Reflecting violence in the warpland: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot

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

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Hull, Gloria T., and Posey Gallagher. "Update on Part One: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks." CLA Journal 21.1 (1977): 19-40.

Karenga, Maulana. "Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function." Gates and McKay 1973-77.

Kent, George E. A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1990.

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Melhem, D. H. Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry & the Heroic Voice. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1987.

Miller, R. Baxter. "'Define ... the Whirlwind': Gwendolyn Brooks's Epic Sign for a Generation." On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation. Ed. Stephen Caldwell Wright. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. 146-60.

Mootry, Maria K., and Gary Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.

Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Report). Washington: GPO, 1968.

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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).

(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.