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Reflecting violence in the warpland: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot
African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Annette Debo
Notes
(1.) Riot's table of contents desribes itself as "a poem in three parts." These three are listed as "Riot," "The Third Sermon on the Warpland," and "An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire." For documentation, line numbers begin again in each part because they are reprinted individually. (2.) See Brooks, Report 84-86 for a description of her experience at the Fisk conference.
(3.) For brief treatments of Riot, see Kent and Shaw. Also see Furman who, I argue, misreads the poem in her claims that for Brooks, "the most tragic aspect of riots is that black people are the victims" and that Brooks's "people do not rise again" (6, 7).
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(4.) See Bolden for a persuasive reading of the political nature of Brooks's early poetry.
(5.) Miller interprets "the warpland," also named in Brooks's "The Sermon on the Warpland" and "The Second Sermon on the Warpland," as "not geographical place but military design--a 'war planned'--and the problem of distortion, the 'warp land'" (156).
(6.) The report of the Kerner Commission and the Kerner Report both refer to the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.
(7.) See Melhem for an intricate gloss of Brooks's allusions to John Cabot and John Wycliffe.
(8.) Hansell makes the interesting point that "the rioters and John Cabot literally speak different languages" ("The Role" 22).
(9.) See Shaw for more analysis of the poem's re-birth theme.
(10.) Brooks removed this line from later reprints of the poem. She explains: "I had to remove the first line--'It is the morning of our love'--when Carolyn Rodgers called to tell me she had found it opening a Rod McKuen poem in Listen to the Warm. Even though I wrote mine first!--as can be seen in the hard-cover edition of Riot, which includes a dated script-version of the poem. Such a horror is every writer's nightmare. Poets, doubt any 'inevitability'" (Report 187).
(11.) Hansell noted the similarities between Brooks and Malcolm X ("The Role" 22).
(12.) See Kent 237.
(13.) See Hansell's "The Poet-Militant and Foreshadowings of a Black Mystique: Poems in the Second Period of Gwendolyn Brooks" for a delineation of three periods in Brooks's poetry. See Taylor for one of the few more evolutionary readings of the development of her poetry.
Annette Debo is Assistant Professor of English at Western Carolina University where she teaches African American literature and critical theory. She has also published in CLA Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and College Literature.
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