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

Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison

Gwendolyn Brooks, more than many American poets, continues to attract nonspecialist readers. In addition to the adult readers she envisioned and read to around the country, she also counted children among her audiences, working tirelessly as a poet in the schools to bring poetry to children in Chicago. On the occasion of her death, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer broadcast interviews with students at inner-city schools who had been touched by Brooks s poetry, including a white teenager. On a gritty Boston rooftop, he recited "We Real Cool," saying it helped him make sense of drug casualties among his friends. National Public Radio and the New York Times also ran extended obituaries, featuring clips of her poems. Also insuring continuing audiences for her work are the many teachers in high schools and colleges who introduce her poetry to new students each year, using both her reprinted volumes and the myriad anthologies in which she appears. As a result of Brooks s longevity, her historical importance to African American letters, her own energetic public service, her early canonization and continued critical blessing, all of her audiences (critics, poets, young people) continue to grow. The poems most celebrated, however, may change. Instead of prizing poems that call readers to recognize a coherent black identity, critics and the canon may focus on poems that teach and witness history ("A Bronzeville Mother Loiters") or illustrate class conflict ("The Lovers of the Poor") or sisterhood ("To Those of My Sisters . . . ," "To Black Women") or that integrate political protest and linguistic experiment ("Sermons on the Warpland"). Brooks's place within literary history is established and firm, in part because her audiences-critics, teachers, and nonspecialized readers of poetry-are broad and diverse.

CHANGING EXPECTATIONS

In the wake of the Black Arts movement's radicalization of traditions begun in the Harlem Renaissance, readers throughout the twentieth century came to associate African American identity and aesthetics in poetry with certain tropes and themes: "black" dialect; folk and vernacular expressions conveying collective, regional racial identities; themes related to African American experience; line lengths and rhythms allied with jazz and blues; and allusions specific to African American history, art, music, and literature. These conventions help construct African American identity within a growing body of literature, creating an art, in the words of Larry Neal, "that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America: ... a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology."30 The Black Power movement's call for a distinct racial identity and the Black Arts movement s aesthetic legacy have together permeated American poetry, and numerous anthologies published between 1975 and 2000 were organized around emerging ethnic-group identities and featured poems that drew upon the conventions above.

The prevailing view of the Black Aesthetic and its multicultural heirs diverges notably from American poetry influenced by postmodernist theories of language and subjectivity in its stances toward the poetic speaker, language, politics, and audience. In contrast to the oral bases of many black artists' work, language poetry was written, read, and listened to not tor previously untold stories or patterns of imagery, but for its reflections on and play with language; it deconstructed narrative at the level of the sentence rather than producing narratives of a historically marginalized people. Though often claiming its appeal to wide audiences, language poetry was difficult and dense and was initially read mainly by cutting-edge poets and some academic audiences. Poetry of the Black Aesthetic, meanwhile, strove to be accessible to ordinary readers. Though both poetic modes were interested in the political effects of reading, their notions of political action were quite different. The Black Aesthetic called for sociopolitical awareness and action on the part of its readers, as Brookss work demonstrates. In contrast, language writers called for readers to rethink their relations to reading and language and to become aware of the political implications of those relations. Poets who defended traditional poetic conventions often regarded formally innovative poetry as politically unhelpful, primarily because its political commentary, couched more in syntax than content, eluded many readers. After 1968, literary debates about the politics of "coherent voice" ran on different tracks in these poetries. Many poets of the Black Aesthetic and multicultural lyric valued recognizable, coherent, empowering representations of race, gender, and class in literary work, in part manifested through the "voice" of the poetic speaker. That voice might be individual or collective, but it strove toward coherence in either case. Postmodern poets, in contrast, valued defamiliarized, deconstructed identities as likelier paths to liberation. These poets viewed efforts to construct a coherent identity or narrative (or a narrative of identity) as new forms of entrapment that unnecessarily reduced what was plural, such as reality and the self, to a singular form.