Reflecting violence in the warpland: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Annette Debo

(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.