Jerry Ward's Blogspot

A POEM FOR SAINT ARETHA Not anymore do we know or feel anything other than precious memories born the day you died, the flames of sound which illuminate what's in the dark and dry its dankness. Not anymore do we knock on doors, tap on window panes. The past that lives forever is a comfort, an instruction of respect for tenderness, a balm for ears grown weary of endless, unelected struggling. Your giving the time of day for decades to the air we take as the gift you intended, the gems of purpose that ever sparkle in golden caskets of a soul, of a sound. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             November 2, 2018

For Neworld Review November 1, 2018 Hayes, Terrance.   To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight .   Seattle: Wave Books, 2018. From the "Acknowledgments" section of this book, page 205, you learn that "The Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry supports contemporary poets as they explore in-depth their own thinking on poetry and poetics, and give a series of lectures resulting from these investigations." Terrance Hayes is a contemporary poet, a MacArthur fellow (2014) and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets (2017).   He is gifted, prized and credentialed to speak about American poetry. As an arrangement of his Bagley Wright lectures, Hayes's book is a walking tour in the republic of American letters, a bagatelle for the super-literate and a wonderment, a puzzling,   for readers who insist on occupying less elevated groundings.   The book   gives an ...

Cinematic Interrogation Accidents of opportunity have made this a week of self-interrogation. Monday, October 22 ---"Cane River" (1982) forced you to meditate on your color and blood-talk documented Creole ancestry Friday, October 26 --"Dry" (2014) invited you to think about vesicovaginal fistula in Nigeria and what many African Americans quite too easily trivialize and romanticize about their print-documented ancestry Accidents of chance have made this a week of reflection and refraction. Do you want to holler, to make sounds no one shall hear?   Do you want to take a vow of silence, to expose uncertainty to the multi-angled,   ironic gazes of the disinterested world in which you live? Triage isn't exactly an easy task, is it? ii It is enough ( necessary and sufficient )   to say that cinema is a tool for witnessing.   For awkward confession.   What follows the visual ending of a film is the advent of torment....

Rereading Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye When you are past sixty-five, the radicalism of your youth may turn into regret . One advantage of age, however, is being able to remember what were crucial issues in the USA fifty or more years ago. Of course, you can   tell convincing lies about "the good old days."   You can prevaricate with gusto and count at the end of the day how many red herrings you were able to sell.   If those who listen to you are very young and have not developed the skills needed to segregate fact from fiction, they quite likely believe your tales are true.   They may be too preoccupied with the troubles of now to fact-check your statements about a better time in America's history. They are little aware that you are lying with a purpose in a tradition that novelists cherish, a tradition quite easily co-opted and imitated in sinister discourses. When societies and cultures hold fict...

HUMBLY APPROACHING                 (for Asili Ya Nadhiri) We journey humbly   in ostracized day and discarded night, in space/time where Dedekind cuts   preclude truth as you say you know it. We know how death condemns a spendthrift spirit. We keep company with humility. Humbly, we keep it real, alive, perhaps overmuch aware when necessity   questions quintessential answers. Humbly, we deploy fibs to murder ignorance, lies being the tools we have yet to master. We entertain the minimal. We fellowship with the rebuked, the scorned. Humbly, we are taught by the tried and sentenced, the incarcerated and condemned. Theirs are prescient minds they are not entitled to waste. We taste their bitter sweetness. Humbly, we prey to be made small by stone, by light, by what is worthy...

VIEWING CANE RIVER Monday, October 22, 2018, was a special day in the year-long celebration of three hundred years of history in New Orleans, because we had the privilege of seeing a remarkable instance of black film in the history of cinema in the United States of America.   We saw Horace Jenkins's Cane River (1982), a major feature of the 29th New Orleans Film Festival (NOFF) at   the Contemporary Arts Center.   There is nothing unique in the fact that African Americans have written, directed, and produced film. We need only remember the pioneering work in independent film of   Oscar Devereaux   Micheaux (1884-1951), who wrote, produced , and/or directed more than 44 films, classics in the visual reproduction of race, or of William Greaves (1926-2014) who produced more than 200 documentaries and whose Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968) illuminated post-modernity before the post-modern was born.   The contemporary filmmakers we applaud-...

Mr. Ramcat's Vulgar-flavored   Verse Dump all the trumps on the table. Roger them until they are able to come to their diverse senses of their moral/mortal consequences. J. W. Ward, Jr.    October 14, 2018.