poetry and the political

 

POETRY  & THE POLITICAL

 

"Have we begun to begin?"  Sensing an incompleteness of  the rhetorical , my friend responded "Again?" Don't ignore opportunity.  Revise. "Have we begun to begin again?"  "Again to begin have we begun?"Choice.  Compromise.  Indecision. So many tasks for the ancient future.

 

January 20

 

Amanda Gorman's voice takes poetry into the soul of President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

What is conjured up is Robert Frost at the John F. Kennedy inaugural.  Frost almost stole the show. Gorman asserted her right to possess the moment.

 

Robinette is a solid French name.  On a whim, I make it English ---Robin and the net in Sherwood Forest. Poetry lets you get away with anything.  Would President Biden attempt to use poetry to unify a broken nation?  Perhaps he might do so in Wonderland, but those he has vowed to lead do not live there.  So, we can walk backwards into Abraham Lincoln as if nineteenth century historical narratives could heal festering wounds. Historical narratives and lofty words have theoretical power, but systemic racism, fascist yearnings, and titanium hatred are not theoretical.  They are factual. Centuries of hurtful words must be tamed by new centuries of social actions and viable policies.  Those who believe in charity, hope, and faith look forward to a better day. I lack the patience to look for fictional "better days." The bad days of now consume my attention. Yes ,obviously  I write political poetry to awaken something or someone.

 

I AM NEW ORLEANS; 36 Poets Revisit Marcus Christian's Definitive Poem (New Orleans: Runagate Press/University of New Orleans Press, 2020) arrived in the afternoon mail.  This unique anthology is edited by Kalamu ya Salaam, who commissioned me to write the "Afterword."  Salaam included my poem "Genders and Genres."  I suspect the final lines of the poem constitute an act of terrorism ---

 

                                                "The theory of America---

hurricanes let nothing remain upon the earth except the ashes."

 

I don't know what readers will gain from reading those lines.  All that matters is that they gain something. A primal duty of poetry is to infect the mind and make resolution impossible.

 

January 21

 

Given the way news media tend to broadcast misinformation, it is logical that millions of American citizens think QAnon is in possession of inconvenient facts that are withheld from other millions of Americans.  Example ---the United States Senate is evenly divided.  If there are 50 Republicans, 48

Democrats, and 2 Independents in the Senate, the division isn't even.  It may be true that Independent Senators usually vote with Democrats, but belief they will always do so belongs to the same category of thought as the assumption that Black Americans are Democrats. The assumption is as bogus as the platitude that Truth is Beauty in a rather well-known British poem.

 

Early this morning, I was slightly chilled by Ezra Klein's New York Times op-ed "Democrats, Repeat After Me: Help People Fast."  Does Klein have to tell Republicans to repeat after him "I promise not to be a rabid fascist who tries to destroy Democracy  with overt and covert weapons of white supremacy."  The only help people will have in this nation is the help they make for themselves.  Klein and other colorless critics of American politics  should do the time-warp  ask an enslaved person in the 1621 what help was.

 

 

 

I have begun a new chapter in my reading life by exploring

 

Reed, Ishmael.  Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues: Poems, 2007-2020.  McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2020.

 

A few readers in my generation might compare one of Reed's famous poems "I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra" with his recent eruptions of pith and vernacular wisdom (essence of motherwit) and be renewed by his recombining of old cultural items with scientific gusto.  Afrofuturism is not a twenty-first century invention. Reed's Neo-HooDoo aesthetic was Afrofuture many years before the future opted to be Afro.

By combining aspects of quantum physics with referents to mythologies of everyday life, to  jazz and blues in poetic form, Reed manifests the saturation Stephen Henderson described so very well in Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (1973).  Perhaps younger students and teachers (those born in the 1990s) will discover a certain urgency in absorbing Henderson's speculations to see where Reed has always been coming from and where he is going in our current pandemic-threatened world. As Reginald Martin suggested in Ishmael Reed and the New Black Aesthetic Critics (1988), Reed's stalwart commitment to doing what he wants to do precludes his incarceration in "any sort of formalistic, critical structure" (49)  Reed  flows in cosmic actuality; he is not an object in the prison-house of reality that much of the West so abjectly adores.  The political thunder in all of his writing will not permit us to sleep in ignorance.  That is as it should be. His insights always help us (black holes)  to begin again to reject silence in our singing of our blues.  In her stellar introduction , Joyce Ann Joyce cites the book "as a conflation of Reed's acute ability to draw our infirmities into an imaginative web…forbidding our escape without contemplation that  leads to transformation" (xii).

 

 

A PERSONAL CODA------Reed is now a few years past 80.  If we remember our home-training, we remember our obligation to thank him for his genius, for  his being a beacon who has cared enough to promote critical cultural and political thinking for more than 50 years.  Now is the time to sing praise-songs for him while he can still appreciate the sounds.  Odes for our deceased national treasures have a place in the scheme of things, but notes of gratitude for our living treasures have a better place in the post-future we ought to be creating.  I urge people  to sing praise-songs by reading Reed's very impressive body of writing. the whole body. Reading against the grain of the status quo helps us to maintain sanity and humanity.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            January 22, 2021