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Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen
Frontiers, 2005 by Cummings, Allison
Gwendolyn Brooks, more than many American poets, continues to attract nonspecialist readers. In addition to the adult readers she envisioned and read to around the country, she also counted children among her audiences, working tirelessly as a poet in the schools to bring poetry to children in Chicago. On the occasion of her death, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer broadcast interviews with students at inner-city schools who had been touched by Brooks s poetry, including a white teenager. On a gritty Boston rooftop, he recited "We Real Cool," saying it helped him make sense of drug casualties among his friends. National Public Radio and the New York Times also ran extended obituaries, featuring clips of her poems. Also insuring continuing audiences for her work are the many teachers in high schools and colleges who introduce her poetry to new students each year, using both her reprinted volumes and the myriad anthologies in which she appears. As a result of Brooks s longevity, her historical importance to African American letters, her own energetic public service, her early canonization and continued critical blessing, all of her audiences (critics, poets, young people) continue to grow. The poems most celebrated, however, may change. Instead of prizing poems that call readers to recognize a coherent black identity, critics and the canon may focus on poems that teach and witness history ("A Bronzeville Mother Loiters") or illustrate class conflict ("The Lovers of the Poor") or sisterhood ("To Those of My Sisters . . . ," "To Black Women") or that integrate political protest and linguistic experiment ("Sermons on the Warpland"). Brooks's place within literary history is established and firm, in part because her audiences-critics, teachers, and nonspecialized readers of poetry-are broad and diverse.
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CHANGING EXPECTATIONS
In the wake of the Black Arts movement's radicalization of traditions begun in the Harlem Renaissance, readers throughout the twentieth century came to associate African American identity and aesthetics in poetry with certain tropes and themes: "black" dialect; folk and vernacular expressions conveying collective, regional racial identities; themes related to African American experience; line lengths and rhythms allied with jazz and blues; and allusions specific to African American history, art, music, and literature. These conventions help construct African American identity within a growing body of literature, creating an art, in the words of Larry Neal, "that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America: ... a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology."30 The Black Power movement's call for a distinct racial identity and the Black Arts movement s aesthetic legacy have together permeated American poetry, and numerous anthologies published between 1975 and 2000 were organized around emerging ethnic-group identities and featured poems that drew upon the conventions above.
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