Jerry Ward's Blogspot

  THE ENDS OF APRIL (random thoughts on Friday)   Pandemic is a poor reason for becoming an alcoholic.   It is a fantastic excuse for being a wino.   According to the Corporate Internship Leadership Institute, college students are commodities. Ah, capitalism, I need x-ray eyeglasses to read you , to read how human beings are traded on Wall Street.   Pandemic makes me aware of confinement and duration.   When I was very young, time moved like molasses.   A week did not pass quickly.   It waddled along   like a Peabody Hotel duck.   When I taught college courses, Fridays were special.   They marked the beginning of weekend relief. Pandemic makes Fridays advents of anxiety.   Time and my body are rushing me to a terminal.   The journey to casket or coffin or an undistinguished hole in the ground would not be so bad if COVID-19 did not exist, if pandemic did not limit my options.   These days I wear a ma...

  PRESIDENT BIDEN AND   CHAOS REVISITED   President Biden's April 28 address to a joint session of Congress was as surreal as Revelation. Biden is a man of color who tries desperately to represent millions of Americans who believe they have no color.   He was on point in using crisis and opportunity as keywords in his address.   There was accidental humor in his saying "Now we're on Mars, discovering vaccines…."   We are not on Mars.   A very expensive investigating device is on Mars.   We, the American people, are not discovering anti-COVID vaccines; a small population of scientists are doing that work.   Mr. President be more cautious.   Do not expose your Achilles heel to your sworn enemies foreign and domestic.   It is as easy for President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. to create a bipartisan consensus   about anything as it was for Tantalus to pluck a bunch of grapes.   [quick correction ----consensus about anything ...

 v THE JOY OF READING ZHENG'S HAIBUN   Zheng, Jianqing.   A Way of Looking .   Eugene, Oregon: Silverfish Review Press, 2021. ISBN:   978-1-878851-7-27   $18.00   Jianqing Zheng's A Way of Looking , winner of the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Award, draws upon his expertise as a modern poet and his exceptional skills as a photographer to record what transpires as he travels back and forth between China, his native land, and the Mississippi Delta, his adopted home. The form he has chosen for describing the journeying is haibun, the prosimetric literary form popularized in Japan by Matsuo Bash ō , a haiku master who wrote prolifically about his physical and spiritual journeys. What is quite special about reading Zheng's haibun is what they reveal to us about poetry anchored in blendings of prose and verse.   The best instances of haibun produce harmony between image-laden prose and the image-conservation of haiku.   The expansive and the con...

  LATE REVELATIONS (   for C. Liegh McInnis   )   you, my good and honest friend, expose as other poets would not dare that so-called white parents fed their children to exercise machines.   you, my good and honest friend, expose as other poets would not dare that bereft of mammies so-called white parents feed their children to exercise machines.   you, my good and honest friend, expose how reprehensible and unfit so-called white parents deploy alien privileges feeding their children to exercise machines.     Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                             April 26, 2021    

 LANGUAGE STOLEN FROM LEWIS GRANDISON ALEXANDER   Life goes by moving. My soul is the wind listening to the rain, knowing not at all how the nightingale sings.   I shall purchase my mood. Did you say a sound? Moon of today my ears burn for speech; they look at the white moon.   Is thought that is not thought the poetry of life? I swim down the stream treading wearily within the shadow.   My heart like a shell is bathing in life's fountain. I will wrap the song. No words speak; otherwise why should I wander?   Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            April 25, 2021 LANGUAGE STOLEN FROM LEWIS GRANDISON ALEXANDER   Life goes by moving. My soul is the wind listening to the rain, knowing not at all how the nightingale sings.   I shall purchase my mood. Did you say a sound? Moon of today my ears burn for speech; they look at the white ...

    PANDEMIC AND CURIOSITY   Pandemic has multiplied our fears and uncertainties.   It has deepened curiosity about all the bio-cultural factors which have changed either slowly or swiftly in the millions of years of human evolving.   Curiosity demands satisfaction.     The New York Review of Books is one   American   magazine that tries to dignify the pursuit of curiosity without pandering to the soi-disant elitism of The New Yorker or the flippancy that too often mars the offerings of The Atlantic . All three magazines target readers who possess   more than merely functional literacy.   It is probable that radical, anti-intellectual conservatives have severe disdain for all three.   It is probable   that radical, intellectual liberals overrate their virtues. Those who prefer to   read in a centrist twilight zone might more readily turn to Democracy: A Journal of Ideas .   Ideology and taste govern...

 v The Mirage of JUSTICE                   A small portion of our nation exhaled when the verdict was announced.   Derek Chauvin was found guilty of murdering George Floyd.   It was normal to exhale and then take in a moment of free air, of breath.   Exhaling in relief was normal.   Celebrating was not.   At least it was not normal for me.   I shall not participate in the obscenity of a celebration.     Normal   was the bitter taste that the ghost of JUSTICE left on my tongue.   The taste was three times more bitter than Guinness Extra Stout.   It is appropriate to sing praises for ancestral ghosts.   It is an abomination to celebrate   a ghost named JUSTICE in America, because the whole history of the nation was and continues to be the worship of unholy ghosts.             ...