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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
In her later poems, however, this distance is significantly reduced by Brooks s use of "you" to mean "you, my black reader," spoken by an "I" that Brooks claims as her own voice, not a persona. In later work such as In the Mecca and To Disembark, she strives to speak to an audience that is collective, public and black, not to an imaginary or internal auditor. In the poem "Young Afrikans," she writes:
Of the furious
Who take Today and jerk it out of joint
and they await
across the Changes and the spiraling dead,
our Black revival, our Black vinegar,
our hands, and our hot blood.23
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In her later work, she writes numerous tribute poems to activist heroes such as Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. In many of these poems, she reinforces a group identity and stirs her readers to feel part of the movement, as in "Paul Robeson":
The major Voice.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other's
harvest:
we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.24
In addition to more directly addressing African American audiences and readers, Brooks's later poems, as many critics have noted, are more accessible, are less often set in traditional forms and rhymed, and generally use plainer diction and shorter lines.
Brooks's complexity and signature styles do not so neatly divide between her early and later work, however. Her poetry responds to a changing political climate, but throughout her career, her work shows concerns with race, gender, and class and alternates between playful, complex, and vivid vernacular. Readers can place early and late poems side by side that temper the alleged break outlined above. For instance, "We Real Cool," her banner poem, published in The Bean Eaters in 1960, is strongly echoed by "The Blackstone Rangers," published in 1968 (In The Mecca):
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.25
The Blackstone Rangers
I
As seen by Disciples
There they are.
Thirty at the corner.
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
that do not want to heal.26 Where the rebellion of the pool players was self-destructive and regarded with pity and sadness by the speaker, the Rangers' street gathering is militant and purposeful, and the speaker seems to respect their 1968 insurrection. The last line's metaphor of "sores ... that do not want to heal" alludes to and modifies Langston Hughes' warning of racial revolt in "Harlem": "[does it] fester like a sore- / and then run?" The disaffection and gathering unrest of the 19505, when "We Real Cool" and "Harlem" were written, has been replaced in the later poem with a determination to fight through the aftermath of the explosions Hughes foretold.
In addition to calling to a black audience in poems before and after Fisk, Brooks used set forms, internal rhyme, assonance, and dense, complex syntax throughout her career. In "The Anniad" m Annie Alien, Brooks herself admits that she "was trying to be arty and to be ever so poetic [though she] could never write a poem like that again. [She] wouldn't have the patience and [doesn't] see the point."27 Even in poems about social issues, Brooks often used an ornate, playful style, as in the well-known fourth sonnet of "The Womanhood":
