormenting spirit's bone, skin, tissues, in spiking blood drops of self-regard.   Spirits, so wearied by yearnings which leak secrets which never were hidden from the mind, the minute-by-minute recordings of the mind.   Spirits suffer cruel, abject hope. pre-primitive pains, local knowledge erasing the bogus of the universal. the figment of actuality's truth.   9/16/2020 12:04:35 PM

    COVID TO POTUS (from the Book of Judas )   You know, do you not, Donald A. Pope was the king's dog at Kew? O.K., white boy, whose dog are you?   9/12/2020 9:26:42 AM

    September 11, 2001   our calendars burn:   the fires taste tragedy   in all our seasons.   9/11/2020

  BLIND SEERS   beware of Shambhala promises, traps blowing in the winds, burnt-flesh narratives baptized in kerosene, sagas of pet rednecks and pompous blue-white collars, tales thrice-told of jokes that are yokes; beware of knives which amputate feet before feet know they are missing; beware of henbane wax romancing eardrums to murder sound,   cross-wires in crucifixes; beware of histories which destroy the sanctity of lives.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             9/10/2020 6:52:12 AM

  Empathy in Mississippi 2020   As new and improved fascism ascents in   the United States of America, you might notice an increase in pleas for empathy.   For example, the Mississippi Humanities Council is currently seeking contributions to support its Anti-Racism Reading Shelf list.   According to Stuart Rockoff, MHC Executive Director, the list "includes contemporary Mississippi writers like Angie Thomas, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon, whose fiction and memoir help inspire empathy in White readers with their honest accounts of the experience of Black Americans" (email, September 8, 2020).   Why should anyone who knows anything about what has transpired in the State of Mississippi since 1817 believe a reading list will cultivate empathy?   How much empathy did a white Mississippian's reading of UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN or BLACK BOY produce? How many white Mississippians have cultivated genuine empathy from reading Margaret Walker,   Charlie Braxton, Sterling D. Plum

  WORK OF THE DAY   "When the tradition of struggle and remembrance breaks, the past is forgotten and the system triumphs." (113)   Kevin Powell, Who's Gonna Take the Weight?: Manhood, Race, and Power in America (2003)     They want volunteers for the testing of COVID-19 vaccines, and they ask "Why are those people not volunteering in great numbers?"   Highlight "those people," a phrase signaling that a systemic racial contract question has been asked.   It is not a mystery that those people do not hasten to be objects of experiments.   The majority of those people   just eschew probable stupidities as they remember and act to save their lives.   When dangers   appear in the ruins of an increasingly crumbling democracy, the wise refuse to be complicit self-destruction.   The wise remember   J. Marion Sims treating vaginal fistula in the bodies of enslaved women and his refusal to use anesthesia.   The Tuskegee "bad blood

  PANDEMIC REMARKS ON THE HOUSE OF PRESIDENT INSANE   "A man feared that he might find an assassin; Another that he might find a victim. One was more wise than the other."   Stephen Crane, The Black Rider and Other Lines , LVI     I resent President Insane, a certified draft-dodger, fixing his mouth to say women and men who have died in American   military battles are suckers and losers.   I am a Vietnam veteran and entitled to address these words to President Insane-------   Draftdodger, I will not cast the visual purple of my gaze in your snuff movie, witness the obscene grin of your wicked camera witnessing the unlovely surprised death agonies of that girl.   I am still in Vietnam, and it in me. I aim higher for the enemy. I aim to shatter the blue iris of your eye, Draftdodger.   I wrote these lines three decades ago, but they are not sufficient.   Resentment is not sufficient. Neither anger nor contempt is suffici

  COVID LOVES CONFUSION   Baby mama, baby daddy, baby baby--- ghosts of an enslaved history   Mystery   knows who is daddy and mystery will not snitch   9/4/2020 2:59:23 PM

  Richard Wright’s Spinning of Tales                         Spiders and writers intrigue us with their spinning of artful designs.   The spiders, of course, often get more immediate rewards than writers or storytellers for their labors.   What they may happily catch can be consumed and transformed into more material for spinning.   Storytellers and writers, no matter how great the attention they capture, must often wait much longer for rewards to come.   The spider’s delicate art is easily destroyed; the storyteller’s or writer’s art gets preserved in memory, in print, or in this new century on disks and websites. The question that interests me is at once simple and difficult to answer: what drives the storyteller’s imagination that creates the design?                 The wording and syntax of that question is slightly askew, because the ambiguity is necessary to keep in motion a long-range project on the mind of Richard Wright, an extensive inspection of the ebb and flow

  September 4, 1908------September 4, 2020         It is September, The month in which I was born; And I have no thoughts .   Richard Wright, Haiku 508   The "I" in the poem invites readers to think differently about time and memory.   Usually we think about   our birthdays as moments of celebration.   It is uncommon to assert, as does the third line of the haiku, that the expected celebration is displaced by a surprising confession about an absence of thoughts.   Wright jolts us out of complicity with expectations we assume to be normal and punches us with his emotional truth.   All birthdays are not happy occasions, and some of them may lead us to believe we "have no thoughts."   The poem is one of many warnings   Wright issued in the final months of his life. His   inscription of emotional truth in Haiku 508 is subversive: the writing of a poem is evidence we can't escape thoughts.   In 2020, it is difficult to   escape thinking about w