innovative poetry

INNOVATIVE POETRY

It is noteworthy that

Nielsen, Aldon Lynn and Lauri Ramey, eds. What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America.

Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015.

and

Coval, Kevin, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall,eds. The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop.  Chicago: Haymarket, 2015.

should be published just before a long, hot summer swings in.

It is noteworthy that

The cover art for one anthology comes from Untitled…Negro Mythos Series by Hebru Brantley; the cover art for the other, from Anna Everett’s early 1970s mural on a “wall of Lafayette High School in Buffalo, New York.”

It is noteworthy that

These anthologies may relegate

Rowell, Charles Henry, ed. Angle of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.

to a status of discrepant engagement that is yearning for …….oh, well, read Amiri Baraka’s review “A Post-Racial Anthology?” at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/245846

It is noteworthy that

These anthologies send us on a mission of tackling difficult w(hole)s, namely, making comparisons with

Powell, Kevin and Ras Baraka,eds. In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young Black Writers. New York: Harlem River Press, 1992.

and

Medina, Tony, Samiya A. Bashir, and Quraysh Ali Lansana, eds. Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art. Chicago: Third World Press, 2002.

It is noteworthy that

Douglas Kearney has work on pages 86-92 of What I Say and pages 117-126 of The BreakBeat Poets; if you want to read the innovative poetry of Kalamu ya Salaam, Asili Ya Nadhiri, or Lenard D. Moore, turn to

Jahannes, Ja A., ed. Black Gold: An Anthology of Black Poetry. Savannah: Turner Mayfield Publishing, 2014.

It is noteworthy that

All of these anthologies want me to answer a singular (c.i.a.n.s.a.) question: WHAT CRITERIA MUST A POEM SATISFY TO BE CALLED INNOVATIVE?

It is noteworthy that

I shall eventually provide an answer.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 10, 2015

C. P. Snow and Three Cultures

C. P. Snow and Three Cultures

Several weeks ago, I sent questions to a few friends.

 Why do we know so much about African American writers and so little about African American scientists?  Who talks about Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ruth Ella Moore, Mae Jemison, Euphemia Lofton Haynes, and Sylvester James Gates, Jr.?

Some of the responses were illuminating.  One friend who is a librarian knew Tyson, Moore, and Jemison.  Another, who is a medical doctor, proposed that people fear mathematics and think science is too hard. A rather surprising answer came from a poet who holds that scientists don’t know as much about literature as writers know about science.  The most intriguing response came from a highly acclaimed literary scholar and cultural theorist.  He said that I was playing a Sunday morning game as if I were moderating an Oxford Union debate and that Tyson’s popularizing of scientific ideas compromised his trustworthiness as a scientist. Damn. If asking a question is now the equivalent of being on a television show, so be it.

  These responses inspired me to revisit C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959).  Less than a day after rereading Snow, Lee McIntyre’s article “The Attack on Truth” appeared in the online Chronicle Review, June 8, 2015.

(http://chronicle.com/article/The-Attack-on-Truth/230631)  Two friends with whom I shared the article slammed McIntyre for publishing bullshit, for being ignorant about the history of literary theory, and for being tendentious in claiming some conservatives have borrowed postmodern rhetoric for the sake of disputing “inconvenient” scientific facts.  They are right, of course, but I am still amused that McIntyre imitates Snow without specifying Snow’s political and ideological motives for writing about easily observable habits attributed to disciplines.

McIntyre, a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, will publish his book Respecting Truth: Willful ignorance in the Internet Age this month with Routledge. If “The Attack on Truth” is a synecdoche, it is probable that some reviews of his book will be less than kind.  Had he used Peter Dear’s The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) or Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) as templates for examination of ignorance and wisdom, McIntyre might have secured more credibility.

Like some of his intellectual peers, Sir Charles Snow was very much a man of the West, the British-inflected West, and his fears about minimal communication between “the men of science and the rest of us” were genuine in the late 1950s.  He feared that the Russian Communists had the edge on Britain and the United States in training scientists and engineers, people whom he deemed less racist and paternalistic than most Europeans and Americans who intervened in the affairs of Asia and Africa. The rest of us might at that time have included George Padmore, Richard Wright, and participants in the 1955 Bandung Conference who were thinking beyond science and literature toward a third culture, a culture of actions which is neither Western nor Communist in the purest sense. Snow was not prophetic enough, cosmopolitan enough, to behold the future which he hoped to influence.  Few human beings are capable of triple consciousness.

