Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  MISSISSIPPI 1923   The Purple Heart hangs on a limb with tatters of Army uniform and pieces of once supremely white flesh and bones burned to pristine carbon.   elo nam ni noom   Funny, is it not that Mississippi history books fail to notice   American tragedies change their masks from time to time?   nam ni noom si elo     Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             October 28, 2020  

  In the 1940s There was no need of a clock to tell you what your body told you to expect: the afternoon arrival of the Good Humor man with your chocolate-coated treat.   When you have parents who know the exact moment a voice will ask and answer -------   "Who know what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows."   you happily live in the shadow of radio, your private Inner Sanctum for the alone and ignorantly   innocence, and you fear no evil as you   enter the Inner Sanctum in the mystery of your radio, in the sanctuary of a child's aloneness.   Your father, more brilliant than he admitted, favored Amos 'n Andy. Your mother, more blessed with virtue than she dared claim, got whatever she got from Our Gal Sunday, Stella Dallas, and Just Plain Bill.   you happily live in the shadow of radio, in the tutoring of science fiction Saturdays, the paralysis of Perry Mason, the crime and...

  PROPAGATION OF HISTORY AND FAITH   DuBois, W. E. B.   Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 . (1935; New York: The Free Press, 1998).   Dr. DuBois knew what was problematic about his revisionist history in Black Reconstruction .   He made his intentions clear in his note "To The Reader" (December 1934).   His ideal audience consisted of people who believed a black person in America "and in general is an average and ordinary human being, who under given environment develops like other human beings…"   DuBois was not trying to convince those who regarded " the Negro as a distinctly inferior creation, who can never successfully take part in modern civilization…"   Indeed, the Negro, in my mind at least, is the chief architect of civilization.   Is it only a matter of accident that Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro was published   two years before Black Reconstruction ?   No.   It wasn't an accide...

  LANGUAGES AS COVID-19 SOUNDS   Spinning counter-clockwise in non-existing winds spinning in absent spaces, we are feeling the end-moment of languages, exquisite traumas devoid of names. Is it that languages do not absolutely ever fail --- pandemics and worse crises notwithstanding periods of minimal disorder? Gross error to talk of peace, the comfort that denies being until   missing from ourselves we pulsate in arcane physics.   Nabilac Caliban did suss profit, the ultimate injury of insult. The comfort that denies being is a failure to cleanse ourselves of obtuse emotions, the insanity of we shall overcome one day, a day that has no intention of arriving. Our   ancestors knew as much. They command us not to fail our languages.   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.             10/25/2020 5:54:46 AM

  THE OFFICE OF THE POEM IN CRISIS   With its Whitmanesque imperative and sweep of sounds, Daniel Borzutzky's "Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018" models the pros and cons of what the poet calls "the artistic commodification of suffering."   The possibility that writers are often complicit in such a capitalist enterprise is as ancient as The Epic of Gilgamesh   and as new as poems that honor many victims of   police insanity in the United States.   The Western tradition abounds with works that elevate violence and death   above the dirt upon which tragedies are enacted.   The word "massacre" shows its obscenity to best advantage when it is located in a family relationship with "genocide."   If you discern an echo in Borzutzky's poem of "Bars Fight" by Lucy Terry, you no doubt   know that random massacres   in our nation are less random than they seem.   The horror is betrayed in the liberal construction of America...

  E-70 Project /jww   I was introduced to E. Ethelbert Miller by Ahmos Zu-Bolton in 1974, and that was the beginning of an interesting friendship.   While I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia (1974-77), I had many opportunities to visit friends in Washington, DC and to have conversations with Ethelbert.   Many a Sunday we conversed over pancakes.   We recorded some radio book reviews with Dr Eleanor Traylor and collaborated with Zu-Bolton on magazine editing projects. As director of Howard University's African American Studies Resource Center, he was an energetic collector of contemporary materials on Diasporic literature and culture,   and he worked with Stephen E. Henderson in organizing black writers' conferences at Howard.   If anyone makes a rigorous study of those conferences, that researcher will discover how instrumental Ethelbert was in promoting critical thinking about literature, politics, and culture.   Servin...

    A PERMANENT SENSE OF AMERICAN CRISES   The unholy trinity (COVID-19, chaos, and climate change) and various forms of instant communication maximize our sense of crisis in minds and bodies.    Crisis has a long, vexed history in the U.S.A.   It was, is, and will be inevitable in our daily lives.   American alacrity for believing that crisis is "normal" ought to give us pause.   When MLA President Judith Butler tells us that "[t]he crisis of the humanities is all around us, proclaimed by the popular press and suffered perhaps most acutely by our graduate students in their bones" ( MLA Newsletter 52.1 (Spring 2020): 2, I immediately think of how government   divides and conquers the humanities and the sciences, how the State works 24/7/365 to keep the American public in confusion and to maximize animosity among citizens.   Graduate students do not suffer more acutely than the unemployed or   elders or the   people t...