Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  THE ENDS OF APRIL (random thoughts on Friday)   Pandemic is a poor reason for becoming an alcoholic.   It is a fantastic excuse for being a wino.   According to the Corporate Internship Leadership Institute, college students are commodities. Ah, capitalism, I need x-ray eyeglasses to read you , to read how human beings are traded on Wall Street.   Pandemic makes me aware of confinement and duration.   When I was very young, time moved like molasses.   A week did not pass quickly.   It waddled along   like a Peabody Hotel duck.   When I taught college courses, Fridays were special.   They marked the beginning of weekend relief. Pandemic makes Fridays advents of anxiety.   Time and my body are rushing me to a terminal.   The journey to casket or coffin or an undistinguished hole in the ground would not be so bad if COVID-19 did not exist, if pandemic did not limit my options.   These days I wear a ma...

  PRESIDENT BIDEN AND   CHAOS REVISITED   President Biden's April 28 address to a joint session of Congress was as surreal as Revelation. Biden is a man of color who tries desperately to represent millions of Americans who believe they have no color.   He was on point in using crisis and opportunity as keywords in his address.   There was accidental humor in his saying "Now we're on Mars, discovering vaccines…."   We are not on Mars.   A very expensive investigating device is on Mars.   We, the American people, are not discovering anti-COVID vaccines; a small population of scientists are doing that work.   Mr. President be more cautious.   Do not expose your Achilles heel to your sworn enemies foreign and domestic.   It is as easy for President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to create a bipartisan consensus   about anything as it was for Tantalus to pluck a bunch of grapes.   [quick correction ----consensus about anything ...

 v THE JOY OF READING ZHENG'S HAIBUN   Zheng, Jianqing.   A Way of Looking .   Eugene, Oregon: Silverfish Review Press, 2021. ISBN:   978-1-878851-7-27   $18.00   Jianqing Zheng's A Way of Looking , winner of the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Award, draws upon his expertise as a modern poet and his exceptional skills as a photographer to record what transpires as he travels back and forth between China, his native land, and the Mississippi Delta, his adopted home. The form he has chosen for describing the journeying is haibun, the prosimetric literary form popularized in Japan by Matsuo Bash ō , a haiku master who wrote prolifically about his physical and spiritual journeys. What is quite special about reading Zheng's haibun is what they reveal to us about poetry anchored in blendings of prose and verse.   The best instances of haibun produce harmony between image-laden prose and the image-conservation of haiku.   The expansive and the con...

  LATE REVELATIONS (   for C. Liegh McInnis   )   you, my good and honest friend, expose as other poets would not dare that so-called white parents fed their children to exercise machines.   you, my good and honest friend, expose as other poets would not dare that bereft of mammies so-called white parents feed their children to exercise machines.   you, my good and honest friend, expose how reprehensible and unfit so-called white parents deploy alien privileges feeding their children to exercise machines.     Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             April 26, 2021    

 LANGUAGE STOLEN FROM LEWIS GRANDISON ALEXANDER   Life goes by moving. My soul is the wind listening to the rain, knowing not at all how the nightingale sings.   I shall purchase my mood. Did you say a sound? Moon of today my ears burn for speech; they look at the white moon.   Is thought that is not thought the poetry of life? I swim down the stream treading wearily within the shadow.   My heart like a shell is bathing in life's fountain. I will wrap the song. No words speak; otherwise why should I wander?   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            April 25, 2021 LANGUAGE STOLEN FROM LEWIS GRANDISON ALEXANDER   Life goes by moving. My soul is the wind listening to the rain, knowing not at all how the nightingale sings.   I shall purchase my mood. Did you say a sound? Moon of today my ears burn for speech; they look at the white ...

    PANDEMIC AND CURIOSITY   Pandemic has multiplied our fears and uncertainties.   It has deepened curiosity about all the bio-cultural factors which have changed either slowly or swiftly in the millions of years of human evolving.   Curiosity demands satisfaction.     The New York Review of Books is one   American   magazine that tries to dignify the pursuit of curiosity without pandering to the soi-disant elitism of The New Yorker or the flippancy that too often mars the offerings of The Atlantic . All three magazines target readers who possess   more than merely functional literacy.   It is probable that radical, anti-intellectual conservatives have severe disdain for all three.   It is probable   that radical, intellectual liberals overrate their virtues. Those who prefer to   read in a centrist twilight zone might more readily turn to Democracy: A Journal of Ideas .   Ideology and taste govern...

 v The Mirage of JUSTICE                   A small portion of our nation exhaled when the verdict was announced.   Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd.   It was normal to exhale and then take in a moment of free air, of breath.   Exhaling in relief was normal.   Celebrating was not.   At least it was not normal for me.   I shall not participate in the obscenity of a celebration.     Normal   was the bitter taste that the ghost of JUSTICE left on my tongue.   The taste was three times more bitter than Guinness Extra Stout.   It is appropriate to sing praises for ancestral ghosts.   It is an abomination to celebrate   a ghost named JUSTICE in America, because the whole history of the nation was and continues to be the worship of unholy ghosts.             ...

