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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
One troubling aspect of privileging language as the primary site to torque new meaning and possibility is that it is severed from the political question of for whom new meaning is produced. The ideal reader is an endangered species, the committed reader has an ideological agenda both open and closed, flawed and acute, that we do not address directly. (686)
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Is the "committed reader" a devotee of speculative or liberatory poetry? Who is that ideal reader and what endangers her? Hunt does not answer these questions, but she does suggest that "speculative," "oppositional" poetry may reach even fewer readers than more conservative, co-opted "liberatory" poetry. In this essay, Hunt appears to share Gwendolyn Brooks's sense that literature can and should mount political opposition to dominant and oppressive orders. The mode of opposition, however, which Hunt shares with other language writers, is distinct from the opposition prescribed by proponents of a Black Aesthetic such as Ron Karenga and Larry Neal. Hunt's Local History occupies a literary moment in which political opposition to dominant ideology (variously conceived) remained a fundamental value for writers on both sides of this literature s "stratified domain." Thus she works to practice two competing modes of literary-political resistance at once.
Where Brooks reached a broad audience with her early work and later sought to mobilize specifically black readers in "taverns and schools," Hunt has as yet reached mainly small, mostly academic audiences, who perhaps have not recognized how she seeks to synthesize the liberatory and speculative traditions. But Hunt's writing is intriguing precisely because it does not fit neatly into courses or categories. Brooks and Hunt both represent details of impoverished, urban people's lives, but Brooks speaks from those characters' perspectives, as in "The Mother," depicting their interior lives, whereas Hunt speaks from an observer's perspective, analyzing the social consequences of illiteracy and disenfranchisement. Both poets' attention to the urban poor testifies to their political concerns and their wish to engage readers in those concerns. However, Hunt's reflections on language and social systems, her abstract language, and the relative invisibility of small press-published poetry all make it unlikely that her poems will pop up in anthologies and classrooms anytime soon. But perhaps as critics and poets unearth and reconstruct an alternative African American tradition, which includes Hunt's work, her poetry may yet find ports of affiliation and make its way into more articles and anthologies.
HARRYETTE MULLEN
Harryette Mullen has published six books of poetry to date: Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), and Baby Blues: Early Poems (2002). She teaches at UCLA. In contrast to the critical lull around Hunt's work, Harryette Mullen's writing, particularly Muse & Drudge, has received considerable critical attention, perhaps because it is her fourth book, or because it is highly original in its form, or because it has proven "teachable" in poetry classrooms. One measure of a poet's renown is the interview; and as of 2002, Mullen had given at least five. Written in short, punning, allusive phrases, Muse & Drudge consists of one long poem in irregularly rhyming quatrains. In its plays on words, the poem is a polyglot mix of black, regional, and commercial American expressions, urban slang, Spanish phrases, proverb, and high diction. Mullen calls the poem "quatrains of blues songs and jumprope rhymes, composed of recycled representations of black women."42 Though quatrains structure the volume s extended song, each phrase functions like "the new sentence": fragments of narrative evoke larger stories, which the following sentences build upon elliptically or abandon. Despite these disjunctions, certain motifs and subjects recur, especially regarding black women's lives and identities.
