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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen

Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison

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First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string

With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note

With hurting love; the music that they wrote

Bewitch, bewilder.. .. 28

Here, however, is the second section of "The second Sermon on the Warpland," a poem often cited as an example of Brooks's new consciousness. Its assonance, alliteration, short sentences, and mandarin imperatives echo those in "The Womanhood" and earlier poems:

Salve salvage in the spin.

Endorse the splendor splashes;

stylize the flawed utility,

prop a malign or failing light

but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.

Not the easy man, who rides above them all,

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not the jumbo brigand,

not the pet bird of poets, that sweetest sonnet,

shall straddle the whirlwind.

Nevertheless, live. (454)

Despite the stylistic likenesses, there are formal and political differences between these two poems. The earlier poem is a sonnet, rhymed and in iambic pentameter, while the later poem eschews regular meter and end-rhyme. Moreover, the first letter of each line of the sonnet is capitalized, where the first words of each line in "Sermon" are not. There is also a subtle but characteristic shift in the audience addressed. The sonnet addresses a "you" who must overcome a "they." Though the sermon addresses an implied "you" in its use of the imperative, Brooks includes herself and the community in "our commonwealth." While Brooks did largely abandon such traditional forms as the sonnet in her later work, the shifting pronouns here are perhaps more important to her professed wish to speak "as a black about blacks to blacks." The speaker of the sonnet assumes her auditor will be embattled as she strives to create art or speak out: "they" (whites, poverty, inequality) are the obstacles that must be fought for space to create. The speaker of the "Sermon" suggests that art cannot and should not transcend daily struggles. Rather, life and art must exist and flourish in a flawed commonwealth; we must "Live in the along" ("Speech to the Young") and "conduct [our] blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind."29

In sum, there are discernible shifts in Brookss form from her early to late work: after 1967 she less often used complex diction, traditional forms and rhyme, and more often used personal pronouns in poems that speak more directly to her audiences. However, it is worth noting that Brooks s publicly announced awakening after Fisk encourage readers to discern more radical shifts than her work necessarily displays. The role of critics in her makeover is key; critics may have emphasized the changes in her work to recuperate a sufficiently politicized Brooks for her literary descendants. Critics who wanted to define and preserve a more militant province for the Black Arts movement regarded her work's changes as minimal. And later, in the 19805 and '905, feminist critics regarded Brooks s poetry, early and late, as a major milestone in women's poetry. No doubt Brooks s dependable, if too brief, presence in American literature anthologies is due to multiple factors: her importance as the first African American Pulitzer winner and her role in American literary history, including decades of public activity and lecturing, and her poems' accessibility and (teachable) focus on race, gender, and class.

Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen

Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison

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