When we endorse, the devil finds work

When We Endorse, the Devil Finds Work

 

If the term agent provocateur can be transformed to yield a positive meaning, it is to be noted that Howard Rambsy II is an American cultural scholar who succeeds in doing so.  Since 2013, he has consistently provoked readers of his "Cultural Front" blogspot to think about what is debilitating, what is neutral, and what is wholesome in American cultural commerce.  His July 30, 2015 entry "From Baldwin to Morrison & Coats: a brief history of endorsements" is typical.

Rambsy invites us to reread the letter "Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison" (New York Times, January 24, 1988), a tribute signed by 48 scholars, writers, and artists who proclaimed: "Your gifts to us have changed and made more gentle our real time together.  And so we write, here, hoping not to delay, not to arrive, in any way, late with this, our simple tribute to the seismic character and beauty of your writing.  And furthermore, in grateful wonder at the advent of "Beloved" you most recent gift to our community, our country, our conscience, our courage flourishing as it grows, we here record our pride, our respect and our appreciation for the treasury of your findings and invention."  The prose was purple; the sentiment, genuine. The urgency of the letter was prompted by recognizing that James Baldwin "never received the honor of these keystones to the canon of American literature: the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize: never."  When Baldwin's funeral was held on December 8, 1987, Morrison did not have these keystones in her hands.

The letter is an intra-ethnic endorsement of Morrison's achievements.  It is crucial for interpretation of American cultural history to notice it was published in the New York Times rather than in the Baltimore Afro-American or the Philadelphia Defender.

Rambsy provokes me to wonder to what extent the letter reiterates the yearnings of James Weldon Johnson's  1921 and 1931 prefaces for The Book of American Negro Poetry.  I wonder how the act gives substance to the shadow of contradiction.  Why after being accorded respect by some Americans did Morrison need to be "canonized" by other Americans associated with the so-called mainstream literary establishment or thought-and taste-control mafia?  One easy answer: canonization brings a few dollars as well as placement in the fluid list that complements a redefined American literary history.  Fate or luck or accident ultimately ordained that Morrison would receive a global keystone.  It is reasonable to surmise that the letter assisted Fate.

When Rambsy draws attention to what has occurred in 2015, skepticism dawns.  He quotes only a portion of  Toni Morrison's blurb for Ta-Nehisi Coates'  Between the World and Me.  The blurb in full reads:

"I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.  The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates's journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive.  And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory.  This is required reading."

I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Morrison's expression, for I recognize that what plagued her did not plague everyone between 1987 and 2015. Reading  W. E. B. DuBois, Margaret Walker, Cornel West, Kalamu ya Salaam, Michelle Alexander,    Arnold Rampersad,  Amiri Baraka,  Lorenzo Thomas,  bell hooks,  Tom Dent, Houston Baker, Angela Davis,  Trudier Harris, Richard Wright and others did not allow me to have a sense that an intellectual void existed. I chose to seek critical insights rather than redemption and undelivered moral comfort

What I'll want to determine, once I read Coates's book, is something about the tension which results from his directing readers to Wright in the title and using the epistolary form in the contents which evokes Baldwin.  I suspect most reviewers are comfortable with the moral distance or "transcendent freedom"  that can be had from reading someone's letter to a nephew or a son.  That kind of reading is less painful than dealing with a kind of direct association with horror that Wright demands.  That is the key.  The more Coates is characterized as a new embodiment of Baldwin, the less one has to suffer what Wright demanded that women and men must suffer to render life meaningful.  My embrace of Wright obviously sets me apart from Coates's  reviewers who seek to minimize the sharing of pain by attributing its force mainly to the victims (black people) and less so to those who perpetuate reasons (thug-terrorists domestic and global) for the body to be in pain. Should I discover that Coates does not examine the hazards and hopes of male, female and other-gendered life, I shall be assured that he is not a clone of James Baldwin but a thinker who stands on the shoulders of giants and projects a vision that is not naively transcendent.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.      August 3, 2015

Nadhiri's digital poetry

Asili Ya Nadhiri's Digital Poetry and Performance

 

After both reading and listening to Nadhiri's tonal drawing "wandering here in this dark where it eating up the light" (http://wp.me/p3kMgy-fN), I observed:

This double-voiced rendering of the tonal drawing is an example of what might occur when a poem escapes the prison of print and page and becomes an item in digital poetry.  In a traditional live reading, it would not be possible to have the overlay of sound without the help of some time-delay mechanism. This digital tonal drawing allows us to hear subtle differences in emphasis of inflections in voice 1 and voice 2 as well as echoing that produces a state of "rendered-ing" or "rendering-ed."  Nadhiri's conceptualization sends us to performance theory to find language to discuss self-reflexive echoes.

Good models for such language abound in Black Performance Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez.

