Jerry Ward's Blogspot

    RECKONING IN THE TIME OF COVID-19   Harris-DeBerry, Kelly.   Freedom Knows My Name .   New Orleans: Xavier Review Press, 2020.     In the current discussions of non-hoax mythologies, of   art and social justice in the contexts of COVID-19, we are required to think about poetry and crisis or the poetic management of trauma.   The measurable outcomes of our reading poems is anecdotal not empirical; as is the case with our being chastened by   DeMaris B. Hill's A Bound Woman is a Dangerous Thing (2019), our willingness to be "corrected" is strictly a matter of an individual's tastes.   The success of Hill's work indicates she has readers who are alarmed or angry or both regarding America's continuing and historically complex abuse of black women.   We don't have sufficient information about American readers to say much beyond that.   No matter how much literary success is measured by book sales, we still l...

  Return to Orality   E. Ethelbert Miller's conversation with Whitney Fishburn   https://documental.substack.com/ p/ in-conversation-with-poet-e-ethelbert   is cool for its insights about poetry and policy, about contemporary   life in language.   For a very small number of my peers----stress very small ---the 21st century is drenched with bothersome,   barbaric and inevitable uses of language.   A fine description of our plight is Jean-Paul Sartre's NO EXIT. Our plight is worsened the White House's daily vomiting of lies, hoaxes, and perfected fascist rhetoric. The vomit   constantly erodes our ability to benefit from clear, critical thinking .    It denies that common sense thinking is a worthy goal. We carry the onus   The thin line between the actual   and reality is broken beyond repair, and that has been the case since before 2016.   Repair has no near-future.   Re-read or read ...

  Had President Barack Obama behaved at any point during his time in office like D. J. Trump, we'd be sitting on the ground and telling sad histories.  Obama would either have been assassinated or kicked out of office and sent to a hospital for the criminally insane.  Either action would have been taken in the name of national security.  Before 2017 democracy mattered.  According to Trump, democracy matters very little.  He defecates daily on the dignity of his office, successfully cheapening the value of American democracy.  It is hard to be a patriot in a shithouse nation. Read the novels of Ishmael Reed to get the picture. Coping with pandemic is difficult, but living in a dying democracy is an implacable horror.  It does not help that American news media and our Congress are incapable of saying in plain language that Trump is pathological. Only those of us who recognize how he has enabled the "rule of law" to become an instrument of fasci...

  15 questions posed by Sean Murphy, Executive Director of 1455/ a retreat from COVID-19 1.   The first book that made you want to be a writer? An anthology entitled THIS GENERATION . 2.    Your most profound artistic influence is? Reading Richard Wright and conversations with noteworthy makers of the Black Arts Movement. 3    Album or movie you recommend without reservation ? Casablanca 4.   Best first (or last) line of any book ever? "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." 5. Most underrated author? Kalamu ya Salaam 6.   Why have you not read MOBY DICK? I have read MOBY DICK. 7.   Is there a single theme or issue your work addresses? Implacable anger. 8. What 's your writing routine? Writing when the spirit moves me to do so. 9. Do you believe in writer's block? No.   I believe in writer's imperfection. 10.   Talk about the most significant setback   (artistic or otherwis...

      A GATHERING OF RADICAL SAGES   "That was the chief trouble with Jesus: He was a troublemaker.   So anytime you are a troublemaker and you rebel against the wrongs and injustices of society and organize against that, then what may happen to you is inevitable." Benjamin Mays in My Soul Is Rested (1977)     Time was when blatherskite made us nod our heads in unison; hymns swam in our veins as we watched indigo, cotton, cane, tobacco and corn kill our kin with profits to spare, and then some blatherskite made our brains its habitat, our mouths its loudspeaker.   Preach truth in the closets of time. Will us to defy the quicksand of alien beliefs.   Time is when blatherskite and amoral pandemics imperil motherwit, tempt us to forgive we who are we, abandon our vows to never forget the current killing of kin. Blame blatherskite for the melting of our minds.   Let us make us new rituals...

  The Dead/The Living   "Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the entire tide and direction of American culture.   Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it is felt to be wrong to admit him freely.   Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion." Richard Wright, "The Man Who Went to Chicago" in Eight Men   Mr. Wright, you have lit a match and set a fire in my mind.   When in the 1940 you annotated the 1930s, you spoke of a future, our future that is now a present.     What you say about the Negro (who now wears many names, some of them inscrutable) now applies to all of the organic parts or ethnicities   of the nation.   All the organic parts are simultaneously included and excluded, for...

  COVID SPEAKS TO THE WIND   I neither see nor hear   need for you   to be or not to be   I neither smell nor taste nor feel   reason   for you to exist.   9/22/2020 11:04:50 AM