To his credit, Snow did recognize the treachery of unmitigated binary thinking, for he wrote:

The number 2 is a very dangerous number: that is why the dialectic is a dangerous process.  Attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded with much suspicion. I have thought a long time about going in for further refinements: but in the end I have decided against.  I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right, and subtilising any more would  bring more disadvantages than it’s worth. (10)

Snow should have proposed that the number 3 is less dangerous than 2.  Dialectic does involve three basic gestures, does it not?  If dialectic is tempered by ethics, particularly in social and political discussions, its results do not always reduce us to disadvantages. Snow did have the modesty to know that his idea of two cultures had “to be regarded with much suspicion.”

My own binary question about African American writers and scientists demands a mea culpa, because I did set it in a context that would have made my nationalist motives transparent.   I am not like that jesting dude made infamous by Sir Francis Bacon, the shrewd dude who asked “What is truth?” and promptly washed his Roman fingers. I know that the only “truth” to be trusted is a perpetual state of inquiry and uncertainty, although I do wash my African American hands frequently and try to put distance between myself and utter stupidity.  I do not believe Neil deGrasse Tyson has committed a grave error in making some scientific mysteries and partial explanations of them “popular” or attractive for non-scientists. I do believe that I have profited as a writer from having known a little bit about the thinking of such scientists as St. Elmo Brady (who was tutored by George Washington Carver) and Slayton Evans (who was much beloved for his work in chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and from my efforts to grasp what quantum theory, fractals, and dark matter might help me to understand about writing, art, and language.  I do not believe it is a cardinal sin to encourage people, especially young learners, to study both Ernest Everett Just and Langston Hughes; to tell them they might gain something of value from reading Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters and doing research on African American folk medicine in the American South.

I may be forced to say mea culpa for a cargo ship of flaws, but I’ll be damned if I will say mea culpa for asking whether we can be more curious than we seem to be in our use of interdisciplinary thinking, more curious in looking for practical symbiosis of imaginative expression and hard science.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 9, 2015

Ramcat Reads 4

Ramcat Reads #4

Allen, Jeffery Renard. Song of the Shank: A Novel. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. Like James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird (2013), Allen’s most recent book signals how innovations in the twenty-first century African American historical novel challenge the American penchant for the ahistorical. Judicious criticism of Allen’s novel depends in part on knowing the real life history of the musical genius Thomas Greene Wiggins (“Blind Tom”) and in part on struggling to know how M. M. Bakhtin’s ideas about the dialogic imagination and speech acts might be joined with Georg Lukacs’s thinking about the role of the historical novel in the production of consciousness. Let it suffice, for the moment, that Allen has offered us an exemplary model of what purposeful black writing can accomplish.

Ali, Shahrazad. The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman. Philadelphia: Civilized Publications, 1989. Ali’s confessions of a woman’s low valuation of self was sternly critiqued in Confusion By Any Other Name: Essays Exploring the Negative Impact of The Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman (Chicago: Third World Press, 1990), edited by Haki R. Madhubuti. Anyone who wishes to analyze contemporary “reality television” and the progressive pathology of American mass media in general can acquire historical perspectives from reading or rereading these two books.

Baraka, Amiri. S O S: Poems 1961-2013. Selected by Paul Vangelisti. New York: Grove, 2014.  This book is a prelude to a “definitive collection” of Baraka’s poetry, one which the newly founded Amiri Baraka Society (May 2015) might desire to begin planning.  Of course, it is unlikely that we can have truly definitive collections of work by twentieth-century writers, but making some attempt to gather all of Baraka’s works and to present them with the quality of scholarship Arnold Rampersad has brought to works by Richard Wright and Langston Hughes and John Edgar Tidwell as applied in presenting the poetry and prose of Frank Marshall Davis would be a fitting tribute to Baraka’s importance for now and a future.  In the “Foreword” for Eulogies (New York: Marsilio, 1996), Baraka wrote of the people he honored:

In describing these lives, I was trying to provide a record of their contributions, their sensibilities, their artistic intentions or their ideals, but also the world they lived in.  In offering this collection, I want to help pass on what needs to live on not just in the archive but on the sidewalk of Afro-America itself.

Robust, rigorous scholarship and criticism can ensure that Baraka will “live on.”

Boyd, Herb. Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin.  New York: Atria Books, 2008. Boyd’s survey of Baldwin’s intellectual engagements with such figures as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Norman Mailer, and Harold Cruse is judiciously provocative.