 

Nadhiri replied on his website  to the observation on July 25, 2015 at 10:21 p.m. ---"Jerry, you are making me consider extending this manner of expression more presently."   My observation was concerned with poetry and physics, but Nadhiri's email to me (also July 25) redirected me to philosophy and poetry.  He had written that "perhaps the form birthing in 'wandering here in this dark...' might be suggesting one in which the universality impliciting in my latter work might be made more expliciting."  This remark seems related to a thesis Reginald Martin and  I will elaborate in our book Words and Being:

Although common sense is not immune to deconstructive critiques, it is our most powerful tool in efforts to minimize confusion in studies of African American and American cultures and cultural expressions.

Martin and I are not philosophers, but the thesis will make our book  philosophical by accident, especially in our commentary on poetry. Nadhiri's proposition regarding form coming into being can be shifted from the conditional to the declarative.  The aesthetic impact of his tonal drawing is present progressively universal, and it is an occasion for grasping uncommon knowledge. In its digital manifestation, a tonal drawing can initiate deep, common sense thinking about why innovation in  African American poetry matters as we perform literary and social positions.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    July 26, 2015

 

When Classmates Die

When Classmates Die

 

We think your life was spent

environed by thugs, roses, dogs, fried chicken,

jackasses, mashed potatoes, violence, and buzzards---

all ill-intended to bend your mind,

twisting and breaking off your goals.

 

Cold, the world-womb, bleeding quick, pregnant

trash-grown ideogasms the young and gifted

are fed daily  by the crazy and the dead.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            July 21, 2015

 

Harper Lee's Moral Reckoning

Harper Lee's Moral Reckoning

 

After reading the Wall Street Journal review by Sam Sacks  of Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, I wrote on my Facebook timeline:  This novel obviously upsets some people because it sets the record straight about Southern literature.  A much better novel that deals with a white woman's discoveries about her racist father is Minrose Gwin's The Queen of Palmyra.

According to Sacks, Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is "the most beloved novel in American history ---more popular than even the Bible in numerous polls."  It would be a waste of time to correct Sacks's sense of American history or to argue that some other American novel is more beloved than Lee's.  I doubt that the unnamed polls reveal what Mr. Sacks claims, but I do not dismiss the possibility that they tend to confirm that  the fictional Atticus Finch did "become a symbol of the nation's moral conscience." In that case, we can say with confidence that Finch replaced William Faulkner's ambiguous Gavin Stevens (Intruder in the Dust, 1948) as the white male unambiguous heroic figure and moral voice in Southern fiction.  Who defines what is ambiguous, however,  remains a question to be answered.

Sacks clears his throat so as "not to damp the enthusiasm of expectant readers but to introduce a friendly word of caution. 'Go Set a Watchman' is a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'  This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion."

Truth is like oil in the Gulf of Mexico.  It upsets animal, plant and human ecology.

Tough-minded readers should applaud Harper Lee for striking an iconoclastic blow from an assisted living home in Monroeville, Alabama.  At age 89, Lee is rich (her net worth is estimated at $35 million) and on the brink of having to explain herself to a Supreme Being.  She obviously wants to do the right thing, to be on time in Time.  Thus, she is forcing naive readers who relish and consume American idealism to savor Southern realism; with Go Set a Watchman, she is obligating readers to give moral bankruptcy a name.

President George W. Bush awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.  President Barack Obama awarded her the National Medal of Arts in 2010.  It is just that she should thank her country for these honors by telling a truth before she dies.  It was no accident that she helped her friend Truman Capote with his research for In Cold Blood. In 2015, blood in the United States of America is an ice cube for all of us who are waiting for Godot or watching to see who has an eye on the sparrow.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.    July 12, 2015

for BK Nation

Note on "Poem 72"

A NOTE ON "Poem 72"

July 9, 2015

 

In order to write "Poem 72," I had to begin with the following cluster of words:

 

tissue  somewhere peril peripatetic biopolartics filmic collusion of neoliberal bondage

(e)lucid sex synergy symbolic ecology disappear violence intimate detachment

allegory glue of privacy token autocritography omniscient freak ground of never -colony

antimimetic mother witch rebeling woman a pink banker of niber hate narrative ethics

causalities unnaturals middle objects reformance eschatological

It has become increasingly difficult to write a simple poem.  It may be that the cluster of words is the interpretation for "Poem 72."

 

Poem 72

who is neverlonger

a question

 

jokejester asked

for an answer

 

for a reason

deemed autocritographical

 

who mother(out)witted

a black whole of how

 

 

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

July 6, 2015

 

From an Open Letter

From "An Open Letter to a Writer"

 

July 5, 2015

 

Since we talked back in May, our world has made good progress in collapsing.  When I was much younger, my spirit would have trembled.  Now it laughs, because one can laugh freely if one is Roman Catholic and not Christian, if one is faithful trickster.  Thus, I smirk when African-descended people "forgive" a Satanic thug in Charleston for murdering their relatives and friends in church  ---  a church associated with Denmark Vesey.  We deserve nothing better than to celebrate July 16, 1822 in 2015 by recalling that Christian black folk are insanely good.  They trash the sacrificial intentions of black revolutionaries and walk into the genocide of salvation.  We no longer laugh to keep from crying.  We laugh to keep from killing.

