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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
First I will trace how the Black Arts movement altered Brookss notion of her work and her audience after 1967. Because so much has been written on Brookss poetry, I will focus on critical responses to her work and her own statements about her work, testing those statements against some poems. I will pause after Brooks to delineate in more detail the ideological shifts influencing poets who came of age in the 19705 and after, and then turn to Erica Hunt. Poststructuralist notions of self and language permeate Erica Hunt's 1993 volume, Local History, while explicit mentions of race are nearly absent from that work. Hunt appears to foil readerly and critical expectations that she write about race because she does not directly signify "blackness" through a selfidentified black speaker or other tropes in her poems. However, Hunt writes about race in the poetic and social margins, as one aspect of textual identity among others, including gender, region, and class. She seems suspicious of group identity, perhaps because it relies on stable, coherent identity, though several lines in the volume wistfully mention kinship and community. Critical response to her work has been minimal until recently, when scholars of African American experimental poetry have begun to place her work in a tradition that is both experimental and black. Finally, I turn to Harryette Mullen, who, in contrast, has received much critical attention in recent years. Her changes in voice-from a somewhat coherent "black voice" in her first volume, Tree Tall Woman, to a fragmented subject in S*PeRM*K*t, to the polyvocal cultural references in Muse & Drudge (1995)-reflect shifts in her thinking about her intended effects and her intended audiences. Just as language poetry has infused mainstream American poetry with a new awareness of its medium. Hunt, Mullen, and other innovative writers' work portends, I would argue, new directions in African American literature and American poetry more generally. Their work is racially and generically plural, allowing us to understand how language constructs provisional identities, including race, and how readers and critics increasingly "recognize themselves" in those complex linguistic identities. By tracing critical responses to these poets' work, we can see how the parameters of African American poetry and criticism shifted from the late 19605 to the new millennium.
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Brooks and Mullen, and to a lesser extent Hunt, have all also written about their imagined readers. Each poet s statements about her intended audience do not necessarily, of course, illuminate the face of her actual audience. Rather, those statements encode the ideological dreams of that poet's historical and critical moment. Brooks's statements about her audience distinctly echo Karenga's injunctions for art, while Mullen's statements echo Hejinian's vision of openness. Hunt's often-quoted statement in "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics" lies between the two, historically and theoretically.
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