Brown, Leonard L., ed. John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.  This collection of thoughtful essays lends credibility to T. J. Anderson’s assertion that “all creative artists are cultural anthropologists, documenters and interpreters of culture” (vi) and to Coltrane’s informing Don DeMicheal in a letter of June 2, 1962: “We have absolutely no reason to worry about lack of positive and affirmative philosophy. It’s built in us. The phrasing, the sound of the music attest this fact” (17).

Bryant, Earle V., ed. Byline Richard Wright: Articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015.

Such recent dedicated scholarship  as Mary Helen Washington’s The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s and William J. Maxwell’s F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature serves as a warrant for thinking of contemporary literary and cultural studies as components of a mega-surveillance machine. Readers and critics cooperate, often unwittingly, with publishing conglomerates and official agencies of detection in panoptical activities that exceed the scrutiny imagined by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish or by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism.  Technological progress encourages us to abandon dreams of a liberated future and to accept dystopia as self-evidently “normal.” For Richard Wright scholars, the publication of Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright, Modern Indonesia, and the Bandung Conference (Duke University Press, Spring 2016) by Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher will create an opportunity for more speculation about the function of journalism in Wright’s imagination as well as raising devastating questions about how the journalism of Ida B. Wells and Ishmael Reed assist us to understand what was and is African  American literature. We do need to explore Black print cultures more thoroughly in relation to the production of Black literatures.  In this sense, Earle V. Bryant’s long-awaited Byline Richard Wright has a significant mediating function.

Perhaps financial exigencies are responsible for the University of Missouri Press’s delayed printing of Bryant’s editing and commentary on a number of Wright’s Daily Worker articles from 1937 and the essays “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite” (1935) and “High Tide in Harlem: Joe Louis as a Symbol of Freedom” (1938) from New Masses.  Bryant, a Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, had been working on this project, very quietly, for more than a decade. The delayed publication does not compromise his effort to map underexplored territory in Wright Studies.  It does, unfortunately, increase the likelihood that his work will get less attention than it deserves.

Giving notice to time and space, as Thadious M. Davis does in Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature (2011), reifies the value of chronology in examining Wright’s growth.  Her methodological choices ensure that we link Wright’s emergence as a journalist with his assignments in subdivisions of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), especially the Illinois Writers Project, without diminishing notice of his simultaneous participation in Chicago’s South Side Writers group and brief membership (1934-35) in the John Reed Club. On the other hand, Bryant chose to arrange the Daily Worker articles by theme ---urban conditions in New York, war in Spain and China, heroism, Marxist interest in the Scottsboro case, and art in the service of life. By avoiding strict chronology, Bryant is able to foreground his insightful analyses of political implications and aesthetic qualities in Wright’s journalism, to tell us many things about the strengths and weaknesses of Wright’s accomplishments. Byline is Bryant’s effort “to bring Wright’s early newspaper work out of obscurity and into the light where it can be read and appreciated” (10).

There is a mixed blessing in Bryant’s book being in our hands after the works by Washington, Maxwell, and Davis, because the rigor of their scholarship sets the bar for critical attention to Wright very high.  Bryant’s work provides an opportunity to think about how African American and left-leaning journalism has been necessarily subversive and critical of efforts to sell the American Dream.  To be sure, Byline encourages more thinking about how subversion operates under surveillance. The minor failure in Bryant’s scholarship, however, is his not supplying a full listing of all the Daily Worker articles Wright wrote and glosses or explanatory footnotes for the articles selected from the full range of what is available.  Yes, students and scholars who might use Bryant’s book can surf the Internet to get information about topical references in the articles, but Bryant would have enhanced the value of his book by supplying them in the text.  It is odd that Bryant chose to say nothing about what Wright might have learned from Frank Marshall Davis about the art of journalism.  It is even odder that H. L. Mencken is not mentioned in Byline, because Wright made a special point of acknowledging his discovery of Mencken in a Memphis newspaper and his indebtedness to the work of Mencken as one of America’s most influential journalists, prose stylists, and social critics. It is baffling why Bryant seems to attribute the claim “All art is propaganda” to Wright on page 215, when it is a widely known that W. E. B. DuBois used that wording in his essay “Criteria of Negro Art” in the October 1926 issue of Crisis. Shortcomings notwithstanding, Byline Richard Wright: Articles from The Daily Worker and New Masses can quicken interest in exploring more profoundly the journalistic aspects of Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain and Richard Wright’s bracing subversiveness. Wright deserves more credit for his prophetic panopticism.

