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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 title of this essay, "Public Subjects," refers both to the subject matter that these poets tackle in their work and to the public, rather than private, subjectivities that these poets construct for readers. These poets are highly aware of their readers and, perhaps in answer to literary expectations of African American poetry, tackle issues of public concern, such as poverty, violence, and discrimination. In an age of continuing narcissism and self-congratulatory, pyrotechnic language play, such anchoring in issues allows these poets to say something important and current and to say it in new ways. This essay also seeks to shift attention from the private subject-the self or I in poetry-to the black community, for these poets often write about larger urban and discursive communities rather than about themselves. Further, in her statements about poetry, each poet discusses the readers she imagines, hopes for, and seeks to transform. Brooks, after 1967, often calls for and seeks to forge a collective racial identity among her readers. Hunt's poetry asks readers to consider the ways we construct or reveal our public identities on city streets and in interactions with strangers. And Mullen wishes her work to be read and understood in heterogeneous groups, rather than privately, for the range of her references requires individual erudition as well as a variety of cultural backgrounds to decipher. In their gazes outward toward both social and linguistic realities, these poets chart escape routes from the lyric /s house of mirrors.
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GWENDOLYN BROOKS
Critics, white and black, argue over the racial politics of Brooks's early and later work. In the first stage of her career, Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry was praised by a largely white critical establishment for its formal virtuosity, its verbal complexity, and its "transcendence" of racial themes. In the sixties and seventies, however, many African American critics admired and focused on Brooks's welcome treatment of racial themes, violence, militancy, and the new Black Aesthetic.12 These critical viewpoints are much less segregated now, though as late as 2003, in a critical edition devoted mainly to her later work, Harold Bloom admitted his preference for Brooks's early work, its "wry turn upon the universal" and "imaginatively rich ... enigmas.13
In its second stage, Brooks s poetry was praised by many critics for its political engagement, though more radical poets and critics found it insufficiently revolutionary. Houston Baker finds that Brooks's earlier poems negotiate and "equal the best in the black and white American literary traditions," though the "white" tradition (reflected by "the syllabi of most American literature courses") regards her as a "black writer." Meanwhile, some spokesmen for the Black Arts movement found her work rather pale: Baker notes that Amiri Baraka calls Brooks's work characteristic of "Negro literature," which is to say, not revolutionary or black enough.14 In an essay tracing the changes between Brooks's early and later poetry, John Callahan calls Brooks's "newish voice" an "evolution" rather than a revolution, noting that her later work, especially from In the Mecca (1968) to Primer for Blacks (1980), is less distant, more direct, "chiefly oral," and more apt to "celebrate and, therefore, intensify the integrity of African American life quite apart from the crises of white America."15 George Kent argues that, after 1967, "Brooks's poetry became far more attentive to blacks as an audience than it had previously."l6 Brooks also more often used European poetic forms, such as sonnets and ballads, as well as allusions and complex diction, in her poetry before 1967 than after. Most of Brooks s critics accept her announced change after 1967 as a given, though they differ in their interpretation of the shift: some say her work moved from a private to a public realm, from white to black audiences, from apolitical to political, or from emotional distance to openness.17
