… Now the address must be to blacks; that shrieking into the steady and organized deafness of the white ear was frivolous—perilously innocent; was ’no count.’ There were things to be said to black brothers and sisters and these things—annunciatory, curative, and inspiriting—were to be said forthwith, without frill, and without fear of the white presence.—Gwendolyn Brooks, A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (4)
As Brooks herself insists, the question of audience is of vital concern in her poetry, and not only after her famous change of heart at the 1967 Fisk University Black Writers’ Conference. From A Street in Bronzeville through the more deliberately instrumental work of her maturity, Brooks’s poetry enacts a tension between the lyric convention of isolate interiority and the poem’s status as public speech. Brooks extends her lyric voice to animate and address an absent other, characterized variously in different poems and at different stages of her career. She utilizes many speakers, from the experienced mother of Annie Allen to the enigmatic proselytizers of her later “sermons,” but whether she announces as a leader, cures as a mother, or inspirits as a preacher, her poetic mode is defined by apostrophe. She uses that most lyric of devices to undermine one of the most pervasive, though arguable, assumptions about the post-Romantic lyric: its removal from politics. Brooks forces her version of the lyric to become a public forum, to sustain the marks of and even participate in political struggle. However, from her earliest volumes onward but especially in her “Sermons on the Warpland,” which purport to advise from a position of authority in the explicit context of race riots, her imperatives perplex as much as illuminate.
In “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Barbara Johnson begins discussing Brooks in relation to the figure of apostrophe, which she defines as “the direct address of an absent, dead, or inanimate being by a first person speaker,” specifically in terms of one of Brooks’s early and most famous poems, “the mother” (185). The “mother” of this piece addresses aborted children; Johnson reads this situation as a reversal of the “primal apostrophe” that informs the entire history of the lyric, a demand addressed to a mother by an infant, “which assures life even as it inaugurates alienation” (198). Johnson notes that the Brooks poem exists “because a child does not” (195), reminding us of the competition for some women writers between poetry and motherhood. “The attempt to achieve a full elaboration of any other discursive position than that of a child” in poetry, psychoanalysis, or politics, is fraught with difficulties, but, Johnson theorizes, might have enormous impact in all three arenas (199).
In fact, Gwendolyn Brooks’s lyrics often wield apostrophes; specifically, they most frequently apostrophize children or adults who, childlike, need care, advice, or motivation. Brooks repeatedly writes as a mother, addressing her readers as children in imperatives that reach out of the private world of the lyric long before she asserts this expansion as a political goal of her poetry. Although Brooks has been criticized for apparently abandoning her compelling depictions of women’s lives in her early poetry, this rhetorical innovation remains as important (and perhaps as feminist) as Johnson suggests. Brooks creates a powerful kind of mother, a public actor, fusing her speech with that of a preacher or prophet, articulating an unusually authoritative, distinctly female voice.
Further, Brooks’s invocations are not apostrophes in the usual sense of a speaker’s deflection of address away from her readers. A poetic opening like “Stand off, daughter of the dusk” (Blacks 137) surpasses overheard imperative; it also names, brings into being, her intended readers. In fact, in a 1949 review, J. Saunders Redding chastises Brooks for this same poem, which, he argues, excludes white audiences by its overly “special and particularized” subject (6). While the apostrophes Brooks employs inevitably circle backward to constitute her identity as a poet, mother, and/or minister, she primarily intends to influence her real audience. Thomas M. Greene writes that apostrophe, an address to the absent, constitutes one half of an invocation, which also includes “a summons to appear or make its influence felt in the invoker’s experience” (495). Jonathan Culler, likewise, asserts that “to apostrophize is to will” (139). Through so vividly imagining and animating her readers, Brooks gradually constructs a poetic that demands active, collaborative audiences: in her work the binary of private and public which has so deeply shaped the lyric poem begins to dissolve.
