Jerry Ward's Blogspot

LUNAR   INFLUENCE #1 I live in metaphor as day lives in night, work, make minor miracles when I pray so as not to plague you with evil thoughts as if I were a paragon of American insanity. #2 She claimed to be Adam's mate and rib but made skin sin in their crib Begged no pardon in the rose garden as she gulped forbidden knowledge In a moment of fatal curiosity she serviced demons everywhere. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             April 4, 2020

A FOOL'S DAY "Triage the golden misrule of law." From The Obsidian Anthology of Fear [[It]], a paragon of genders and genres   never invented, [[is]]. Isn't   a four-cornered mouth a perfect allegory of treason murdering reason, the cruel politics of poetry as a supreme image? Perhaps coronavirus and another omens have come to beam the anthropocene through impeachment of space, or a verdict of time. [[It]], a sacred gift from elsewhere, [[is]]. At last we are free to admit we never knew what death really is. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             April 1, 2020

    The Crisis of   Reading the African American Novel The idea   that we have a crisis of reading the novel, regardless of how the text is located in our culture, is at once an absolute lie and a relative truism.   A crisis of reading parallels the threadbare crisis of the humanities. It is at best   an affective   way of speaking about fears, cowardice, Afrofuture fantasy and confusions.   Truth be told, the race- and ethnic-marked crisis of reading is at bottom a failure to identify contemporary   novels which can be as mind-opening   as Richard Wright's Native Son Octavia Butler's Kindred , Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima ,   N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn , Ann Petry's The Street , John Oliver Killens' 'Sippi , Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo , Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God or Toni Morrison's   The Bluest Eye .   It seems our post-whatever novelists are more incarcerated in their egos...

New Orleans, LA                                                       OPEN LETTER TO C. LIEGH MCINNIS February 26, 2020 Dear C. Liegh, Before I comment on your defense of Richard Wright, I quote cogent lines from popular song---- What's love got to do, got to do with it? What's love but a second-hand emotion? Tina Turner Nobody loves you but your mother, And she might be lying too. B. B. King Love is strange.   Much of the music that informs African American literature is saturated with commentary on love, and it helps to shape belief that love is   most genuine when two people are true to one another.   She or he who claims to love several million ...

Black Boy at 75/ Native Son at 80 Richard Wright's gifts to world literature, to borrow verbs made famous by another native son of Mississippi, endure and prevai l.   They do so because at each stage of his career, from his   proletarian verse and prose of the 1930's to his enormous outpouring of haiku and his final novel A Father's Law at the time of his death in 1960,   Wright raised essential questions. Such questions defy conclusive answers.   They invite responses.   They engender new questions which beget a new generation of responses.   Wright's legacy is marked by secular immortality and the infinite gestures of the human mind. For me, the publication of the 75th anniversary edition of Black Boy is a reminder of how important   are the closing words of his autobiography ----"I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fi...

THEM/THOSE SAVAGES "When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages --hate them   to the death." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Look, and say can you see what you must see in the darkness of the heart. Does hating them, those savages dispensing venom, divisions, vices, perpetual discord, constitutional pains, ever suffice, ever resolve the tyranny of misery? Can terror be brought or bought to civilize a savage mind? No doubt, in the lurid murdering of democracy, terror has purpose.--- judicious battle of hell balm with the holy water of heaven, the telos of the floral rainbow. Make correct entries in the vortex of eternal violence. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             2/23/2020 9:00:00 PM

EVERY BODY'S OBITUARY Be still. Grow. Fashion the anthropocene. Decline. Die Become the dirt whence you came to renew the Earth. Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             2/11/2020 7:33:28 AM .