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

I used to read a lot to black audiences. I remember reading once at the Watts Tower in L.A. and people were doing the whole call and response thing: "go ahead, say it girl"-that kind of thing. I loved that in a way; then I did Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T. Those audiences were not there for those books. The readings had a whole different tone . . . I tried to write [Muse & Drudge] so that [both] audiences could sit in the same room together. They might not hear it in the same way, but they would all get something that they could relate to.48

Quite aware of changes in her own work, Mullen has traced a trajectory in her writing from a more "coherent black voice" using dialect and speaking as "I," to poems without a single, central speaker or stable ground for subjectivity. Mullen notes that she began to question her use of "black voice" when she realized that her first book used "a southern black voice" that was "probably my mothers," though her mother wasn't from the South but had acquired the accent from living there. Neither did the voice belong to Mullen. The voice, it seems, came from the literary tradition, from Mullen's internalized sense of how she should write. In her essay, "African Signs and Spirit Writing," Mullen comments that "black literary traditions privilege orality" and that this "racially inflected aesthetic that produces a 'black poetic diction' requires that the writer acknowledge and reproduce in the text a significant difference between the spoken and written language of African Americans and that of other Americans."49 In other writings, Mullen explains her discontent with what this aesthetic excludes: "I don't want the oral tradition to be a prescription. . . . I think it's a rich reservoir of possibility, but [so is] the written tradition. [I try] especially in [Muse & Drudge] to use both possibilities."50

Mullen is particularly suited to speak to varied audiences, given her life in transit between different communities. But the more her work moves away from "black poetic diction," representation, and narratives that a listener can follow on first hearing, the more her audience may be composed of other innovative artists and less of people present to find the kind of direct messages Brooks's work offered. Race is not signified within the text through a single, coherent "voice" or narrative, but numerous lines in the text refer clearly to black women and the public discourses, such as advertising, hip-hop, and blues, that construct race and gender. Rather than recognizing a common, stable identity, readers are asked to reflect on the words, phrases, and language that constitute textual identities. Rather than promoting racial pride, Mullen's poetry promotes self-consciousness about internalized discourses around race and gender. Mullen does not expect any one reader to understand every line or reference:

I think of myself and my writing as being marginal to all of the different communities that have contributed to the poetic idiom of my work, but at the same time it is important to me that I work in the interstices, where I occupy the gap . . . or where there might be overlapping boundaries. . . . This concern is at the heart of Muse & Drudge, a poem that deliberately addresses a diverse audience of readers, with the expectation that no single reader will comprehend every line or will catch every allusion.51