Jerry W. Ward Jr.

“There’s holiness in speech. In song.

I’d say, a sanctity the unsuffered must never touch.”

Photo: C.B. Claiborne, 2004

Born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Moss Point, Mississippi, the poet and scholar Jerry W. Ward, Jr. was educated at Tougaloo College, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Virginia. A Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College for some 20 years, and a Professor of English at Dillard University, Ward has also served as editor to the anthologies Redefining American Literary History (1990), Black Southern Voices (1992) and Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997). Some of Ward’s most recent work includes a memoir, The Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (2008), and Fractal Song (2017), a book of poems. Ward has published essays, poems and critical reviews in New Orleans Review, Obsidian, The Southern Quarterly, Black American Literature Forum and Callaloo, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Kent Fellowship, a Tougaloo College Outstanding Teaching Award, a United Negro College Fund’s Distinguished Scholar Award, the Public Humanities Scholar Award, and a Darwin T. Turner Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society. Ward was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent in 2001.

Featured Poems

“I Have Felt the Gulf: Mississippi”

“Journey 55”

Photo: C.B. Claiborne, 2004
Photo: C.B. Claiborne, 2004
Photo: C.B. Claiborne, 1994

Interviews, Talks, and Readings

I Have Felt the Gulf: Mississippi

I have felt the Gulf churn butter

and fish ignore with beautiful indifference

the fatal harmony of salt and oilwater.

Turtles, housed in theory, laugh.

Veracity, audacious and violent, rises

as wrecked richness to surface

and ride raveling waves to

shore: beach, a long breadbrown

slice of careless nature, awaits

this gift, miracle spread,

as if, perhaps, then again, maybe, why

my boat-tossed face was hushed

to utter awe at the ceiling

of language, a storm-verbed sky. 

 

Jerry W. Ward Jr., “I Have Felt the Gulf: Mississippi,” in Furious Flower: African American Poetry form the Black Arts Movement to the Present, ed. Joanne Gabbin (University of Virginia Press, 2004), 143.

Journey 55

song in arrivals

 

You survive the surreal

path through trees who

Weep as brooms complain

of being misused as instruments

of a slave-jumping point.

 

Owls fear your power.

Lions roar your praise.

 

Such wonders on the star/trail

inspire the utterance

of a child’s mouth:

the truly hip do not hop

with rabbits’ abandon.

They dance designs.

 

Your light/love speaks

critique in dialogue

with desires unchained.

Your metaphor’s revealed.

 

Time remarks thus:

law would order the spine

be broken at the brainbase.

 

You escape, leave no ashes.

The lynched phoenix salutes

your legend.

 

Memory smiles.

Only wind will call your name.

 

Bells inscribe

your dying

to live

the balance

beautiful.

 

Jerry W. Ward Jr., “Journey 55,” in Furious Flower: African American Poetry form the Black Arts Movement to the Present, ed. Joanne Gabbin (University of Virginia Press, 2004), 143-144.

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Interactive Program Day II

Samuel W. Allen Interviews, Talks, and Readings