Cobb, Charles E., Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible.  New York: Basic Books, 2014. An important contribution to revisionist history of the Civil Rights Movement.

Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law. 1965. New York: Modern Library, 1994.  Feynman’s lectures on gravitation, time, mathematics and physics, symmetry, conservation, probability and uncertainty are quite reader-friendly.  They are especially valuable for what they tell us about the impossibility of having conclusive explanations of anything.

Greene, Brian. The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. Greene provides charming and readable explanations for non-scientists of theories regarding observations of how subatomic particles behave. The aesthetic results of his intellectual adventures, however, must be tempered by consideration of human judgment and its limits, by the corrective arguments necessary for critical thinking about the acquisition of scientific knowledge. Thus, reading David Faust’s The Limits of Scientific Reasoning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) helps us to remember the “inherent limitations of scientific judgment.”

Jeffers, Trellie James.  Up and Down the Greenwood.  San Bernardino, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.  In this novella, Jeffers demonstrates that strong ideas derived from late 19^th century nationalism can inform 21^st century fiction.

Koritz, Amy and George J. Sanchez, eds.  Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Arts-based initiatives can simultaneously fail and succeed as they address issues generated by the processes of urbanization and gentrification.

Lewis, Peirce F. New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape. 2^nd ed. Santa Fe, NM: Center for American Places, 2003.  This book supplements Lawrence N. Powell’s The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).  Read together, these books create a sobering perspective on how histories, the Mississippi River, and the social geography of New Orleans dovetail with racial tensions and encrusted mythologies which make the city a place of blissful abnormalities.

Plumpp, Sterling D. Home/Bass.  Plumpp is our best living blues/jazz poet.  Home/Bass, his 12^th collection of poems, does not disappoint.  In poems that are tributes to the Mississippi/Chicago blues musician Willie Kent (1936-2006), he maximizes the fracturing of words and recombination of particles in short lines in order to  surprise readers into consciousness of the pain-shot courage  always behind and under the blues.

Rampersad, Arnold and David Roessel, eds. Selected Letters of Langston Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.  Beginning with Hughes’s September 5, 1921 letter to his father and ending with his letter of April 22, 1967 to Arna Bontemps, this collection provides a sweeping view of why Hughes is one of the most cosmopolitan and beloved writers of the twentieth century.  If one is of a certain age, one reads these letters with pangs of nostalgia and some regret that the art of writing letters is so rarely cultivated in the twenty-first century.  Hughes’s letters are as captivating as his poems and stories, and they reveal a great amount of information about American and international literary and cultural histories.

Thomas, Ebony E. and Shanesha R. F. Brooks-Tatum, eds. Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era.  New York: Peter Lang, 2012. These essays are rigorous critiques of metanarratives that shape social thinking and policy.

White, Jane Barber. Lessons Learned from a Poet’s Garden: The Restoration of the Historic Garden of Harlem Renaissance Poet Anne Spencer. Lynchburg, VA: Blackwell Press, 2011.  Rich with poems written long after the Harlem Renaissance transitioned into social reality and extensive photographic documentation of Spencer’s family, house, and famous garden, this excellent book is required reading for anyone who wants to know who Anne Spencer (1882-1975) was as poet, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.        

June 7, 2015

Venus Flytrap of Literature Past

THE VENUS FLYTRAP OF LITERATURE PAST

By tacit but deliberate accident, the American imagination of dubious color has been attracted to James Baldwin and Richard Wright in 2015.  On March 1, 2015, Ayana Mathis and Pankaj Mishra published “James Baldwin Denounced Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son” as a ‘Protest Novel.’ Was He Right?” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.  More recently, one finds Benjamin Anastas reporting in The New Republic, May 25, 2015, on his teaching of a course on Wright and Baldwin at Bennington College.  His title “James Baldwin and Richard Wright in the Ferguson Era” is a smokescreen.  There is no Ferguson Era any more than there is a Waco Era.  We just have domestic terrorism and violence that dates back to 1619.  Anastas planned his course “as a chance to revisit the work of two writers who loomed large in African American literature of the twentieth century but who had fallen, in recent years, out of favor and off of syllabi.”  In my circles of inquiry, Baldwin and Wright have never been out of favor, and we think people who make such a claim inhabit a monstrous fib, an item of Vermont fakelore.

