poets and prophets

 

 

POETS & PROPHETS & INCONVENIENT PEOPLE

 

Poets and prophets do not tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  They are neither  "under oath" nor are they omniscient.  They are inconvenient people, as common and limited as we all are. They can share nothing more than slivers of what we think truth is, and they depend on our being intelligent enough to put slivers together as if we were connecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.  

 

When Woodie King and Earl Anthony edited Black Poets and Prophets: The Theory, Practice, and Esthetics of the Pan-Africanist Revolution (1972), they delivered a sliver of truth about cultural nationalism and the importance of nationalism of one kind or another in the evolving of cultures .Forty-eight years later, we are still dealing with slivers. Today, however, the pieces are colored by the pandemic-driven "new" normal, namely nonsense.  I have been justly accused of being a prophet of doom.  The accusation is a title of honor. Doom and dread are legitimate elements of  our humanity. I have yet to discover a reason to be silent about the dialectics of contradiction.

 

Nearly seventy years ago, Elizabeth Sewell (1919-2001), who had a lasting impact on my intellectual development as an undergraduate at Tougaloo College, published The Field of Nonsense (1952). Sewell had wonderful witty  insights about the relationship of mathematics, literature, and nonsense.  I need to re-read that book, because I need to discover the permutations of nonsense that are making real progress in dividing our nation under the cover of democratic entitlements. The guardians of capitalism spew nonsense like allegorical characters in Spenser's The Faerie Queene. We must  discover the extent of ongoing psychological damage as an American heritage.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            May 22, 2021

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