  WHEN A WRITER DIES sympathy conjugates impossibility, the mourning in total silence// you are too kind in allowing hyperbole to murder grief // the fated dancer is the fatal dance// old folk say DEATH IS AND DEATH AIN’T// yes, you know as well as I exaggeration is a perfect eraser of difference as piety extracts one word after another .   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             April 18, 2021  

  THE BITTER EARTH: A   SATIRE FROM A FUTURE   Conversations with friends during pandemic terrorism convinced us that paradoxes and contradictions bloomed when the Something of the Universe planted human life on Earth.   The Something, a mercurial power, endowed humans with the ability to stupid (and superbly evil) and the ability to be wise (and remarkably good) ;   the Something gave them the power to love   infinite confusion. According to the few surviving Dead Sea Scrolls, human beings succeeded in liberating themselves from the curse of being human. Thanks to drugs and technological innovations. they evolved into blissful robots who held misery to be the highest good. The Something was not pleased.   The Something un-created the bitter Earth, erased the speed of light, and initiated the Era of the Black W(hole).   We are skeptical of sacred twaddle, of disinformation concerning the End of Time.   Time has not yet ended.   None ...

  Today is Friday, a day for flounder to fly and wrens to swim in warm waters. Is a day also to celebrate that Tougaloo College will give an honorary doctorate to Torkwase Dyson, a brilliant artist whom I had the pleasure of teaching. What a special moment it was to attend her lecture on her exhibit "Black Compositional Thought: 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene" at the New Orleans Museum of Art, January 2020.   Pandemic has ruined the quality of life, but it can't ruin the quality of remembering what Torkwase Dyson has donated to humanity, what many of my former students now contribute to life.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             April 16, 2021

 v Our cultural bridges are valuable   A few days ago, a Chinese colleague expressed surprise that a few African Americans owned slaves before the end of the Civil War.   He considered THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P. Jones to be an exceptional case of black writing about black humanity.   The cases are not unknown; they are for not so obvious reasons just rarely spoken about in the vast commentaries on American slavery.   Most often we regret and refuse to talk about the obscene. Yet, the obscene talks endlessly   about us.   The cultural bridges we have sought to maintain between ourselves and our Chinese comrades are paths on which we experience shocks of recognition.   I suggested to my comrade that he should read Carter G. Woodson's 1924 essay on free Negro owners of slaves,   Larry Koger's   Black Slaveowners (1985) and Thomas J. Pressly's "The Known World of Free Black Slaveholders," Journal of African American History ...

 v RADIANT GRAVES   On Moonlight Eve the graves sparkle. The dead arise to celebrate their lives.   And during pandemic our conversations pivot evermore on the unknown, the unsaid and unsung, the unkindness of histories.   The dead have powers the living do not imagine.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             April 12, 2021  

  Morning Notes for the Day In some discussions of literature and culture, people put Text A "in conversation" with Text B. Despite temporary moments of anger, I find comfort in conversations with relatives and friends, conversations that are not metaphors.   Even the reductive conservations by email provide comfort and assurance.   I assume people who put one segment of print in conversation with another also find a degree of comfort in what they are doing.   I would not claim they are not manufacturing useful knowledge. I am, however, old fashioned and increasingly fixed in my opinions.   I try to obtain meaningful insights by comparing Text A with Text B, but I refuse to put them in conversation.   The only conversation I can find valid is the silent conversation in my mind. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                          ...

  Calling Out April   Damn, April, since pandemic you are abjectly randy, contaminating the virtue of vowels hastily doping consonants on a worn path, scorching ears of jig-saw people, singing with malice "Ha, ha, niddle-nony, they some Potemkin Stupid, ha, ha"   When the puzzle is solved, May will un-oyster you.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             April 6, 2021

  A GRITTY TRUTH During an Easter Sunday conversation with   a former student, he suggested we have to deal with the grim truth of 2021.   I told him I would appropriate his words and change them to "a gritty truth or a grimy truth."   I settled for gritty, because it is more abrasive than grimy.   Deal with the gritty truth of DuBois'   less-than-original "   term "double consciousness."   Writers have worn the term to a frazzle.   I am post-weary of all that lazy-butt palaver. So, I write with the fire that transforms chalk into charcoal   So-called white people are existentially condemned to deal with the evidence of the mirror.   Look.   The mirror   speaks evidence of your self-authorized double consciousness.   The tension between your desire to be human and your brazen desire to be white   is obvious, even to the blind. Enjoy limbo.   It shall disappear soon than you imagined. Behold a grimy...

  COMPLIMENT FROM A FRIEND   He wrote that I prompted "students to understand the true objectifying nature of pornography, the innate nature of human beings to fetishize the grotesque and the link between violence and sexuality, especially as it relates to white fetishizing of the black body."   My next task is to prompt someone to photogram/graph the non-existence of the body of no color. The task is not hard if one uses the weapon power of the word.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             April 2, 2021

  Pandemic Remembers   In 1951, Holy Week and Easter Sunday rewarded my Lenten sacrifices.  After sweating out venial sins in the hot box of the confessional, I was prepared for bits of joy that seemed enormous -----new clothes (do you remember the pride of looking good in whatever your small town called an Easter Parade?); the seasonal Latin hymns at church and spiffy songs on the radio; great food (love went into the making of the ham, the potato salad with homemade mayonnaise, the ice cream in flavors no store ever had, the special cookies and cakes from well-guarded recipes).  My cousins taught me the art of spit-polishing my shoes and how to use heel-dressing properly.  Gone are those days when the poorest of us kept up appearances. All I see now are thousands of people who look like battered, discarded toys and think trash is a matter of good taste.  In 2021, Holy Week and Easter Sunday only provide reason to weep for all my relatives and friends ...