Mathis, author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, believes that Wright’s Native Son “is limited by a circumscribed vision that fails to extend much beyond the novel’s moment in 1940.  Certainly the racism that made Bigger Thomas still exists, but, thank God, Bigger Thomas does not ---he never did.”  She is wrong.  She is right.  Native Son has extended indirectly into the lives of twenty-first century males who are potential targets of selective profiling.  It is true, of course, that the character Bigger Thomas is a construction of words.  The words do not breathe; they have just “lived in” the thinking of many males. Mathis has no obligation to be much concerned with nuances of male matters.

Mishra, on the other hand, does have so gendered an obligation.  Yet, he fails in his reluctance to admit that the protest novel in American English is not some unique property of African Americans but a legacy that extends from James Fennimore Cooper to John Grisham.  It is curious that Mishra embraces Baldwin for unmasking “treacherous clichés in ostensibly noble programs of protest and emancipation” even as he reifies the treacherous cliché of putting Baldwin and Wright into Ralph Ellison’s battle royal.

Anastas admits to being a Baldwinite, but he does recognize Wright’s comments on “police-induced terror” do bear a nightmare relationship to “the United States of Trayvon Martin and ‘Stand Your Ground’.”  What he does not recognize is how complicit he is in what Baldwin identified as the crime of innocence, the state of neither knowing nor wanting to know how one may be an author of human devastation.  Perhaps two or three of his Bennington students were not caught by the Venus flytrap of literature past and were able to detect what lurks in the heart of whiteness.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 6, 2015

Footnote 666

Footnote 666

Law-ordained, ordered arrogance forms

The halos around uniforms, batons, guns,

 Badges, handcuffs, and stuff inform

Novenas for freshly minted killers.

Injustice is all.

This is the way the resolute signs morph

Into rabid symbols after the oaths in blue

Confirm this fraternity shall ruthlessly signify

Innocents are predestined to die.

Injustice is all.

Feral blue uniforms furiously pray

Their prey shall be young, female/male, and black,

Head bowed, silent, hands empty, arms outstretched ---

In truth, a crucifix without a cross.

Injustice is all.

This is America, after all, and air is a snarky, bleached privilege.

 Breath of color whose crime is breathing warrants social death.

This is America, the new post-Eden, and all bluebloody uniforms know

Justice is a brazen nuisance, a dangerous God-fearing whore.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 2 situation report

Situation Report from a Culture of Reading, Part 2

To the slave, revolution is an imperative, a love-inspired, conscious act of desperation.  It’s aggressive. It isn’t “cool” or cautious.  It’s bold, audacious, violent, an expression of icy, disdainful hatred!  It can hardly be any other way without raising a fundamental contradiction.

George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972)

Serendipity allows you to happen upon humorous insights.  Ralph Ellison was one of the most elegant prose writers of the twentieth-century.  You find aesthetic pleasure in his writing as well as less than obvious evidence of self-contradiction.  From time to time, Ellison was out to brunch.  In his essay “Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction” (1960), Ellison justly praised Crane for looking “steadily at the wholeness of American life” and for discovering “far-reaching symbolic equivalents for its unceasing state of civil war.” Fifty-five years later, you find the symbolic equivalents have escaped from the page and refashioned themselves as dedicated efforts to target and murder Black American males (and a lesser number of females), particularly those who are young and unarmed. Patriotic yearnings demand this holocaust.  Ellison nailed the metaphor of war.  When Ellison reviewed Blues People by LeRoi Jones in 1964, he thought Jones erred in giving “little attention to the blues as lyric, as a form of poetry.”  Moreover, Jones placed “the tremendous burden of sociology…upon this body of music” and that error was “enough to give even the blues the blues.”  It may be the case that in this instance Jones was more intelligent than Ellison in bringing historical consciousness to bear upon music and ethos in America’s “state of civil war.”  History not sociology.  It may also be the case that multicultural writing that is worthy of notice in 2015 struggles in the bloody combat zones of Jones/Baraka as a prelude to rest and recuperation in Ellison’s palace of wisdom.  “Writing” values “literature” by signifying on the battlefront.  Like the young Frederick Douglass, Ellison was in a circle that prevented his hearing what he was seeing.

