Junious “Jay” Ward is one of Charlotte’s best-known poets. His slam poetry performances are legendary. In fact, in 2019 he was named the Individual World Poetry Slam Champion. In addition to performing his original poems, he has had great success publishing poems in various journals as well as in a chapbook titled Sing Me a Lesser Wound (2020). One of his most important recognitions came in April 2022 when the City of Charlotte officially named him the Poet Laureate of Charlotte. Next month, will see the publication of Ward’s first full-length poetry collection. Titled Composition, this collection has an official release date of February 7, 2023, but the book is already available for pre-order from Button Poetry: https://buttonpoetry.com/product/composition/
I recently contacted Ward and asked him for more information about how he came to write Composition. Here is what he sent to me:
The original set of poems that would later become Composition was kind of an exploration of my own Blackness, what it meant. But I knew that wasn’t the whole story. Why did I want to write about Blackness? What meaning did that hold for me, why was it important I explore that theme, why should anyone care? As I asked myself those questions, I realized this manuscript wasn’t simply about Blackness, it was about identity. It was about how we look at race and identity through the lens of being multiracial. It was about how we choose to identify, and how, often, people make that choice for us. It was also about being from the South.
I was raised in a rural town in eastern North Carolina. My father died when I was 21 years old. The manuscript evolved to include sub themes of grief, life in the rural South, and self-discovery.
I interact with form, documents, and visual elements throughout the book. For example, it was important for me to not only capture the ‘spirit of conversation’ around interracial marriages at the time that my parents got married, 1969, but also to find a way to enter those conversations, to ‘talk back’ to certain documents. Some poems are blackouts or erasures of documents like Senate Bill 219, and include footnotes or annotations. Other poems are in form (sonnet, ghazal, contrapuntal, etc.) or are combinations of forms, so that each poem becomes kind of a metaphor for the entire manuscript.
As Charlotte’s inaugural Poet Laureate, I am keenly interested in bridging the perceived gap between “performance” poets and “literary” poets, as I’ve had a modicum of success in both arenas. I think this book is also a step in that direction; a blending of two mediums, a way to blur or solidify the lines, a way to ask ourselves what those lines even mean, or perhaps more importantly, a way to feel comfortable identifying oneself as being on either or neither side of those lines.
For readers who want to know more about Ward, please click on the following link:
https://jwardpoetry.com/home Charlotte is one of only a few cities that has its own Poet Laureate, and Charlotte is the only city that can claim Junious “Jay” Ward as a local poet. In Japan, they call their gifted artists “Living National Treasures.” Well, as I see it, Ward is one of Storied Charlotte’s living treasures