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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
17. Norris Clark describes Brooks's shift toward more public, political poetry: "The evolution of the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks from an egocentric orientation to an ethnocentric one is directly related to her advocacy of a black aesthetic and to the shifting criteria in modern America. . . . Although she has always written poetry concerned with the black American experience, . . . [and with] being female, her poetics have primarily undergone thematic developments. Her emphasis has shifted from a private, internal and exclusive assessment of the identity crises of twentieth-century persons to a communal, external, and inclusive assessment of the black communal experience." see "Gwendolyn Brooks and a Black Aesthetic," in A Life Distilled, 84.
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18. Karenga, "Black Cultural Nationalism," 31.
19. Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers: 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 77.
20. Ibid., 87.
21. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), 45.
22. Callahan, "Essential African," 63.
23. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: The David Company, 1987), 494.
24. Ibid., 496.
25. Ibid., 331.
26. Ibid., 446.
27. Denise Hawkins, "An Evening with Gwendolyn Brooks." (Conversation conducted at the "Furious Flowering" Conference, lames Madison University, Harrisonburg, YA). Reprinted in The furious flowering of African American Poetry, ed. Joanne V. Ciabbin (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 330, http://www.jmu.edu/ furiousflower/inten-iew.html (accessed January 10, 2005).
28. Brooks, Blacks, 118.
29. Ibid., 497, 456.
30. Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 184-98.
31. See Cynthia Hogue, "Interview with Harryette Mullen," Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 9, no. 2 ( January 1999): 21. bell hooks, Aldon Nielsen, and Lorenzo Thomas echo Mullen's point.
32. For similar reasons, poets and critics are just beginning to trace a tradition of black formalist poetry, from Countee Cullen to Marilyn Nelson.
33. Aldon Lynn Nielsen makes this observation in Black Chant, 183, as does Mullen in her interviews with Hogue and Barbara Henning.
34. Many women writing in response to the ideas of language writing in the 1970$ and '80s also questioned the models of identity offered by "voice poems," yet retained some markers of identity in their poetry. Hannah Weiner's Little Books/Indians took the form of dated journal entries; the chapters and sentences of Lyn Hejinian's My Life both parodied and explored conventional autobiographical notions of lifetime coherence and progression; Bernadette Meyer's Midwinter Day records one busy domestic day; and a number ol other women worked in epistolary torms.
35. Erica Hunt, "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics," Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, ed. Mary Margaret Sloan (New Jersey: Talisman House Publishers, 1999). Originally published in The Politics of Poetic form, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990).