The explanatory narrative of Blues People illuminates certain grounds of existence that have informed and will continue to inform “writing” (nonfiction and fiction) that refuses to tell brazen lies about its parents and kinfolks.  Much to his credit, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka did not compromise with imitations of life.  On the poetic side of the coin, you find such ruthlessness wonderfully crafted witnessing of lived experiences in the blues/jazz poetry of Sterling D. Plumpp, poetry that some blues musicians judge worthy to be transformed for their audiences [listen to Plumpp’s “911” as recorded by Willie Kent on the CD Too Hurt to Cry (Delmark DE 667)]. Flip the coin.  On its fiction/nonfiction/autobiographical side appears The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy’s Journey into Manhood (New York: Atria Books, 2015), a memoir that merits pre-future applause and critique.  The book will be available in November.  I take the liberty of quoting some of the pre-publication material:

In the spirit of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, this powerful memoir by writer and activist Kevin Powell vividly recounts the horrific poverty of his youth, his struggles to overcome a legacy of anger, violence, and self-hatred, and his journey to be a man and a voice for others.

Driven by his single mother’s dreams for his survival and success, Powell became the first in his family to attend a university, where he became a student leader keenly aware of widespread social injustice. But the struggle to define himself and break out of poverty continued into adulthood, with traumatic periods of homelessness and despair. As a young star journalist with Vibe magazine, Powell interviewed luminaries such as Tupac Shakur, writing influential chronicles of the evolution of hiphop from his eyewitness view. Now, with searing honesty, Powell examines his troubled relationships, his appearance on MTV’s first season of “The Real World,” his battles with alcohol and depression, his two campaigns for Congress, and the uplifting trip to Africa that renewed his sense of personal mission. Finally, Powell embarks on a search for the father he never really knew in a redemptive passage from abandonment to self-discovery.

