Tag: Jerry W. Ward Jr.

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GUEST BLOG: THE ELEGANCE OF GRACE

[By: Jerry W. Ward Jr.] Alexander, Stephon.  The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link between Music and the Structure of the Universe.  New York: Basic Books, 2016. In her 2007 poem “In Search of Grace,” Quo Vadis Gex Breaux makes an elegant plea for an enabling virtue.  Those lines which trigger my imagination are I pray for grace, as I dance on life’s tabletops, as I scale the […]

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COLTRANE AND NADHIRI

[By: Jerry W. Ward Jr.] It might be argued that Langston Hughes’s Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971) can make readers more attentive to combinations of words and music and to the issues of response and interpretation broached in Stephen Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (New York: William Morrow, 1973). More recent critical discussions […]

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The Joy of Refusing

[By: Jerry W. Ward Jr.] From a pre-future vantage, one can discover the joy of refusing. Refusing or resisting is neither an innate virtue nor a vice, despite the fact that one must ultimately account for the moral properties of one’s actions . Refusing is an opportunity to live with the alternatives that might better identify one’s historicity. Consider the outcomes of refusing to read […]

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Instruments of Termination

[Jerry W. Ward, Jr.] Mass media and social media do seem to serve the purposes of the Trump administration well. Despite its commitment to inform the public, mass media use half-truths and lies to frustrate the process of thinking in the United States of America. Its agencies profit from the enterprise.  Its agents take delight in toying with issues and ideas, providing scant evidence one might […]