Returning to
Narrative
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
May 24, 2014
Hidden neatly in the
hyperbole of Thomas Sayers Ellis’ “” (The Maverick
Room. Minneapolis:
Graywolf Press, 2005. 114-115.) is a truth of sorts. There is a boring
“sameness” in a substantial amount of contemporary “canonized” American
poetry. Perhaps the alleged excellence of how MFA programs teach the
making of poetry is partially to blame. MFA is an acronym for an unprintable
phrase. In my scandalizing opinion, MFA programs promote craft as
technical excellence and ego-interiority, minimizing the option of craft to
speak with engaged boldness of the painful messiness of life and world
affairs.
To be sure,
aesthetics can evoke bright moments of pleasure or eargasms, even a bit of knowledge.
But the best poetry uses aesthetic properties to intensify the pragmatic, the
always present need to deal with how people manufacture horrors for themselves
and others. Jazz counts as some of our best poetry, and certainly John
Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor and other jazz people direct our minds to
the “sound” science and physics of existing. Metaphysics for real. How
refreshing it is to read John Coltrane and Black America’s
Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010) edited by
Leonard L. Brown.
Abstain for a time
from the sameness of poetry and look for practical and critical stimulation in
the differentness of fictional and non-fictional narrative. Find alternative
spaces where furious flowers bloom. We do not need to construct and deconstruct
a bogus war between poetry and non-poetry, because in certain remarkable
instances it is poetry and poetic equations that cut a pathway to narrative.
Consider the importance of how poets Brenda Marie Osbey and Honoreé Fanonne
Jeffers excavate histories, of how Rudolph Lewis employs the poetics of orality
to craft fiction.
Yes, we have many lines to straighten and many “lost” narrative to read. And now is the time for the Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) to resume its leadership in recovery work by way of the 2015 Margaret Walker Centennial; PHBW can increase awareness of a humanistic tradition implicit in how the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival (1973) was conceptualized and executed, in why Walker’s novel Jubilee initiated a call for rigorous examinations of histories. In one sector of American letters, Joyce Carol Oates has responded to Walker’s call in The Accursed (2013) and Larry McMurtry has done so in The Last Kind Words Saloon (2014).
Yes, we have many lines to straighten and many “lost” narrative to read. And now is the time for the Project on the History of Black Writing (PHBW) to resume its leadership in recovery work by way of the 2015 Margaret Walker Centennial; PHBW can increase awareness of a humanistic tradition implicit in how the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival (1973) was conceptualized and executed, in why Walker’s novel Jubilee initiated a call for rigorous examinations of histories. In one sector of American letters, Joyce Carol Oates has responded to Walker’s call in The Accursed (2013) and Larry McMurtry has done so in The Last Kind Words Saloon (2014).
In another sector,
Kiini Ibura Salaam, James Cherry, Jesmyn Ward, Keenan Norris, and
Anthony Grooms make answers in the tradition. I am noticing a need,
however, to use the treasury represented by the PHBW novel database to
say more about orality/orature and fiction from the Civil War/post-bellum
period to the present. PHBW’s planned GEMS retrospective on John A. Williams
can open up many issues about who gets taught in the academic world against who
gets read by the non-academic public. Credit must be given to Ishmael Reed for
suggesting some years ago that we pay tribute to John A. Williams by
reinvesting effort in trying to understand the present relevance of Williams’
noteworthy but under-examined body of work. Let us not forget the importance of
revisiting Reed’s own anthologies, novels and essays, his thoroughly
multicultural conversation with America.
The reception of
genres at any given period is central, of course, in recovery work, but so too
is the matter of how themes can encourage or discourage discussion and
examination in the public sphere. Kenton Rambsy’s work with short fiction for
his dissertation is bringing some aspects of what I see as a major discursive
problem in how we deal with literature to the foreground/ Mary Helen Washington’s
The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of
the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) and Keith Clark’s The
Radical Fiction of Ann Petry (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2013) ask us from very
different angles to reexamine "social realism" or
socially/politically engaged fiction in light of what happens in American life
beyond "literature."
I find myself
generating questions in my writing about how Wallace Thurman's Infants of the
Spring might connect us with the preoccupation in mass media with the antics of
Jay-Z and Beyonce, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Or how his The Blacker the
Berry obligates us to deal with the color-blindness of people of no-color who
have 20/20 vision of racial colors as they project their unacknowledged
pathologies on the screen of the American mind. Narratives by Waters Edward
Turpin, Sutton E. Griggs, Oscar Micheaux, Lorenzo Dow Blackson, and Albert
Evander Coleman may occasion a fresh vision of what the world is or wants to be
in 2014.
As I see
things, PHBW has maximized attention to poetry and some twentieth-century
fiction writers through its NEH-sponsored institutes and larger projects. Now
is the time for PHBW to do more with non-canonized fiction and non-fiction. It
is only fitting that more be done with the holistic, politically astute vision
Margaret Walker Alexander had in nurturing African American humanism.
X X X X X
Thomas Sayers Ellis, “All Their
Stanzas Look Alike”
x x x x x
John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest for Freedom:
Spirituality and the Music
By Leonard Brown
Edited by prominent musician and scholar Leonard Brown, “John
Coltrane and Black America's Quest for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music” is
a timely exploration of Coltrane's sound and its spiritual qualities that are
rooted in Black American music-culture and aspirations for freedom. A
wide-ranging collection of essays and interviews featuring many of the most
eminent figures in Black American music and jazz studies and performance
--Tommy Lee Lott, Anthony Brown, Herman Gray, Emmett G. Price III, Tammy
Kernodle, Salim Washington, Eric Jackson, TJ Anderson ,Yusef Lateef, Billy
Taylor, Olly Wilson, George Russell, and a never before published interview
with Elvin Jones -- the book examines the full spectrum of Coltrane's legacy.
Each work approaches this theme from a different angle, in both historical and
contemporary contexts, focusing on how Coltrane became a quintessential example
of the universal and enduring qualities of Black American culture.
We had a seminar recently and all of this was discussed there. It was a part of our Bar Review Courses. I felt quite knowledgeable after getting out of the hall. This post is also very interesting. I will share it with my friend also. He is also very serious about this field and I know he has always been better than me when it comes to studying.
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