A striking memoir by a child of post-Civil Rights America, The Education of Kevin Powell gives eloquent testimony to the power of the soul to heal.

~~~

“Poignant and powerful. This story of Black male life in our patriarchal culture, from boyhood to manhood, is raw and passionate. It offers a true and honest portrait of all that Black males endure to survive and, more importantly, to cope with trauma, and to heal and thrive. It should be read by everyone who claims to care about the fate of Black males in America."
—bell hooks

In my culture of reading, Powell’s book will be juxtaposed with one that appeared seventy years ago, namely Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945).  To recycle words from bell hooks’s blurb, you can say Powell’s book and Wright’s classic autobiography “should be read by everyone who claims to care about the fate of Black males in America.”  The pronoun everyone should include President Obama, all the Republican candidates for 2016, and most certainly Hillary Clinton. And Black Boy serves as the touchstone for measuring Powell’s achievement.  Perhaps we shall be able to say of Powell what Wright said of George Lamming and In the Castle of My Skin (1953): to paraphrase and quote ---“…as an artist,” Powell has “stubborn courage; and in him a new writer takes his place in the literary world.”

Powell, of course, already has a place in the literary world, but that place must be secured again and again by way of transnational commentary and vernacular conversation in the barbershop.  I suspect The Education of Kevin Powell is about something more than the permanent “civil/civic war “in the urban spaces of the United States.  I suspect the book will, if serendipity works, move us to ponder the dynamics of international wretchedness. Our narrative is global not local, although our first order of action must be in our neighborhoods.

Attending to the global sprawl of our concerns is imperative, because international cultural economies do impact what we produce and how we live and/or die.  When we engage contemporary “writing” in fiction, we are obligated to say that street literature has a germinal, historic role in literary politics. Reading Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2014), edited by Keenan Norris, clears away academic tear gas and reveals the challenging diversity of “writing” as it complements the heliocentric desires of “literature.” 

All “writing” is not street literature, and the proof would be such novels as Keenan Norris’s Brother and the Dancer (2013), James E. Cherry’s Shadow of Light (2007), Olympia Vernon’s A Killing in This Town (2006) and Jabari Asim’s forthcoming Only the Strong: An American Novel (Chicago: Bolden, 2015). To be sure, it can be argued, as Norris does, that the “literary” ancestors for street literature include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Raymond Chandler, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, and Dashiell Hammett.  I would add Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell.  Ultimately, whether we “improve” our mindscapes with literature or with writing depends on individual tastes and the suspect ideologies of literary commerce. 

To circle back to the beginning like a novel by James Joyce, I believe that Blues People is as important as Invisible Man or William Melvin Kelley’s Dunsfords Travels Everywheres for grasping how we give meaning to our experiences of temporality, limitations, vices and virtues, and personal actions by constructing episodes.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 2, 2015

June 1 situation report

Situation Report from a Culture of Reading, Part 1

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York;

And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Richard III

Unlike Richard, contemporary readers need not be “subtle, false and treacherous” unto themselves and the worlds they inhabit.  They need not pretend those worlds are either peaceful or private spaces, immune to terrors made with alacrity by other, literate human beings.  The hyperbole of Reginald Martin’s title Everybody Knows What Time It Is becomes a truism in the process of daily reading, especially if what you are reading is not a political document, an analysis of skills, prowess,  and trash talk in one sport or another,  a scientific treatise, or an essay informed by valid evidence.  That is to say, if you are reading what proclaims itself to be “literature,” you are counting privileged nanoseconds of duration.  People who read “writing” count plain minutes of time.  I value writing more than literature, because writing is a more accurate representation (gesture) of how historical consciousness marks off trails. Writing that empowers is often excluded from lists of bestsellers.  So be it.

The writing that is important for my culture of reading does not fit into any single canon, because it follows the Drinking Gourd and quits the merely fashionable, post-whatever plantations of the Western academy and looks for sanctuary elsewhere. Fortunately, a considerable amount of writing in 2015 has abandoned slave space for regions where inevitable “enslavement” is minimal. Anticipate more flight in 2016.  There is no known human space can where writing can locate absolute freedom, but that fact does not preclude noble efforts to discover ideal places of more than four dimensions.  Necessary writing is very comfortable with the advancing theories of physics.

To begin with poetry.  Honorée Fannone Jeffers’s fourth collection The Glory Gets (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2015) is valuable blues and womanist testimony regarding the endurance of the abused peoples of the Earth.  As the elders would say, we must be still to carry and absorb the weight of Jeffers’s craft, which doesn’t err in being craft-for-craft’s sake.  We can expect a similar dropping of knowledge in Treasure Shields Redmond’s “Chop: 30 Kwansabas for Fannie Lou Hamer,” which won the Winged City Chapbook Contest; it will be published by Argus House Press in Fall 2015. From LSU Press in November comes All Souls: Essential Poems by Brenda Marie Osbey, a much-needed record of her consistent excellence in a tradition of African American poetry that wants attention. The work that Osbey, Redmond, and Jeffers do to anchor us in remembering is complemented by Philip Kolin’s Emmett Till in Different States (forthcoming from Third World Press).  His book takes us into the Mississippi territory of abrasive recall mapped by Redmond’s tribute to Fannie Lou Hamer.  It can be said that writing by Kolin, Osbey, Redmond, and Jeffers takes us to the spaces where language gives birth to images of iconic moments in America’s violent past.  These images morph into the bullet and blood photographs of the terrible present. And these visuals for the mind’s eye take us to the certain dread of existential futures. As writing, the poetry of now forces us to abandon excuses and assume the onus of reckoning and payback actions.  We do not have to dismiss the recent angles and topologies of ascent claimed by poetry as literature, the motions that flee from or seek to trivialize the fires of the Black Arts Movement legacy.  Such literature can travel to the post-Elizabethan bosom of some ocean of opportunity.  Can it stay there forever is a question without an answer.

Two recent anthologies are devoted to poetry that is more akin to” writing” than to “literature.” What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey and The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015), edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, and Nate Marshall.  From quite different angles, the books deconstruct and reconstruct the once simple idea of “writing” (acting or performing in print). The heavy question that applies to both is: WHAT IS INNOVATIVE POETRY?  The word “innovative” is not an easy substitute for the word “experimental.”  Even if it were, we are required to ask INNOVATIVE FOR WHOM AND ON WHAT GROUNDS? The word must be contextualized so as to expose the motives for using it. C. S. Giscombe’s introduction for What I Say has its own integrity as a statement on aesthetic experimentation; it is rightly addressed to an audience that values “the difficult.” And we get another question: FOR WHOM IS WHAT DIFFICULT?  On the other hand, Kevin Coval’s introduction for The BreakBeat Poets reminds one of the pioneering explanations in Eugene Redmond’s Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry. Coval is very clear in saying his anthology is by and for the hip hop generation, a generation that constantly seeks alternative spaces for expression, and that the anthology has an unfinished mission. The debate about the innovative must go forth, and I hope the two anthologies will exist in parahistorical harmony. By the way, “parahistory” is a concept that I attribute to the historian Lerone Bennett.

Part 2 of this situation report will deal with some special narratives.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 1, 2015