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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
The existence and proliferation of experimental African American poetry may indicate real gains in this society. Even those readers who like their poetry straight-up-representational, narrative, arranged in full sentences-might applaud what these poets' work implies. The abandonment of predictable, unified formulations of racial identity may represent a diminishing need to protest for basic rights; these poets replace those formulations with complex, self-conscious representations of race, while continuing to address life's difficulties, and thereby indicate a new stage and sophistication in political resistance. This poetry resists our own conceptual ruts around ideas of race and identity, scrutinizing how we use the language so that we may rethink how we think. Both poets' work indicates that borders in American poetry are indeed moving, and there are audiences rising to applaud the territories emerging.
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NOTES
1. Both new formalist and experimental poets and critics have made claims about contemporary poetry's audiences, but these claims are hypothetical and untested. Reader-response theory offers some useful frameworks and vocabulary for discussing audiences. Peter Rabinowitz, for instance, calls real readers "actual audiences" and imagined readers hypothetical or "authorial audiences." The latter reflect an author's "assumptions," "guesses," and wishes about projected readers. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). However, most theories focus on how individual readers interpret texts, rather than on how social movements, like Black Power, or critical paradigms, like poststructuralism, alter poets' assumptions about readers and readers' and critics' expectations of poetry.
2. Ron Karenga, "Black Cultural Nationalism," in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Anchor Press, 1971), 31-37.
3. Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure," in Writing/ Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Reprinted in Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994), 272.
4. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 10.
5. Kimberly W. Benston, "Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American Poetry," in Afro-American Literary Study, eds. Houston A. Baker Jr., and Patricia Redmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 164-185.
6. A number of critics have highlighted parallel differences within the racial discourses of other poetries, as well. Timothy Yu, focusing on Asian American poetry, analyzes the "collision between two of the most powerful trends in American poetry since 1970 - the project of radical modernist-postmodernist formal innovation represented by Language poetry, and the feminist and multicultural poetries that emerged in the wake of the 19605." Timothy Yu, "Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry," Contemporary Literature 41, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 423.