 

I remember the moral disengagement hatred demands and maintain some distance from it.  As I mentioned to one of our fellow-writers, I write to prevent my becoming a serial killer.  Killing people rarely resolves the systemic problems which encage us.  I write to assassinate time.

 

.......

 

Stay well and stay strong in this eternal battle we have to fight.

 

Peace,

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

 

Drawing Terrance Hayes

DRAWING TERRANCE HAYES

 

Hayes, Terrance.  How To Be Drawn.  New York: Penguin, 2015.

 

You could be drawn to the work of Terrance Hayes by way of Elizabeth Alexander's advance praise for How To Be Drawn, a statement that draws you to such words as dust, urgency, necessity, by any means necessary (the latter cluster evoking an injunction from Malcolm X); in addition, you could be drawn by noticing poems by Terrance Hayes are anthologized in Angles of Ascent as instances of "Second Wave, Post-1960s" but not in What I Say or The BreakBeat Poets, and the notice is a signal either that you are curious about where the cipher (a good Arabic zero) or that you do have non-trivial questions about inclusion/exclusion and probabilities/possibilities; it is better that you could be drawn by accessing

 

http://terrancehayes.com/notes-drawn

 

to find "notes, reference, and inspiration for the poems" in How To Be Drawn.  Maximize your options.

 

 

Truth could tell itself by revealing that you are drawn initially by none of the above.  You were drawn to the poems of Terrance Hayes by sustained interest in the innovative poetics of Asili Ya Nadhiri as manifested in his "tonal drawings."  The required proof is located at

 

URL: http://wp.me/p3kMgy-fj

 

The device of ekphrasis may be one motivating link between the poems of Nadhiri and Hayes, because that device draws attention to how American poetry is a process which defies consensus. It motivates a few readers to think beyond the belief that "poetry" exists independent of a historicized reading and to ask whether poetry is actually or really necessary.  Answers vary according to your choice of adverb ---really or actually.   A poem lacks a fixed definition of its identity.  It does have descriptions.  Thus, an imagined conversation between Hayes and Nadhiri is rewarding, because it begins to cast light on why some readers actually fear poetry while other readers so love poetry that they argue for the validity of any and every form that a poem can assume.  The Republic of American Letters is becoming the Democracy of Writing in a slow hurry.

 

Truth also tells on itself when you access Terrance Hayes's website to acquire the information needed for intelligent reading of the academic poems in How To Be Drawn.  Hayes provides a most welcomed, common sense definition of what an academic poem is.  When he answers the question "If you could be any tree, what would you be and why?" with a rich accident: "I'm trying to think of something clever here?  I like the word magnolia.  I like the smell of pinewood. I like the flowers of dogwoods.  I'd be an apple tree."  The accident, for which Hayes is not responsible, is conjuring the relevance in the context of the question of Michael S. Harper's  remarkable Photographs: Negatives: History As Apple Tree (San Francisco: Scarab Press, 1972).  The last five lines in Section 9 of Harper's long poem are

 

let it become my skeleton,

become my own myth:

my arm the historical branch,

my name the bruised fruit,

black human photograph: apple tree  (n.p.)

 

Hayes made a good choice, as good as the choices he made of which poems to include in How To Be Drawn,  which remarks to make in the Spring 2015 "Anything But Invisible"  audio interview with Studio 360, and which forms to give "Black Confederate Ghost Story, "How to Draw an Invisible Man,"" Portrait of Etheridge Knight in the Style of a Crime Report," and "Reconstructed Reconstruction"  ----poems I would recommend that my Chinese colleagues would teach in their American and African American literature courses.  No.  Those are my favorite poems.  Good pedagogy requires that all the poems in How To Be Drawn should be taught, so that poems can themselves teach us something.

 

Navigating among works by Hayes and Nadhiri and all the poets who are in the most recent anthologies brings a jolt of recognition to people who have taught literature for several decades.  Close reading and re-reading of texts are still worthwhile procedures as we transform dead print/drawings into vibrant literary events.  But close reading now depends greatly, though not exclusively,  on the use of the Internet, digital tools, and audio-visual information.  New ways of "reading" give some credibility to the notion that a poem in the canon is not innately superior to a poem which is not so archived or museumed.  Inclusion or exclusion seems to be a result of a poet's having the "right" connections or a dynamite agent, having more than demitasse spoon of genuine talent, and having the blessings of Fortune in an over-crowded market.  You are indeed drawn in to be lessoned by the closing lines of Hayes's poem "Ars Poetica For The Ones Like Us"------

 

Do not depend on speech to be felt.

Remember too that the eyes are not flesh,

That crisis is irritated by the absence of witness,

 

That Orpheus, in time, became nothing

But a lying-ass song

Sung for the woman he failed. (96)

 

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

June 30, 2015