Content provided in partnership with
Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
7. Lorenzo Thomas traces similar and recurrent clashes in African American poetry: "the poets of the Black Arts movement were [in their 'need to express . . . oral traditions in . . . free verse and eccentric typography'] actually returning to a development that had occurred forty years earlier, when Modernist poetry met up with African American cultural consciousness during the Harlem Renaissance." see Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 97.
- More Articles of Interest
- "A material collapse that is construction": History and Counter-Memory in...
- Double Consciousness, Modernism, and Womanist Themes in Gwendolyn Brooks's...
- A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In...
- Nervous comeback in February after January's selloff. (Month in Insurance...
- `To Gwen With Love' - poet Gwendolyn Brooks - Brief Article
8. Thomas, in Extraordinary Measures, 222, names the date as 1966, as do some others. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. William Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris (1997), and Gwendolyn Brooks cite 1967 as the date of the Second Annual Black Writer's Conference, so that is the date 1 use.
9. Among such writers are Thomas Sayers Ellis, Mei-mei Brussenbruge, John Yau, Claudia Rankine, and others. Lorenzo Thomas notes that rap music, perhaps because of its early, enormous commercial success, quickly "replac[ed] artistic vision with an unimaginative notion of racial and class authenticity-'keeping it real'" (223). The identity that sells, in other words, sticks; and simplified, coherent identities have generally sold better than complex, mixed identities.
10. bell hooks, Yearing: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 111.
11. Houston A. Baker, Jr., "Preface: Unsettling Blackness," American Literature 72, no. 2 (June 2000): 245.
12. See Clenora Hudson, "Racial Themes in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks," CLA Journal 17 (1973), or Dudley Randall, "Black Emotion and Experience: The Literature of Understanding," American Libraries 4, no. 2 (1973); on violence and militancy, see William H. Hansell, "The Role of Violence in Recent Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks," Studies in Black Literature 5 (1974); and on the Black Aesthetic, see Bernard Bell, "New Black Poetry: A Double-Edged Sword," CLA Journal 15, no. 1 (1971): 37-43.
13. See Bloom's brief introductions to Gwendolyn Brooks: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000), and Gwendolyn Brooks: Bloom's Major Poets (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003). Very few individual African American poets are the subjects of these critical editions, markers of canonicity. Derek Walcott and Jay Wright have new volumes, but Amiri Baraka and Rita Dove do not. One wonders whether there would be a Modern Critical volume on Brooks at all, were it not for her early work's traditionalism.
14. Houston A. Baker, Jr., "The Achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks," in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, ed. Maria Mootry and Gary Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 22.
15. John Callahan, '"Essentially and Essential African': Gwendolyn Brooks and the Awakening to Audience," North Dakota Quarterly (Fall 1987): 69.
16. George E. Kent, "Aesthetic Values in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks," in A Life Distilled, 31.
