Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen

Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison

Lorenzo Thomas, in Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry, suggests that the difficulty of publishing and public recognition, as much as philosophical commitment to either a social or aesthetic agenda, may also have helped to perpetuate the divisions in poetry and audiences above.7 Thomas notes that often "visibility depends upon the emergence of an aesthetic or political program that provides a convenient rubric or perhaps a fortunate commercial interest. The emergence of the Black Arts movement manifestos in 1965 and at the 1966 Fisk University Writers' Conference provided such a rubric."8 Manifestos and anthologies of language poetry performed a similar service, providing lesser-known poets with a label, however ill-fitting and reductive, by which to become more visible. Critics and anthology editors thereby had ready-made categories in which to place, discuss, and promote new work. Given this rubric, and the continuing, sometimes pernicious, expectation that writers of color would write about race, many younger writers who consider themselves heirs of the Black Arts movement have felt that their work must foster coherent group identity rather than dissect the premises of identity and must signify "blackness" in recognizable ways. Nonetheless, there are and have been a number of recent poets of color who "resist mainstream forms of poetic expression," precisely because those forms seem to require a static representation of racial identity in transparent, and somewhat circumscribed, language.9

Writing in 1990, bell hooks voiced a sense of artistic limitation in the Black Aesthetic of that historical moment: "Narrow limiting aesthetics within black communities tend to place innovative black artistry on the margins."10 Writing ten years later, Houston Baker suggested that critical notions of "blackness" had changed significantly: "the 'blackness' into which I was initiated during the heady days of the Black Aesthetic of the 19605 and 19705 has been academically superseded by what I want to call a fourth wave of criticism and analysis focused on African American intellectual and cultural production." " This essay seeks to ride that fourth wave. Tracing changes in poetic and critical conceptions of black subjectivity from the 19605 to the present, I will examine the intersection of the intellectual currents outlined above in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen.

First I will trace how the Black Arts movement altered Brookss notion of her work and her audience after 1967. Because so much has been written on Brookss poetry, I will focus on critical responses to her work and her own statements about her work, testing those statements against some poems. I will pause after Brooks to delineate in more detail the ideological shifts influencing poets who came of age in the 19705 and after, and then turn to Erica Hunt. Poststructuralist notions of self and language permeate Erica Hunt's 1993 volume, Local History, while explicit mentions of race are nearly absent from that work. Hunt appears to foil readerly and critical expectations that she write about race because she does not directly signify "blackness" through a selfidentified black speaker or other tropes in her poems. However, Hunt writes about race in the poetic and social margins, as one aspect of textual identity among others, including gender, region, and class. She seems suspicious of group identity, perhaps because it relies on stable, coherent identity, though several lines in the volume wistfully mention kinship and community. Critical response to her work has been minimal until recently, when scholars of African American experimental poetry have begun to place her work in a tradition that is both experimental and black. Finally, I turn to Harryette Mullen, who, in contrast, has received much critical attention in recent years. Her changes in voice-from a somewhat coherent "black voice" in her first volume, Tree Tall Woman, to a fragmented subject in S*PeRM*K*t, to the polyvocal cultural references in Muse & Drudge (1995)-reflect shifts in her thinking about her intended effects and her intended audiences. Just as language poetry has infused mainstream American poetry with a new awareness of its medium. Hunt, Mullen, and other innovative writers' work portends, I would argue, new directions in African American literature and American poetry more generally. Their work is racially and generically plural, allowing us to understand how language constructs provisional identities, including race, and how readers and critics increasingly "recognize themselves" in those complex linguistic identities. By tracing critical responses to these poets' work, we can see how the parameters of African American poetry and criticism shifted from the late 19605 to the new millennium.