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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
As noted above, there are few critical essays on Hunt's work, so generalizations about its reception would be spurious.4" However, the critical silence surrounding her work might have been due in part to the difficulty of placing it among poetic traditions, and in part to the limited criticism (or venues for criticism) of avant-garde poetry by women in the 1980s and early '90s. Hunt has commented little on the audiences she envisions, unlike Brooks and Mullen, but her work would be accessible to readers unfamiliar with poststructuralist theories of the self and language, even as it makes readers aware of their own social positioning. Hunt's essay, "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics," indicates her reservations about both experimental and representational writing:
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In literature-a highly stratified cultural domain-oppositional projects replicate the stratification of the culture at large. There are oppositional projects that engage language as a social artifact, as art material, as powerfully transformative, which view themselves as distinct from projects that have as their explicit goal the use of language as a vehicle for the consciousness and liberation of oppressed communities. In general, the various communities, speculative and liberatory, do not think of each other as having much in common, or having much to show each other. In practice, each of their language use is radically different - not in the clichéd sense of one being more open-ended than the other, but in the levels of rhetoric they employ. More interesting [are] the limitations they share-limitations of the society as a whole which they reproduce, even as they resist. . . . Speculative projects are not exempt from the cul de sacs that contain other oppositional writing.41
Rather than adopting derogatory terms for either mode, Hunt coins neutral terms for formally experimental and traditional poetries-"speculative and liberatory"-and acknowledges the limitations of both. Unfortunately, she does not name those limitations nor give an example of the "levels of rhetoric" that separate these poetries. Though Hunt seems to regard both modes of writing as equally valid, she goes on to imply that "speculative" writing is more likely than "liberatory" writing to resist "conservatism, insularity, and cooptation . . . by dominant discourse of conceptual advances made by oppositional groups into the terms, values and structures of dominant ideology" (684). In other words, where Brooks regarded her later work as more politically effective (liberatory) because of its direct speech and its accessibility, Hunt regards her mode of writing as politically effective to the extent that it cannot be reduced to simple messages: its inaccessibility gives it political teeth. This position echoes the critical airwaves, but counters the lower frequencies her own poetry transmits: the poems above are both speculative in their use of language and liberatory in theme.
Toward the end of her essay, Hunt acknowledges the question of audiences for poetry like hers:
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