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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
ERICA HUNT
Erica Hunt's volume, Local History (1993), like much innovative women's writing, uses life writing and an "I" to question what constitutes personhood.'4 Grouped into three sections, "Local History," "Correspondence Theory," and "Surplus," the volume is written mainly in prose poems, which run for several pages and build discernible, though ambiguous, narratives. Hunt has been affiliated with language writers mainly because of the venues in which she has published-In the American Tree, boundary 2, Vanishing Cab, and with the press Roof Books-and as a result of her statements in "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics" against official political and poetic discourse. 1^ Like much language poetry, much of Hunt's poetry resists the reader's impulses to create narratives and reflects on words as words and speech as constitutive of the person. In its analytical tone and experimental forms, Local History makes its political statements indirectly. Her publishing history, as much as her poetry, then, indicates that she has written for an audience interested in and informed about innovative American writing.
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Born in New York in 1955, Erica Hunt has worked as a poetry teacher, housing organizer, labor news writer, and radio producer. As of 2001, she worked as a program officer for a social justice funder in New York. In addition to Local History, Hunt has published two additional volumes of poetry, Arcade, illustrated and written in collaboration with artist Alison Saar (Kelsey Street Press, 1996), and Piece Logic, a chapbook from Carolina Wren Press (2003).36 Hunt's relative obscurity maybe due to several factors. Hunt has published just two books so far; these books have been published by very small presses; very little criticism of her work has been published, so even many academic poetry specialists are unfamiliar with her work, and few readers will stumble upon her work accidentally; and Local History contains so few direct statements about race or gender that the volume is unlikely to attract readers or teachers on the lookout for poetry that treats African American experience directly. The relative absence of direct references to race in this volume, whether through speech or imagery or theme, highlights the degree to which late twentiethcentury readers have been conditioned to expect African American writers to employ certain speech and themes.37 The only definitive indication of Hunt's race is her photo on the back cover, which seems to be present mainly to satisfy publication conventions or readers' curiosity. Hunt does refer to personal experience-relationships to family members and the urban public-but those experiences may not be Hunt's, as her pronouns refer to different speakers. Her meditations on identity, like Brooks's, spring mainly from observing other peoples' experiences.
In Local History, Erica Hunt offers neither dismantled, postmodern subjectivity, nor plainspoken racial identity. In contrast to Brooks's call to black readers to recognize racial and political solidarity, Hunt calls readers to be conscious of the social relations that grant them status as subjects: a home, a job, literacy, and the ability to communicate with others via verbal and other signs. Race is one factor among many determining one's identity and one's freedoms. While Hunt does not "hail" readers around a central political identity, she does construct a fairly coherent voice within each poem: she often uses an "I," which functions as the text's central perceiver. Like other language writers, Hunt explores in abstract, philosophical language how language and ideology shape human consciousness, but her explorations as often seek to represent experience as they seek to destabilize the terms in which we represent experience. For instance, in one of the few lineated poems in the volume, "Woman, with wings," Hunt writes,