Brooks’s critics increasingly argue for such continuity in her work. Gwendolyn Brooks’s own autobiographies, tellingly entitled Report from Part One and Report from Part Two, divide her career into two sections, a sort of Before and After separated by the Black Arts Movement. Some interviews with and essays on Gwendolyn Brooks duplicate this division, recounting her transformative experience at Fisk University, followed by her work with the Chicago teenage gang the Blackstone Rangers; although William H. Hansell locates three periods in her oeuvre, his essay and other important pieces by George Kent (1987) and Houston Baker emphasize the 1960s as a crucial hinge for Brooks. She encountered in that conference and, more crucially, in her mentorship of young poets a new kind of energy and pride in Black identity to which Brooks attributes a change in both her life and her writing. In the narrative usually told by anthology headnotes (see, for instance, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry or The Harper American Literature), Brooks moved from poetry in a mix of traditional forms (some European, some African-American) to work in open forms, from an integrationist philosophy to Black nationalism, from lyrics written for private reading to an oral orientation, drastically reconceiving her audience and intentions. Critics often quote the manifesto from the Appendix to the first Report:
My aim, in my next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully “call” (see Imamu Baraka’s “SOS”) all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in pulpits, black people in mines, on farms, on thrones; not always to “teach”—I shall wish often to entertain, to illumine. My newish voice will not be an imitation of the contemporary young black voice, which I so admire, but an extending adaption of today’s G. B. voice. (183)
Here Brooks seems on the one hand to announce a new orientation: she wishes that her writing might unify a black community. On the other hand, even within this proclamation, she signals the continuity between phases of her work: her “newish,” not “new,” voice will be an “extending adaption” of her current poetry, extending its dependence on apostrophe, adapting that address to a newly configured readership.
Brooks radically marked her commitment to this change in focal audience by cutting her tie to Harper and Row and, after 1971, only publishing at black presses. Some of Brooks’s critics ally themselves with one Brooks or the other, arguing either that her early work transcends race or betrays her blackness, that her late work either fails aesthetically or finally breaks through its bondage to white forms. The most partisan are often poetic inheritors. Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) naturally favors her post-1967 efforts, while Rita Dove and Marilyn Nelson Waniek lament the detrimental influence of the Black aesthetic on Brooks’s later work. Yet, to draw too dramatic a contrast between the early and later works is to misread them; as Brooks herself insists, although the world around her has changed, “I just continue to write about what confronts me” (Report from Part One 151). In an interview with Claudia Tate, Brooks points out the political nature of many of her early poems, arguing that “in 1945 I was saying what many of the young folks said in the sixties” (42). D. H. Melhem asserts, in fact, that “no facile demarcations exist” in Brooks’s canon (2), supporting recent work by Kathryne V. Lindberg and Betsy Erkkila. Although she carefully explicates certain transformations in Brooks’s work, Erkkila argues that “the simple opposition between early Euro-American and politically incorrect Brooks and later African-American and politically correct Brooks breaks down in any careful reading of her work” (201). Not only are there continuities in her rhetorical poses and her imagery, but in perpetually revising herself Brooks frequently alludes to and incorporates her earlier language in the later poetry.
One of these subtle shifts in Brooks’s use of the lyric is that the maternal rhetorical position Brooks so frequently occupies in her early volumes becomes fused with the more public, sermonic voice that resonates throughout her later poetry. From Annie Allen to the “Sermons on the Warpland,” however, the voice of the mother and its metaphoric extension into the voice of the minister enables her to investigate whether, or to what extent, the lyric has a social function. Her use of apostrophe, finally, takes the tradition of enclosed lyrics from which she emerges—especially the confine-conscious lyrics of previous American women poets, from Emily Dickinson onward—and stretches it, exploiting the lyric’s public possibilities. Intriguingly, the poems that manifest this struggle have also been labeled her most “mandarin,” suggesting, as Brooke Kenton Horvath notes, a link between stylistic and political resistance (213, 221).
* * *
With Annie Allen, her second book of poetry, Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950); yet, as Claudia Tate observes, it receives less critical attention than many of Brooks’s other works (140). It seems less hopeful than A Street in Bronzeville, less determinedly political than The Bean Eaters, and may be the least accessible of Brooks’s poetry, dense with word-play and formal experiment; Don L. Lee later singles it out as Brooks’s work most obviously focused on “poetic style,” and therefore at a white audience (84). More specifically, he laments “an overabundance of the special appeal to the world-runners” (86); Lee accurately notes the racial converse of Redding’s remark that certain poems, by their manner of address, construct a readership that excludes him.
