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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
Work is pushing past resistance,
past the sense
it has all been written
before, spilling off the inventory shelves.
Sometimes you can read
with the headlights on, sometimes
you can drive to moods for which
no correlates exist, only curves, shaded
paths in the wilderness, occasional plots of
land ignored by absentee owners.38
This poem contains a rather straightforward description of writers block, especially the block that attends contemplation of an overpopulated literary world. Using an extended metaphor of driving as writing and journeying, Hunt locates, by the end of the poem, a somewhat conventional resolution in an image of escape from convention, domestic and poetic:
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The cars ahead of us have disappeared.
Finally the way is clear, we have come to a way out;
past the flocked walls, the manipulated
seams, past the unzippered feeling, the tacit
violence between its teeth,
the trick with the mirrors and speed."
While the poem contains some imaginative leaps and interesting juxtapositions, it shares more commonalities with poems in mainstream literary journals than with much language poetry.
However, Hunt's interest in exploring how the self is composed of multiple discourses, an interest shared by many language writers, drives many poems in the volume. The discourses she examines include regional dialect, gender, race, generational experience, and literacy. In the poem "City," Hunt describes New York's dialect as an eerily familiar tongue that creates an instant, and perhaps illusory, sense of community with one's urban neighbors: "It was very soon after we arrived, when the city, however plural, we heard as a dialect, as a distinct manner of speaking. We were as startled as if we had heard a stranger using our mother's habits of speech, a turn at once familiar and uncanny, that made us fall into an intimacy with our neighbors, joined by a mother tongue" (27). Through the phrases "mother tongue" and "mother's habits of speech," Hunt conflates a national, native tongue and a private, family argot. That speech, in turn, transforms "strangers" into "neighbors" and so redefines others' identities and roles within the community. Elsewhere in the volume, some colloquial lines are attributed to neighbors, illustrating the city's deceptively familiar dialects: "You may not have broken your neck damn fool, but you sure have broke up that sled"; "Lifting that elevator and toting them stairs, up the tenement !lights .... we thought scrape, we ate scrape and we lived scrape" (32,66).
Gender identity is explicitly defined through language in the sequence of poems "The Order of the Story" (15-20). In that poem, Hunt depicts three ways of understanding a courtship. In section one, the speaker addresses a "you," which both observes how a woman composes herself for self-presentation to a new love and how a writer composes the scene of a date: "Imagine yourself walking into a room. . . . Invent the language as if each inflection belonged to you instead of containing you. . . . Describe the figure the doorway supports. . . . where she shows signs of adjustment: a walking chainsaw in crinoline and spandex, a smile outlined in flame. / Describe where the heart goes in and out of her, where the exits are marked" (15). In the section entitled "Gloss (a catalog of feeling)," Hunt provides a nonalphabetical glossary of the terms of romance, redefining some words according to their different applications to men and women, and underlining the pronouns to highlight how gender is constructed through language and through oppositions:
