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

Cummings, Allison

Since the 19705, many critics of contemporary American poetry have focused on the issue of subjectivity, particularly the "I" or speaker in poetry and its political implications. Far fewer studies have focused on the subjectivities of actual audiences for recent poetry, though reader-response critics and reception theorists have extensively discussed how individual readers interpret novels old and new.1 Because most reader-response theorists focus on novels and narrative, the shifting conventions within different poetry communities do not often figure into their examination of individual readers interpretive practices. Though this essay will describe both the real and imagined readers of these poetries, it is most concerned with delineating how different historical and critical moments, specifically the Black Arts movement and poststructuralism, shape poets' notions of their audiences and determine how that work is received and understood. This essay joins other recent scholarship that assembles an alternative tradition of African American avant-garde poetryin contrast to long-prevailing notions of accessible, plain-spoken black poetry-and it contributes to that scholarship a focus on poetry by women as well as a focus on the popular and critical reception of such work over four decades. Through examining how the cultural and critical contexts around each poet shifted, one can more clearly trace how American paradigms of race and writing have changed and continue to change.

Those critics who have discussed contemporary poetry's audiences have called for poets to liberate readers-to different ends and via different means. For instance, back in 1971, Ron Karenga called for poetry of the Black Arts movement to rally and uplift readers around a new racial identity, to "reflect and support the Black Revolution ... to expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the revolution."2 As Karenga saw it, readers would collectively receive from artists clear messages that would help to forge a new consciousness of racial identity and of the need for revolutionary action. Just over a decade later, in 1983, Lyn Hejinian called for "open texts" that are "generative rather than directive, [that] emphasize ... process, [and] ... resist the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; [that] resist reduction and commodification."( Hejinian and other language writers sought a poetic revolution, whose political effects they awaited. Rather than receiving doctrinal, closed messages, or deciphering the author's intentions, each reader would participate in the making of his or her message and develop a new consciousness of how language (over)determines identities and meanings. While poets and theorists have worked very hard indeed to reconcile these two visions of art's relation to politics, poets writing in the wake of poststructuralism have until recently tended to write with an eye toward either sociopolitical or linguistic revolution.

For poets of color coming of age since the 19705, these artistic imperativesto write the revolution or to write the process of linguistic revolution-have often been felt as competing, contradictory demands. Where the Black Arts movement and much poetry influenced by it called for audiences to recognize a new racial pride and a coherent group identity, poststructuralist writing, language writing, and poetry in their wake called for readers to question the literary and linguistic formulations of identity, to distrust the "I," and to interrogate fictions of autobiographical progression, coherence, or consistency within subjectivity. Of course, much poetry of the Black Arts movement tackled social and linguistic opposition at once. Dense, self-reflexive, disjunctive work by Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major, as well as Gwendolyn Brooks, appeared in the 1960$ and '70s. However, as Aldon Nielsen notes in Black Chant: Uinguages of African-American Postmodernism, in subsequent critical discussion of Black Arts poetry the legacy of the movement has narrowed, focusing on a few accessible works and poets, thereby "ensuring the invisibility of the others."1 With the Black Arts movement's poetic innovations only recently gaining sustained critical attention then, poets who sought to represent race from the 19705 to the 19905 faced a conflict in literary expectations, particularly if they wished their work to reach broad audiences.

Disparate conceptions of racial identity, producing divergent formulations of race in American poetry, clearly precede the 19705 and the split before and after poststructuralism that I allude to here. Certainly, Langston Hughes s and Countee Cullen's stylistic differences stem as much from different ideas of racial identity as from different wishes for audiences and literary posterity. In his essay, "Performing Blackness," Kimberly Benston not only outlines disputed conceptions of blackness in African American poetry before 1970, but also seeks to construct a paradigm for reading and writing about black poetry that synthesizes its internal disagreements.5 Comparing the texts of Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka, Benston writes that poets who "embracfe] the Black Arts' ideological claim for an autonomous black poetics [rather than] seeking to situate black poetics within a larger . . . framework of American/Western/ Human creativity" replay the literature's own dialectical "argument[s] about the nature of blackness, performance, and the modern Afro-American self" (168). Baraka, Benston writes, "invokes the extralinguistic standard of'correct' blackness in erecting a vision of the poetic canon, [whereas Ellison] refocuses attention on the verbal medium in which [an] eclectic or 'synthetic' vision of blackness evolves from generation to generation" (174). In Benston's implied literary history, the Black Arts movement momentarily froze black identity, referring to it as constituted outside and before the text (182). However, the "differences within black discourse(s)," which Benston called upon critics to highlight, are now visibly back in play within the critical perspectives of Aldon Nielsen, Lorenzo Thomas, and Harryette Mullen, among others (183).6

Lorenzo Thomas, in Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry, suggests that the difficulty of publishing and public recognition, as much as philosophical commitment to either a social or aesthetic agenda, may also have helped to perpetuate the divisions in poetry and audiences above.7 Thomas notes that often "visibility depends upon the emergence of an aesthetic or political program that provides a convenient rubric or perhaps a fortunate commercial interest. The emergence of the Black Arts movement manifestos in 1965 and at the 1966 Fisk University Writers' Conference provided such a rubric."8 Manifestos and anthologies of language poetry performed a similar service, providing lesser-known poets with a label, however ill-fitting and reductive, by which to become more visible. Critics and anthology editors thereby had ready-made categories in which to place, discuss, and promote new work. Given this rubric, and the continuing, sometimes pernicious, expectation that writers of color would write about race, many younger writers who consider themselves heirs of the Black Arts movement have felt that their work must foster coherent group identity rather than dissect the premises of identity and must signify "blackness" in recognizable ways. Nonetheless, there are and have been a number of recent poets of color who "resist mainstream forms of poetic expression," precisely because those forms seem to require a static representation of racial identity in transparent, and somewhat circumscribed, language.9

Writing in 1990, bell hooks voiced a sense of artistic limitation in the Black Aesthetic of that historical moment: "Narrow limiting aesthetics within black communities tend to place innovative black artistry on the margins."10 Writing ten years later, Houston Baker suggested that critical notions of "blackness" had changed significantly: "the 'blackness' into which I was initiated during the heady days of the Black Aesthetic of the 19605 and 19705 has been academically superseded by what I want to call a fourth wave of criticism and analysis focused on African American intellectual and cultural production." " This essay seeks to ride that fourth wave. Tracing changes in poetic and critical conceptions of black subjectivity from the 19605 to the present, I will examine the intersection of the intellectual currents outlined above in the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen.

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.

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.

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.

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

The Black Arts movement strongly influenced Brooks s thinking and rhetoric about her work, even if it left ambiguous marks on her work itself. After her legendary radicalixation at the Fisk Writers Conference of 1967 and her involvement in the Black Arts movement, Brooks expressed a wish to speak to, for, and about black readers and thereby to forge an audience called to awareness of racial identity and politics. Her statements about her intended audience drew their focus from black cultural nationalism and have influenced numerous writers after her. Within the Black Arts movement, many spokespeopleAmiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Ron Karenga-called for a recognizably "black" voice to hail and forge a newly positioned, newly politicized black audience for art. As Karenga formulated it, black art must be unifying, collective, speaking for, about, and to the people: "Any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid." " Gwendolyn Brooks heard the call to "the New Black, the Tall-Walker" at Fisk, and, inspired by the new aesthetic, left Harper & Row in 1968 for Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, founded in Detroit in 1965. Thereafter, she directed her work more specifically toward black readers: "I want to write poems that will be non-compromising . . . [and] meaningful to ... Black people. . .. True black writers speak as blacks about blacks to blacks.... The new Black is understood by no white, not the wise, the Schooled, the Kind White."19 Brooks referred to her poetry of the forties and fifties as "high poetincense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable." After Fisk, she viewed her work as "Independent fire!" In her autobiography, she announced her aim "to write poems that will somehow successfully 'call' all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate."20

The notion of "calling" to an audience, which will unify itself politically and spiritually as it hears, is useful for conceiving of the generational shift from Brookss era to the present. In this call, African American artists hoped to interpellate audiences into the ideology of Black Power. The call that Brooks heard enabled her to recognize her "essential African" heritage, and recognizing that heritage gave her a new, deeper sense of "black fellow feeling."21 She felt immediately at home in her new self-conception, perhaps because the new self was comforting in its coherence, collectivity, and currency. However, followers of the Black Aesthetic became subject to certain political goals and intentions. After her "conversion," some critics judged Brooks s art according to its fulfillment of revolutionary ends, ends that might have encouraged her to unify her hitherto ventriloquial voice and project it as one steady chord, or to subordinate her previous focus on gender to one on race.

In Brooks's earlier work, her audiences are not specific when she addresses them directly at all. Most of her poems written before 1967 tell compressed narratives of others' lives in third person: "Sadie and Maud," "Hattie Scott," "DeWitt Williams," "Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," "Annie Alien," "Bronzeville Mother," "Lovers of the Poor," and others. Many of her poems feature personas that narrate their own stories in first person: "Gay Chaps at the Bar," "Negro Hero," "The Mother," "Beverly Hills, Chicago." Very few poems speak in first person to a "you" (with the exceptions of "The Independent Man," "Love Note I and II," "First Fight. Then Fiddle," and "To Be in Love"), and of those, few seem to speak as Brooks in first person to a "you," with the exception of "In Honor of My Father" or perhaps part of "The Mother." Some critics claim that the overall effect of these many voices, many of them not Brooks's personal voice, is a degree of emotional distance.22

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

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":

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,

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.

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.

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.

The prevailing view of the Black Aesthetic and its multicultural heirs diverges notably from American poetry influenced by postmodernist theories of language and subjectivity in its stances toward the poetic speaker, language, politics, and audience. In contrast to the oral bases of many black artists' work, language poetry was written, read, and listened to not tor previously untold stories or patterns of imagery, but for its reflections on and play with language; it deconstructed narrative at the level of the sentence rather than producing narratives of a historically marginalized people. Though often claiming its appeal to wide audiences, language poetry was difficult and dense and was initially read mainly by cutting-edge poets and some academic audiences. Poetry of the Black Aesthetic, meanwhile, strove to be accessible to ordinary readers. Though both poetic modes were interested in the political effects of reading, their notions of political action were quite different. The Black Aesthetic called for sociopolitical awareness and action on the part of its readers, as Brookss work demonstrates. In contrast, language writers called for readers to rethink their relations to reading and language and to become aware of the political implications of those relations. Poets who defended traditional poetic conventions often regarded formally innovative poetry as politically unhelpful, primarily because its political commentary, couched more in syntax than content, eluded many readers. After 1968, literary debates about the politics of "coherent voice" ran on different tracks in these poetries. Many poets of the Black Aesthetic and multicultural lyric valued recognizable, coherent, empowering representations of race, gender, and class in literary work, in part manifested through the "voice" of the poetic speaker. That voice might be individual or collective, but it strove toward coherence in either case. Postmodern poets, in contrast, valued defamiliarized, deconstructed identities as likelier paths to liberation. These poets viewed efforts to construct a coherent identity or narrative (or a narrative of identity) as new forms of entrapment that unnecessarily reduced what was plural, such as reality and the self, to a singular form.

Recent African American poets have had to negotiate conflicting modes of oppositional writing inherited from a distilled version of the Black Arts movement on the one hand, and from language writing and avant-garde traditions on the other. Harryette Mullen, among other poets, finds the conventionalized voice of black experience prescriptive and resists that conception of the tradition. She argues that the canonical expectation that poets write to, for, and about black readers in an authentic black voice limits individual poets as well as the growing literary tradition. A predominant emphasis on orality not only limits contemporary writers' notions of artistic possibilities and overlooks past writers who resisted dominant trends, but also causes each generation to think it must invent alternatives from scratch: "because this information is missing, each time someone is doing work that is considered innovative, it seems to come out of nowhere . . . [so] innovative black poets don't seem to have any black antecedents."31 Advocates of "postmodern blackness" are working to assemble and analyze that alternative black tradition. This work will not only expand the current canon retroactively; it will also help establish the lineage and future for innovative writing.

The project of reincorporating a tradition of innovation is analogous to but perhaps more complex than assembling and defining an experimental tradition among women writers.32 Before second-wave feminism, experimental writing was largely regarded as a male province, despite obvious and influential exceptions like Dickinson, Stein, and Riding. Because of the efforts of numerous critics and anthologies like Mary Margaret Sloan's Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, the macho reputation of experimental writing has been substantially qualified. That writing has not, however, lost its pallor. Innovative writing is still often implicitly cast as "white," partly in contrast to prevailing views of the Black Aesthetic, partly due to its current spokesmen, its publishing venues, and its academic audiences. One might note that the use of traditional forms is also often considered a white practice. Both of these associations leave narrow margins for aspiring black poets. Despite many critics' observations that poetic forms, experimental or traditional, are neutral, the notion persists that they are intrinsically politicized. The racial coding of this aesthetic schism is problematic yet pervasive in poetry criticism; both Nielsen and Mullen have noted "the all too common assumption that experimental approaches to expression and theorized reading are somehow white things."33

As noted earlier, even though there are numerous twentieth-century African American poets whose work is difficult and writerly in both canonical and experimental ways, their work is less frequently anthologized or taught than more accessible work that reinforces the oral tradition and that is perhaps more easily marketed. Reincorporating a tradition of black innovation, then, like recovering a tradition of women's experimental writing, requires paying critical attention to overlooked writers, tracing hitherto invisible lines of influence from lesser known poets to their more famous peers or ancestors, and constructing new reading strategies whereby the significance of these poets' innovations are delineated for other readers. This work is now underway.

Erica Hunt's work has just started to receive critical attention, partly because of the efforts of the postmodern critics mentioned above. While the presence of Hunt's work in such "language" anthologies as In the American Tree and The Politics of Poetic Form suggests her ties to that movement, the construction of an alternative African American literary tradition might enable critics to trace Hunt's aesthetic kinship with other black writers. Within the context of this essay. Hunt's work marks a transition point between Brooks and Mullen. In its indirect refusal to construct essential racial subjectivities, Hunt's work circumnavigates the conflicting imperatives of "speculative and liberatory" poetics. Her first volume, Local History, unwilling to abandon issues of social justice or to avoid questions of subjectivity, examines how identity is defined by one's gender, generation, region, and class.

ERICA HUNT

Erica Hunt's volume, Local History (1993), like much innovative women's writing, uses life writing and an "I" to question what constitutes personhood.'4 Grouped into three sections, "Local History," "Correspondence Theory," and "Surplus," the volume is written mainly in prose poems, which run for several pages and build discernible, though ambiguous, narratives. Hunt has been affiliated with language writers mainly because of the venues in which she has published-In the American Tree, boundary 2, Vanishing Cab, and with the press Roof Books-and as a result of her statements in "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics" against official political and poetic discourse. 1^ Like much language poetry, much of Hunt's poetry resists the reader's impulses to create narratives and reflects on words as words and speech as constitutive of the person. In its analytical tone and experimental forms, Local History makes its political statements indirectly. Her publishing history, as much as her poetry, then, indicates that she has written for an audience interested in and informed about innovative American writing.

Born in New York in 1955, Erica Hunt has worked as a poetry teacher, housing organizer, labor news writer, and radio producer. As of 2001, she worked as a program officer for a social justice funder in New York. In addition to Local History, Hunt has published two additional volumes of poetry, Arcade, illustrated and written in collaboration with artist Alison Saar (Kelsey Street Press, 1996), and Piece Logic, a chapbook from Carolina Wren Press (2003).36 Hunt's relative obscurity maybe due to several factors. Hunt has published just two books so far; these books have been published by very small presses; very little criticism of her work has been published, so even many academic poetry specialists are unfamiliar with her work, and few readers will stumble upon her work accidentally; and Local History contains so few direct statements about race or gender that the volume is unlikely to attract readers or teachers on the lookout for poetry that treats African American experience directly. The relative absence of direct references to race in this volume, whether through speech or imagery or theme, highlights the degree to which late twentiethcentury readers have been conditioned to expect African American writers to employ certain speech and themes.37 The only definitive indication of Hunt's race is her photo on the back cover, which seems to be present mainly to satisfy publication conventions or readers' curiosity. Hunt does refer to personal experience-relationships to family members and the urban public-but those experiences may not be Hunt's, as her pronouns refer to different speakers. Her meditations on identity, like Brooks's, spring mainly from observing other peoples' experiences.

In Local History, Erica Hunt offers neither dismantled, postmodern subjectivity, nor plainspoken racial identity. In contrast to Brooks's call to black readers to recognize racial and political solidarity, Hunt calls readers to be conscious of the social relations that grant them status as subjects: a home, a job, literacy, and the ability to communicate with others via verbal and other signs. Race is one factor among many determining one's identity and one's freedoms. While Hunt does not "hail" readers around a central political identity, she does construct a fairly coherent voice within each poem: she often uses an "I," which functions as the text's central perceiver. Like other language writers, Hunt explores in abstract, philosophical language how language and ideology shape human consciousness, but her explorations as often seek to represent experience as they seek to destabilize the terms in which we represent experience. For instance, in one of the few lineated poems in the volume, "Woman, with wings," Hunt writes,

Work is pushing past resistance,

past the sense

it has all been written

before, spilling off the inventory shelves.

Sometimes you can read

with the headlights on, sometimes

you can drive to moods for which

no correlates exist, only curves, shaded

paths in the wilderness, occasional plots of

land ignored by absentee owners.38

This poem contains a rather straightforward description of writers block, especially the block that attends contemplation of an overpopulated literary world. Using an extended metaphor of driving as writing and journeying, Hunt locates, by the end of the poem, a somewhat conventional resolution in an image of escape from convention, domestic and poetic:

The cars ahead of us have disappeared.

Finally the way is clear, we have come to a way out;

past the flocked walls, the manipulated

seams, past the unzippered feeling, the tacit

violence between its teeth,

the trick with the mirrors and speed."

While the poem contains some imaginative leaps and interesting juxtapositions, it shares more commonalities with poems in mainstream literary journals than with much language poetry.

However, Hunt's interest in exploring how the self is composed of multiple discourses, an interest shared by many language writers, drives many poems in the volume. The discourses she examines include regional dialect, gender, race, generational experience, and literacy. In the poem "City," Hunt describes New York's dialect as an eerily familiar tongue that creates an instant, and perhaps illusory, sense of community with one's urban neighbors: "It was very soon after we arrived, when the city, however plural, we heard as a dialect, as a distinct manner of speaking. We were as startled as if we had heard a stranger using our mother's habits of speech, a turn at once familiar and uncanny, that made us fall into an intimacy with our neighbors, joined by a mother tongue" (27). Through the phrases "mother tongue" and "mother's habits of speech," Hunt conflates a national, native tongue and a private, family argot. That speech, in turn, transforms "strangers" into "neighbors" and so redefines others' identities and roles within the community. Elsewhere in the volume, some colloquial lines are attributed to neighbors, illustrating the city's deceptively familiar dialects: "You may not have broken your neck damn fool, but you sure have broke up that sled"; "Lifting that elevator and toting them stairs, up the tenement !lights .... we thought scrape, we ate scrape and we lived scrape" (32,66).

Gender identity is explicitly defined through language in the sequence of poems "The Order of the Story" (15-20). In that poem, Hunt depicts three ways of understanding a courtship. In section one, the speaker addresses a "you," which both observes how a woman composes herself for self-presentation to a new love and how a writer composes the scene of a date: "Imagine yourself walking into a room. . . . Invent the language as if each inflection belonged to you instead of containing you. . . . Describe the figure the doorway supports. . . . where she shows signs of adjustment: a walking chainsaw in crinoline and spandex, a smile outlined in flame. / Describe where the heart goes in and out of her, where the exits are marked" (15). In the section entitled "Gloss (a catalog of feeling)," Hunt provides a nonalphabetical glossary of the terms of romance, redefining some words according to their different applications to men and women, and underlining the pronouns to highlight how gender is constructed through language and through oppositions:

courtship:

to use an assumed name.

passion:

she takes a step back and can see herself fully in a darkened pane of glass in the kitchen window.

passion:

he thought sentences had only two sides to them, bottom and top: now love multiplies possible positions. (17)

Passion, "he" implies, blurs identities, positions, and verbal possibilities, while passion makes "her" watch herself. The dance of love continues in the poem's third section, but just two paragraphs after their awkward greeting at the door, "he" assesses her not as a lover, but as a political ally in an unspecified war: "He wants to ask her whose side she is on in the total war-the one without a name-which side protects her-in the exchange of bullets. . . . He wants out of the line of fire, he wants back into the ground taken from him in a chain of mistaken events: / a thief mistakes him for a thief or a neighbor mistakes him for a housebreaker. A cop with the power of a gun mistakes him for a perp out of line. He wants out of the extreme" (19). The courtship, in which gendered roles were analyzed as texts, closes with this question of politics and race: where does she stand in the war? Gender identity and love, in other words, are deeply connected to politics.

That literacy is a foundational element of socially recognized identity is of course a key theme in the African American literary tradition. In Hunt's poetry, illiterate characters are not designated by race, and Hunt makes no explicit reference to that tradition. But in examining the role of illiteracy in contemporary social status, she analyzes problems of urban poverty and marginality in isolation from race. In the poem, "In the Corner of the Eye," Hunt describes an indigent woman, scavenging food from a restaurant and pages from a Penthouse:

She must be someone's missing person, the unread portion . . .

She is a victim of a conspiracy of her teeth that keeps her away from the food she loves, raw carrots, corn, apples, raisins. She is forced to order omelettes and french toast. Sometimes she offers to sweep the floors, rinse the windows of their daily ashes and to defer to the empty plate that poverty and the times demand. . . .

She's wearing a skirt and pants and it's cold and she's between sexes just now. She's wearing shoes that don't fit her feet, like old felt hats at the ends of her legs.

One of the definitions of being a person is that another person is talking to you. The person is particular, unlike that diffuse group of people you don't spend time with who are all pronouns. This person is the source of certain facts but not the facts that she ever speaks out loud. This person you become accustomed to; her buckle, our buckle, her pins, our pins, her ankles, our ankles, her limp, our limp. Your person or her person, it doesn't matter in the dwindling middle ground. (12)

In this and other poems, the lack of speech between the "you" and the disenfranchised street people is part of "local history." This woman may be seen by passersby as a nonperson, already perhaps listed as "someone's missing person" (dead), in part because no one talks to her, in part because she is poor and anonymous, and in part because of her actions and dress. The sheer population density of New York may cause urbanites to abstract others into pronouns. Elsewhere, Hunt writes, "acting as if you don't see what's in front of you is a matter of taking a walk backwards, mentally, from the person who confronts you," and "the population, no matter how anonymous, was slowly dividing into a them and an us" (27-28). However, Hunt renders this woman visible through details such as "her pins" and implies a past in "her limp." Indeed, once she focuses on the woman as a distinct character, the "middle ground" between observer and stranger begins to shrink, and the pronouns that separate them melt into the collective "our." The poem does not completely cross that middle ground, though, for the woman never speaks, nor does the observer speak to her.

Hunt's poems trace the assumptions and social conventions that impede human interactions, barriers that are easily questioned and analyzed but not easily crossed. In the poem "City," she writes: "You become aware of obscure dynastic differences-the impossibility, for instance, of asking the guy beside you with the aroma of a public shelter but fresh creases in his pants, why he is reading Herodotus upside down" (28). As the man turns the book over, the speaker comments for both of them: "One becomes accustomed to thinking within one's own noise." In this and the poem discussed above, spoken and written language both connect and separate individuals and groups from each other. In "City," both the poet and the man recognize the cultural capital of reading Herodotus, but the man's mishandling of the book severs what connection the speaker felt, and propels a "mental walk backwards." In the previous poem, the woman's choice of Penthouse is similarly off-base, but holding a magazine legitimates her presence in the café. In both of these poems, Hunt suggests that identity is constructed in part by clothing and in part by literacy, speech, and the uses one makes of texts. The woman's pants and skirt and the man's creased but odorous pants are also texts, means of constructing a public, presentable identity, but the texts' mishandling betrays the wearers' cultural illiteracy. If each garment is indeed a word and an outfit is a sentence, these street people read neither words nor sentences, though they salvage some of the right parts of speech. The homeless woman's collection of pornographic pages and the mans inverted classic imply that the most dispossessed persons recognize that their display of icons of literacy may provide access to normal society, or provide enough cover for one to be left alone by police. Their non-standard choice and handling of those signs, however, are telltale signs and guarantees of their marginality.

While a city dweller's ability to "think within one's own noise" is a necessary mechanism for survival, the homeless man's and woman's existence within the social silence of their "own noise" guarantees their isolation. Hunt depicts, in other words, the social consequences of alienation from conventional speech and literacy. In this way, she illustrates the political consequences of marginal language in quite a different light than many language writers. The images in Hunt's Local History suggest that linguistic liminality may be liberating for the literati who exist within the structures of conventional speech and communication, but imprisoning for those who exist outside mainstream culture, without access to education. Though the man and woman imaginatively liberate closed texts from their conventional interpretations, no new awareness of reading practices follows, nor any improvement in their lives. Hunt's poetry itself, of course, occupies a position of privilege by virtue of its literacy and its freedom to experiment with and comment on conventional patterns of written and spoken communication, but it uses that privilege to critically examine real-world experiences of social marginality.

As noted above, there are few critical essays on Hunt's work, so generalizations about its reception would be spurious.4" However, the critical silence surrounding her work might have been due in part to the difficulty of placing it among poetic traditions, and in part to the limited criticism (or venues for criticism) of avant-garde poetry by women in the 1980s and early '90s. Hunt has commented little on the audiences she envisions, unlike Brooks and Mullen, but her work would be accessible to readers unfamiliar with poststructuralist theories of the self and language, even as it makes readers aware of their own social positioning. Hunt's essay, "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics," indicates her reservations about both experimental and representational writing:

In literature-a highly stratified cultural domain-oppositional projects replicate the stratification of the culture at large. There are oppositional projects that engage language as a social artifact, as art material, as powerfully transformative, which view themselves as distinct from projects that have as their explicit goal the use of language as a vehicle for the consciousness and liberation of oppressed communities. In general, the various communities, speculative and liberatory, do not think of each other as having much in common, or having much to show each other. In practice, each of their language use is radically different - not in the clichéd sense of one being more open-ended than the other, but in the levels of rhetoric they employ. More interesting [are] the limitations they share-limitations of the society as a whole which they reproduce, even as they resist. . . . Speculative projects are not exempt from the cul de sacs that contain other oppositional writing.41

Rather than adopting derogatory terms for either mode, Hunt coins neutral terms for formally experimental and traditional poetries-"speculative and liberatory"-and acknowledges the limitations of both. Unfortunately, she does not name those limitations nor give an example of the "levels of rhetoric" that separate these poetries. Though Hunt seems to regard both modes of writing as equally valid, she goes on to imply that "speculative" writing is more likely than "liberatory" writing to resist "conservatism, insularity, and cooptation . . . by dominant discourse of conceptual advances made by oppositional groups into the terms, values and structures of dominant ideology" (684). In other words, where Brooks regarded her later work as more politically effective (liberatory) because of its direct speech and its accessibility, Hunt regards her mode of writing as politically effective to the extent that it cannot be reduced to simple messages: its inaccessibility gives it political teeth. This position echoes the critical airwaves, but counters the lower frequencies her own poetry transmits: the poems above are both speculative in their use of language and liberatory in theme.

Toward the end of her essay, Hunt acknowledges the question of audiences for poetry like hers:

One troubling aspect of privileging language as the primary site to torque new meaning and possibility is that it is severed from the political question of for whom new meaning is produced. The ideal reader is an endangered species, the committed reader has an ideological agenda both open and closed, flawed and acute, that we do not address directly. (686)

Is the "committed reader" a devotee of speculative or liberatory poetry? Who is that ideal reader and what endangers her? Hunt does not answer these questions, but she does suggest that "speculative," "oppositional" poetry may reach even fewer readers than more conservative, co-opted "liberatory" poetry. In this essay, Hunt appears to share Gwendolyn Brooks's sense that literature can and should mount political opposition to dominant and oppressive orders. The mode of opposition, however, which Hunt shares with other language writers, is distinct from the opposition prescribed by proponents of a Black Aesthetic such as Ron Karenga and Larry Neal. Hunt's Local History occupies a literary moment in which political opposition to dominant ideology (variously conceived) remained a fundamental value for writers on both sides of this literature s "stratified domain." Thus she works to practice two competing modes of literary-political resistance at once.

Where Brooks reached a broad audience with her early work and later sought to mobilize specifically black readers in "taverns and schools," Hunt has as yet reached mainly small, mostly academic audiences, who perhaps have not recognized how she seeks to synthesize the liberatory and speculative traditions. But Hunt's writing is intriguing precisely because it does not fit neatly into courses or categories. Brooks and Hunt both represent details of impoverished, urban people's lives, but Brooks speaks from those characters' perspectives, as in "The Mother," depicting their interior lives, whereas Hunt speaks from an observer's perspective, analyzing the social consequences of illiteracy and disenfranchisement. Both poets' attention to the urban poor testifies to their political concerns and their wish to engage readers in those concerns. However, Hunt's reflections on language and social systems, her abstract language, and the relative invisibility of small press-published poetry all make it unlikely that her poems will pop up in anthologies and classrooms anytime soon. But perhaps as critics and poets unearth and reconstruct an alternative African American tradition, which includes Hunt's work, her poetry may yet find ports of affiliation and make its way into more articles and anthologies.

HARRYETTE MULLEN

Harryette Mullen has published six books of poetry to date: Tree Tall Woman (1981), Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), Muse & Drudge (1995), Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), and Baby Blues: Early Poems (2002). She teaches at UCLA. In contrast to the critical lull around Hunt's work, Harryette Mullen's writing, particularly Muse & Drudge, has received considerable critical attention, perhaps because it is her fourth book, or because it is highly original in its form, or because it has proven "teachable" in poetry classrooms. One measure of a poet's renown is the interview; and as of 2002, Mullen had given at least five. Written in short, punning, allusive phrases, Muse & Drudge consists of one long poem in irregularly rhyming quatrains. In its plays on words, the poem is a polyglot mix of black, regional, and commercial American expressions, urban slang, Spanish phrases, proverb, and high diction. Mullen calls the poem "quatrains of blues songs and jumprope rhymes, composed of recycled representations of black women."42 Though quatrains structure the volume s extended song, each phrase functions like "the new sentence": fragments of narrative evoke larger stories, which the following sentences build upon elliptically or abandon. Despite these disjunctions, certain motifs and subjects recur, especially regarding black women's lives and identities.

Mullen's work has also garnered critical praise because it incorporates forms and ideas that critics have awaited. As Elisabeth Frost, Marjorie Perloff, and Barbara Henning have noted, Mullen revises Gertrude Steins Tender Buttons in her volume Trimmings, and she incorporates Steinian language play in later work as well. Kate Pearcy, in "A Poetics of Opposition: Race and the Avant-Garde," notes that Mullen's work "represents a convergence of [the aesthetic program of the language school) and . . . the ontological authenticity of 'the black voice.'"43 Mullen confirms this reading, noting the influences on her poetry of the language writers, the French experimental writers of Oulipo, and the literary theory she read in graduate school. Mullen's work has garnered critical adulation then not only because it works to synthesize disparate traditions, but because it reflects on that synthesis explicitly.

For instance, in many stanzas of Muse & Drudge, Mullen uses and twists the discourse of advertising, especially the cosmetics industry, which urges African American women to lighten, bleach, straighten, and otherwise blanch their beauty to mimic white features. Mullen echoes but alters familiar beauty industry slogans, defamiliarizing them to expose their racist assumptions:

if your complexion is a mess

our elixir spells skin success

you'll have appeal bewitch be adored

hechizando con crema dermoblanqueadora44

mellow elbow lengthy

fading cream and peaches

bleach burn lovingly

because she's worth it45

In both stanzas, Mullen uses the American and Latino languages of advertising, which prey on the insecurities of women viewers and seek to convince them that lighter skin is more beautiful and lovable. "Fading cream" lightens skin and moisturizes pesky "ashy skin," prevalent on the elbows, but Mullen notes that the desired complexion, "peaches and cream" (pink and white), requires bleaching and burning, as do the processes for lightening and straightening African hair. Placing L'Oréal's slogan for hair dye in the final line, right after "bleach burn lovingly," Mullen underscores the irony of a discourse that sells products by simultaneously appealing to a woman's self-worth and targeting her insecurity.

Linking her poetics to her past in several interviews, Mullen traces a story of intentionally acquiring a broader knowledge of African American culture in college and afterward. Raised in a religious, educated household in Texas, the descendent of teachers and Baptist ministers, Mullen grew up between several cultures-white, black, Hispanic-and ignorant of many elements of African American culture, such as the blues, which her family considered "low-down."46 At the University of Texas at Austin, she took a folklore course to "learn what [her] oral tradition [was]." Muse & Drudge represents a synthesis of much of what Mullen learned over years of cultural observation and absorption.

Whereas Brooks's discovery of racial identity took the form of revelation at Fisk, Mullen studied and wrestled with various notions of African American identity. Brooks's new conception of herself and of her prophetic role authorized a new, direct way of calling readers to find sources of pride and dignity in African American culture. Mullen notes that her education and research have given her a stronger sense of racial identity, but that that identity is now plural, encompassing blues and folk traditions, Mexican and Texan influences, as well as avant-garde literary traditions.147 Perhaps because such plurality is more difficult for readers to "place," Mullen notes that she has lost some African American readers, and perhaps gained others, as her work has focused increasingly on language and cultural constructions of race:

I used to read a lot to black audiences. I remember reading once at the Watts Tower in L.A. and people were doing the whole call and response thing: "go ahead, say it girl"-that kind of thing. I loved that in a way; then I did Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T. Those audiences were not there for those books. The readings had a whole different tone . . . I tried to write [Muse & Drudge] so that [both] audiences could sit in the same room together. They might not hear it in the same way, but they would all get something that they could relate to.48

Quite aware of changes in her own work, Mullen has traced a trajectory in her writing from a more "coherent black voice" using dialect and speaking as "I," to poems without a single, central speaker or stable ground for subjectivity. Mullen notes that she began to question her use of "black voice" when she realized that her first book used "a southern black voice" that was "probably my mothers," though her mother wasn't from the South but had acquired the accent from living there. Neither did the voice belong to Mullen. The voice, it seems, came from the literary tradition, from Mullen's internalized sense of how she should write. In her essay, "African Signs and Spirit Writing," Mullen comments that "black literary traditions privilege orality" and that this "racially inflected aesthetic that produces a 'black poetic diction' requires that the writer acknowledge and reproduce in the text a significant difference between the spoken and written language of African Americans and that of other Americans."49 In other writings, Mullen explains her discontent with what this aesthetic excludes: "I don't want the oral tradition to be a prescription. . . . I think it's a rich reservoir of possibility, but [so is] the written tradition. [I try] especially in [Muse & Drudge] to use both possibilities."50

Mullen is particularly suited to speak to varied audiences, given her life in transit between different communities. But the more her work moves away from "black poetic diction," representation, and narratives that a listener can follow on first hearing, the more her audience may be composed of other innovative artists and less of people present to find the kind of direct messages Brooks's work offered. Race is not signified within the text through a single, coherent "voice" or narrative, but numerous lines in the text refer clearly to black women and the public discourses, such as advertising, hip-hop, and blues, that construct race and gender. Rather than recognizing a common, stable identity, readers are asked to reflect on the words, phrases, and language that constitute textual identities. Rather than promoting racial pride, Mullen's poetry promotes self-consciousness about internalized discourses around race and gender. Mullen does not expect any one reader to understand every line or reference:

I think of myself and my writing as being marginal to all of the different communities that have contributed to the poetic idiom of my work, but at the same time it is important to me that I work in the interstices, where I occupy the gap . . . or where there might be overlapping boundaries. . . . This concern is at the heart of Muse & Drudge, a poem that deliberately addresses a diverse audience of readers, with the expectation that no single reader will comprehend every line or will catch every allusion.51

Aware of the current chasm between innovative and representational poetries, Mullen seeks to write in a way that is "black and innovative," to "use both" to create a new poetry with hybrid vigor. Critics have relished the political implications of this new blend in Mullen's work, but overlooked it in Hunt's. Though Mullen's higher visibility as a rising-star poet with several books may partly account for that favored treatment, Mullen's work is also more recognizably, explicitly about African American (and ethnic American) identity on every page. Mullen's poem also plays with language in nearly every line, while Hunt's poems in Local History reflect on our uses of language, but do so in fairly traditional poetic prose.

Mullen's poetry is also quite musical, as Sandra Cisneros implies in her blurb on Muse & Drudge: "Harryette hype hip-hops and bops the taut poetry trapeze. Makes me want to marimba." Many of Mullen's lines are memorable for their layers of signification, internal rhyme, rhythm, and lyricism. In her interview with Elisabeth Frost, Mullen notes, "Poetry does come out of song. If it gets very far from song, it is difficult for many people to connect with it. . . . Music has always been fundamental to me, as well as folklore and poetry, and the church-Psalms and Proverbs, the gospels, spirituals, and all the preaching."52 While Mullen mentions church music in her interview and alludes to blues in her poetry (using phrases by Ma Rainey, Besse Smith, and other blues musicians), her poetry perhaps most closely resembles rap and hip-hop, as Cisneros notes. Like rap and hip-hop, her lines rhyme insistently but irregularly; they are brief and do not use repetition or refrains. And like rap by other women artists, Mullen's lines often bolster the speaker's sense of self, through language play and "signifying," providing a feminist counterpoint to the cultural discourses and representations that erase black women.53

Among Mullen's favored techniques are puns, such as "déja voodoo queens," and allusions. Several critics have commented on the volume s opening line, "Sapphire s lyre styles," which refers at once to Sappho, a precursor in fragmentary lyric and to Sapphire the contemporary writer (and gem), who in turn refers to the Amos 'n' Andy character of Sapphire, whose name has passed into the lexicon as a synonym for an emasculating African American woman.54 Mullen's puns, which are often more tragic than comic, register one meaning in the readers eye and another in the ear. The line "debit to your race" reverses the meaning of the phrase it echoes, "a credit to your race," and is used here to highlight and empty out the racist assumption that individuals represent their race, raising or lowering its "credit rating."55

This homophonic play in particular marks a departure from the writer-reader collaboration in much innovative writing in the 1980s. Rather than moving reflective readers along a signifying chain of silent wordplay, Mullen's text rephrases black orality as aurality. The wordplay takes place not in a conceptual realm of denotation and connotation, but over the airwaves. Readers' translation from the words seen on the page to the words heard in the mind's ear reveals a gap or duplicity between the two. The new meaning we hear, which the text prints, relies on an old meaning or phrase that is familiar enough to echo, an aural palimpsest below what is seen. This doubleness is a form of compression. These lines then-"stark strangled banjo," "mnemonic plague," "warp made fresh"-encode two disparate meanings (28, 64). A "stark strangled banjo" evokes a lone, frustrated, or suppressed musician, playing on a remote porch; that image chafes against the "star spangled banner," a euphemism for patriotism (and baseball) and officiai, national music. The banjo conjured in the ears seems a realistic, corrective image to the abstract, idealized banner, waving before the eyes. A "mnemonic plague" isn't nearly as lethal as its echoed cousin, "bubonic plague," but aural memory can infect our understandings of, or even alter, what we hear. The "warp made fresh" echoes the "word made flesh"; the phrase thereby evokes a culturally authoritative source for belief in words' transparency. If the word is "warped" from the original with each iteration, something like Plato's endless imitation of a form, what is incarnated is nevertheless fresh and new in its divergence from an original that dogs our mnemonic ruts.

As noted above, Muse o- Drudge collects and defamiliarizes familiar phrases from American culture: the idiomatic phrases, official language, and slang that constitute us with each utterance. In addition to illuminating how the languages of advertising encourage women's insecurities, many phrases affirm women's beauty and independence: "black-eyed pearl / around the world girl"; "lady redbone señora rubia / took all day long / shampooing her nubia / she gets to the getting place/ without or with him" (40, 51). Other lines fend off insuit: "ain't your fancy / handsome gal / feets too big / my hair don't twirl"; or highlight restrictions on girls: "keep your powder dry / your knees together / your dress down / your drawers shut" (17,38). Such phrases represent some of the many ways American culture defines women's identity and sexuality through languages of approval and disapproval.

In addition to gaining audiences among poets and critics, Mullen may gain a generational following among students, who may have read her work in college classes. Many manifestos of language writing idealized the collaboration between reader and writer in the making of meaning, but Muse & Drudge, especially when read in a classroom, lends itself very well to such collaboration. Because it is "polyvocal," "layering and juxtaposing communolects," the poem rewards collective reading, wherein a number of readers contribute information, decode allusions, and assemble meanings. Some readers will know much more than others, depending especially on their knowledge of jazz and blues and current slang. The volume has been read in classes in adult literacy, contemporary poetry, and American literature.56 Readers compose their plural subjectivities in the process of rereading our collective culture through this text.

I taught the volume twice at a men's college to students who were predominately white and Southern, so very few students recognized the text's allusions or slang; incomprehensible to them were "dicty kickpleat," "soulless divaism," "hussified dozens" (15), and "ruses of the lunatic muse" (21), perhaps because these phrases use terms that are African American (dozens), gendered (kickpleat), urban, or campy (divaism).57 They did, however, supply meanings for "Patel hotel" and "the sun goes on shining / while the debbil beats his wife" (10). One student from North Carolina volunteered that the expression refers to rain that falls while the sun is out; a year later I ran across the phrase in a Native American context. Mullen uses the phrase in the midst of a passage that invokes alcoholism and domestic violence: "a broke johnny walker / mister meaner / bigger than a big man / cirrus as a heart attracts / more power than a loco motive / think your shit don't stink / . . . battered like her face / embrazened with ravage" (5-6).

In her inventive spelling and wording, Mullen is less interested in representing dialect than in making one word signify two or more meanings. The spelling of "debbil" with b's instead of a v not only replicates Southern dialect but echoes the word "debilitated," weakened, perhaps by alcohol, perhaps by a frustrated wish for power, and so implies both social and psychological sources of alcoholism and domestic violence. Similarly, Mullen's use of "embrazened with ravage" evokes "emblazoned with rage." The latter phrase has one fairly stable meaning-that a face showed strong rage-while the former phrase may signify "embrasure," an opening, as in fortresses from which one shoots enemies, or "brazen," bold and forceful, as one wishes a woman might become in response to battering. The phrase evokes, but does not denote, meaning as it coins new words. Some readers like the poetry's indeterminacy very much, while others may remain frustrated with the lack of certainty, narrative, or closure. Though I share the students' bewilderment in some passages, I am quite convinced that Mullen's work represents a new kind of polyvocality in poetry, a multiplicity that younger readers may recognize in rap, hypertext, the X-Files, and other incarnations of the postmodern. Those readers may in fact be more proficient at reading such jump cuts than their professorial elders.

I conclude the three-way comparison of this essay with the example of Mullen's work because it announces another step toward the expansion of the African American canon. Where Hunt's meditations on discourse displace race and avoid its conventional literary evocations-dialect, folklore, allusions to jazz and blues-in favor of meditating upon related facets of identity, Mullen both uses those traditional tropes and meditates upon how and why they signify "blackness." Muse & Drudge is a metapoetic text, exploring the discursive construction of race through literary and cultural texts. In its evocation of cultural-literary indices of blackness, the volume helps readers imagine new ways of thinking and writing about race. I also conclude this essay with Mullen's work because it has recently met with great critical acclaim. Such acclaim signals yet another shift underway in African American literature and in conceptions and representations of identity in poetry.

In comparing the critical acclaim for Mullen's work to Hunt's in this essay, I was certainly always aware that the term is relative. Even within the small world of poetry, Mullen's name has been strictly nonhousehold. I might have focused on Rita Dove, as a more obvious descendant of Gwendolyn Brooks, whose laureateship provides clear testimony of her success and whose representations of identity in various volumes are also complex, innovative, and influential. As I conclude this essay, however, I feel confirmed: Mullen's volume, Sleeping with the Dictionary, was nominated for a National Book Award, along with books by Sharon Olds and Ellen Bryan Voigt, who are undeniably well known, established poets. While I might previously have claimed that what critics love is not necessarily what national judges reward, the two value systems, in this case, seem to have coalesced.

As I noted at the outset of this essay, much criticism of American literature currently seeks to illuminate evidence of multiplicity, of hybrid subjectivity, in texts old and new. The "fourth wave" that Houston Baker identifies, which "begins to compel African American cultural texts to voice . . . the rhapsodies of the musically hybridized 'Other,'" rather than highlighting a unified voice, has also washed over and reshaped American poetry and criticism more generally.58 While many recent poets have consciously sought to represent subjectivity within their work self-consciously and disjunctively, many writers have done so for decades, but critics have only recently recognized and valued that multiplicity. Writing in the same issue of American Literature as Baker, for instance, Joel Peckham describes the editor and the market forces that encouraged Jean Toomer to emphasize and exoticize blackness in Cane, instead of what Toomer regarded as an emerging, definitively American cultural hybridity. Toomer wrote: "I am at once no one of the races, and I am all of them. . . . I am, in a strict racial sense, a member of a new race . . . now forming."59 Peckham, like many of us, rediscovers Toomer's genetic and literary hybridity, in part through cultural excavation, in part due to a contemporary lens that zooms in on plurality. While I wished to draw critical attention to Hunt's and to Mullen's work in this essay, I wished also to trace the good or bad luck of coinciding with critical ideology, as trendy in its way as fashion. Mullen's work deserves all the accolades it has gotten. Hunt's work, including her second book, deserves further attention.

The existence and proliferation of experimental African American poetry may indicate real gains in this society. Even those readers who like their poetry straight-up-representational, narrative, arranged in full sentences-might applaud what these poets' work implies. The abandonment of predictable, unified formulations of racial identity may represent a diminishing need to protest for basic rights; these poets replace those formulations with complex, self-conscious representations of race, while continuing to address life's difficulties, and thereby indicate a new stage and sophistication in political resistance. This poetry resists our own conceptual ruts around ideas of race and identity, scrutinizing how we use the language so that we may rethink how we think. Both poets' work indicates that borders in American poetry are indeed moving, and there are audiences rising to applaud the territories emerging.

NOTES

1. Both new formalist and experimental poets and critics have made claims about contemporary poetry's audiences, but these claims are hypothetical and untested. Reader-response theory offers some useful frameworks and vocabulary for discussing audiences. Peter Rabinowitz, for instance, calls real readers "actual audiences" and imagined readers hypothetical or "authorial audiences." The latter reflect an author's "assumptions," "guesses," and wishes about projected readers. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). However, most theories focus on how individual readers interpret texts, rather than on how social movements, like Black Power, or critical paradigms, like poststructuralism, alter poets' assumptions about readers and readers' and critics' expectations of poetry.

2. Ron Karenga, "Black Cultural Nationalism," in The Black Aesthetic, ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. (New York: Anchor Press, 1971), 31-37.

3. Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure," in Writing/ Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1985). Reprinted in Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994), 272.

4. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 10.

5. Kimberly W. Benston, "Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American Poetry," in Afro-American Literary Study, eds. Houston A. Baker Jr., and Patricia Redmond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 164-185.

6. A number of critics have highlighted parallel differences within the racial discourses of other poetries, as well. Timothy Yu, focusing on Asian American poetry, analyzes the "collision between two of the most powerful trends in American poetry since 1970 - the project of radical modernist-postmodernist formal innovation represented by Language poetry, and the feminist and multicultural poetries that emerged in the wake of the 19605." Timothy Yu, "Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry," Contemporary Literature 41, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 423.

7. Lorenzo Thomas traces similar and recurrent clashes in African American poetry: "the poets of the Black Arts movement were [in their 'need to express . . . oral traditions in . . . free verse and eccentric typography'] actually returning to a development that had occurred forty years earlier, when Modernist poetry met up with African American cultural consciousness during the Harlem Renaissance." see Thomas, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000), 97.

8. Thomas, in Extraordinary Measures, 222, names the date as 1966, as do some others. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. William Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris (1997), and Gwendolyn Brooks cite 1967 as the date of the Second Annual Black Writer's Conference, so that is the date 1 use.

9. Among such writers are Thomas Sayers Ellis, Mei-mei Brussenbruge, John Yau, Claudia Rankine, and others. Lorenzo Thomas notes that rap music, perhaps because of its early, enormous commercial success, quickly "replac[ed] artistic vision with an unimaginative notion of racial and class authenticity-'keeping it real'" (223). The identity that sells, in other words, sticks; and simplified, coherent identities have generally sold better than complex, mixed identities.

10. bell hooks, Yearing: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 111.

11. Houston A. Baker, Jr., "Preface: Unsettling Blackness," American Literature 72, no. 2 (June 2000): 245.

12. See Clenora Hudson, "Racial Themes in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks," CLA Journal 17 (1973), or Dudley Randall, "Black Emotion and Experience: The Literature of Understanding," American Libraries 4, no. 2 (1973); on violence and militancy, see William H. Hansell, "The Role of Violence in Recent Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks," Studies in Black Literature 5 (1974); and on the Black Aesthetic, see Bernard Bell, "New Black Poetry: A Double-Edged Sword," CLA Journal 15, no. 1 (1971): 37-43.

13. See Bloom's brief introductions to Gwendolyn Brooks: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2000), and Gwendolyn Brooks: Bloom's Major Poets (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003). Very few individual African American poets are the subjects of these critical editions, markers of canonicity. Derek Walcott and Jay Wright have new volumes, but Amiri Baraka and Rita Dove do not. One wonders whether there would be a Modern Critical volume on Brooks at all, were it not for her early work's traditionalism.

14. Houston A. Baker, Jr., "The Achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks," in A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, ed. Maria Mootry and Gary Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 22.

15. John Callahan, '"Essentially and Essential African': Gwendolyn Brooks and the Awakening to Audience," North Dakota Quarterly (Fall 1987): 69.

16. George E. Kent, "Aesthetic Values in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks," in A Life Distilled, 31.

17. Norris Clark describes Brooks's shift toward more public, political poetry: "The evolution of the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks from an egocentric orientation to an ethnocentric one is directly related to her advocacy of a black aesthetic and to the shifting criteria in modern America. . . . Although she has always written poetry concerned with the black American experience, . . . [and with] being female, her poetics have primarily undergone thematic developments. Her emphasis has shifted from a private, internal and exclusive assessment of the identity crises of twentieth-century persons to a communal, external, and inclusive assessment of the black communal experience." see "Gwendolyn Brooks and a Black Aesthetic," in A Life Distilled, 84.

18. Karenga, "Black Cultural Nationalism," 31.

19. Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers: 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 77.

20. Ibid., 87.

21. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), 45.

22. Callahan, "Essential African," 63.

23. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: The David Company, 1987), 494.

24. Ibid., 496.

25. Ibid., 331.

26. Ibid., 446.

27. Denise Hawkins, "An Evening with Gwendolyn Brooks." (Conversation conducted at the "Furious Flowering" Conference, lames Madison University, Harrisonburg, YA). Reprinted in The furious flowering of African American Poetry, ed. Joanne V. Ciabbin (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 330, http://www.jmu.edu/ furiousflower/inten-iew.html (accessed January 10, 2005).

28. Brooks, Blacks, 118.

29. Ibid., 497, 456.

30. Larry Neal, "The Black Arts Movement," in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 184-98.

31. See Cynthia Hogue, "Interview with Harryette Mullen," Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 9, no. 2 ( January 1999): 21. bell hooks, Aldon Nielsen, and Lorenzo Thomas echo Mullen's point.

32. For similar reasons, poets and critics are just beginning to trace a tradition of black formalist poetry, from Countee Cullen to Marilyn Nelson.

33. Aldon Lynn Nielsen makes this observation in Black Chant, 183, as does Mullen in her interviews with Hogue and Barbara Henning.

34. Many women writing in response to the ideas of language writing in the 1970$ and '80s also questioned the models of identity offered by "voice poems," yet retained some markers of identity in their poetry. Hannah Weiner's Little Books/Indians took the form of dated journal entries; the chapters and sentences of Lyn Hejinian's My Life both parodied and explored conventional autobiographical notions of lifetime coherence and progression; Bernadette Meyer's Midwinter Day records one busy domestic day; and a number ol other women worked in epistolary torms.

35. Erica Hunt, "Notes for an Oppositional Poetics," Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, ed. Mary Margaret Sloan (New Jersey: Talisman House Publishers, 1999). Originally published in The Politics of Poetic form, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York: Roof Books, 1990).

36. In a review of Arcade, Harryette Mullen describes Hunt's second volume as "a calculated step into performance-oriented sing-song ('tune/tin tongue/ ritual/ spoon') [amid] reflections firmly grounded in the everyday" (Publishers Weekly 243, no. 18 (April 29,1996): 64). In this and many other reviews and articles, Mullen works to publicize innovative writing by African American authors, especially women. See Mullen's essay, "Not Struck Dumb but Logodaedalyly Phonotounded: The Vernacular Heteroglossaries of Fran Ross's OREO," How2 1, no. 2 (September 1999), http://www .scc.rutgers.edu/hown'er/vI_2_1999/current/index.html (accessed January 9, 2005).

37. For a similar instance of readerly confusion, compare Marjorie Perloff's reaction to John Yau's early work: "there was no indication, at this stage of Yau's career, that the poet is in fact Chinese-American" (quoted in Yu, "Form and Identity," 444-45). Lorenzo Thomas notes in passing, "Hunt's poetry is neither primarily focused on race nor limited to complaint" (221).

38. Erica Hunt, Local History (New York: Roof Books, 1993), 71.

39. Ibid., 71-72.

40. To date, Nielsen, Thomas, and Mullen are Hunt's primary critics and reviewers, though I've seen titles of at least two dissertations that include Hunt.

41. Sloan, Moving Borders, 686.

42. Barbara Henning, "An Interview with Harryette Mullen," Poetry Project Newsletter 162 (Oct/Nov 1996): 9, http://www.poetryproject.com/newsletter/mullen.html (accessed January 9, 2005).

43. Kate Pearcy, "A Poetics of Opposition?: Race and the Avant Garde," Poetry and the Public Sphere: Conference on Contemporary Poetry, http://english.rutgers.edu/ poetics (accessed January 9, 2005).

44. Harryette Mullen, Muse 6- Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1995), 34.

45. Ibid., 43.

46. Interview with Calvin Bedient, "The Solo Mysterioso Blues: An Interview with Harryette Mullen," Callaloo 19, no. 3 (1996): 667-68.

47. Elisabeth Frost, "Interview with Harryette Mullen," Contemporary Literature 41, no. 3 (Fall 2000).

48. Pearcy, "A Poetics," 4. Also see interview with Farah Griffin, Michael Magee, and Kristen Gallagher, "A Conversation with Harryette Mullen," Excerpted in COMBO #1 (Summer 1998), ed. Michael Magee, 5-6, http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/mullen/ interview-new.html (accessed January 8, 2005).

49. Harryette Mullen, "African Signs and Spirit Writing," Callaloo 19, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 670-89.

50. Bedient, "Solo," 667-69.

51. Henning, "Interview," 8.

52. Frost, "Interview," 401-03.

53. Elisabeth Frost cites Mullen's comment on such female backtalk: "African American women writers have often used their texts to 'talk back' to texts by white men, white women, and black men in which representations of black women are absent or subordinated to other aims." " 'Ruses of the Lunatic Muse': Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity," Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27 (September 1998): 471.

54. See Marjorie Perloff, "After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents," Keynote speech, "Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry: Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women": Conference at Barnard College, April 1999; Elisabeth Frost, "Ruses," 468-9; or the entry on "Sapphire" in the Oxford Companion, 644.

55. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 78.

56. The quoted phrases are from Henning, "Interview," 5. In her "Interview" with Mullen, Elisabeth Frost also notes the volume's amenability to communal deciphering (405), and various participants at the Barnard Conference, "Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry," mentioned successfully teaching the volume in such contexts.

57. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 15, 21.

58. Baker, "Preface," 246.

59. Joel Peckham, "Jean Toomer's Cane: Self as Montage and the Drive toward Integration," American Literature 72, no. 2 (June 2000): 277-79.

ALLISON CUMMINGS is an associate professor of English at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, New Hampshire, where she teaches American literature, creative writing, contemporary poetry, gender studies, and composition. She has published essays on contemporary American women's poetry in the essay collections After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative, and Tradition and New Definitions of Lyric Theory; Technolog); and Culture. In 1999, she organized a conference at Barnard College, "Where the Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry," with Claudia Rankine. She is the editor of the literary journal Anwskeag and is currently revising a poetry manuscript.

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