While this collection, a series detailing the life of its title character, plies a more cryptic style than other early Brooks, in the last third of this book Brooks makes an important move toward increased accessibility. She explicitly identifies the voice of the poet with the voice of the mother, in this case a mother of imperiled and lost progeny. Annie Allen, in fact, narrates this move toward the mature, mother’s voice, a voice (in her poetic world) of leadership and authority. The volume consists of three sections, “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood,” “The Anniad” and its appendix, and “The Womanhood.” The first section shows the literal narrowness of Annie’s life as well as the cramping of her will and imagination by her mother; the discipline of form demonstrated by Brooks duplicates the discipline of meek and obedient femininity imposed on Annie. “The Anniad” offers the mock-epic of Annie’s failed marriage. In “The Womanhood” Brooks “writes beyond the ending” of heterosexual romance and announces the need for a new direction, which perhaps Brooks only fully finds twenty years later.1
All of the work from the first phase of Brooks’s career speaks in uneasy dialogue with Anglo-American poetic tradition; Annie Allen grapples with some of its most powerful exemplars. “Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood” consists mainly of light lyrics, especially in ballad stanzas, to set up Annie’s expectations for a happy ending through marriage. Brooks writes none of these poems in the second person, except for the last piece in the sequence, “my own sweet good,” Annie’s quoted address to her future lover. “The Anniad” bows to the epic as it encompasses both a World War and the war between Annie and her husband, or Annie’s fantasies and reality; “Appendix to the Anniad” searches further and ends up with “the sonnet-ballad,” a love-lament, to tell the story of the failed marriage. In both of these subsections, body and appendix, Brooks addresses the reader: “The Anniad” begins, “Think of sweet and chocolate” (Blacks 99) and ends with parallel imperatives including “Think of tweaked and twenty-four” (109). Many of the sonnets and ballads in the last third of the book, “The Womanhood,” direct love not at husbands or lovers but at children, and the whole volume ends on the seriousness of blank verse, addressing a deaf tradition personified as a group of resistant white men and finally asserting Annie’s alienation from it and its forms. The collection continuously searches among the Anglo-American traditions of poetic expression for a form that will both hold what Annie’s life has been, and direct her in her maturity. Her conclusion is that there are no “timely godmothers to guide us,” that she can expect no admittance to any estate, but that she must innovate her own way forward.
Apostrophe offers a crucial tool for such pathfinding, especially in the prescient final poem of this volume. Untitled, it apostrophizes, in a form suggesting blank verse, “Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road,” demanding that they “Admit me to our mutual estate” (139). This voice, distinctly not maternal, does employ the second-person address and imperatives often associated with that pose. Brooks, as a poet, only barely still in the persona of Annie Allen, knocks on the doors of the Anglo-American tradition, demanding to be admitted to its “high” company. She genders her alienation first, comparing her previous relationship to this tradition to a woman loving but fearing a husband who seems alternately brutal and indifferent. Next, Brooks notes the racial component of her ostracization, as these men who hate change respond that “prejudice is native” and “ineradicable,” but that she should be satisfied with their new “politeness” (140). Brooks refers not only to a black woman’s relationship to “civilization” but to her place in the literary world, as she makes clear by the use of the resonant word “line” to describe her confinement within other people’s assessment of her worth: “For the line is there./ And has a meaning … the line is/ Long and electric” (140). Here Brooks herself calls her use of Anglo-American forms a bondage in politeness; the line, the unit of poetry, itself represents a kind of electric fence.
Annie rejects such enclosure, and Brooks seems to repudiate the limited conception of the brief, expressive, well-wrought lyric she has inherited. She moves from first person singular to a plural “we,” and suddenly seems to turn to a new audience: “Rise./ Let us combine. There are no magics or elves/ Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must/ Wizard a track through our own screaming weed” (140). The ending of “men of careful turns” so clearly expresses the necessity of innovation that one might expect Brooks’s next volume to strike out in an entirely new direction, past the fence and through weedy unmapped land, with its newly defined army. As Henry Taylor asserts, “If there are sharp divisions in Brooks’s career, one of them comes at this point” (266). However, Brooks spoke her subversions obliquely enough through forms familiarly safe enough to a white audience that apparently her disgust was not visible, or at least not threatening. Brooks’s next work in poetry, The Bean Eaters, does make some movement in a new direction, and her novel was certainly meant to reach a larger audience. Annie Allen’s apostrophic gestures support Brooks’s own implication that her 1967 “change” is not so utter as it may at first seem.
In “and shall I prime my children, pray, to pray,” from Annie Allen, Brooks also experiments with the voice of the minister or the spiritual guide, in an imperative mode of address which strongly resembles the tone of her advising mothers. Brooks fully realizes this mode in her “Sermons on the Warpland.” Erkkila notes how “Brooks addresses the black community as a kind of female preacher, a role that would have been denied to her in the more traditional structures of the black church” (220). Like the mother, the preacher stands taller than her less-powerful listeners and dispenses guidance. Although this hortatory voice grows out of Brooks’s maternal pose, it reaches more widely, acknowledging the public role poetry can exercise, the multiplicity of potential readers, the world context and not only the intimate indoor spaces in which poetry is often composed and read. Sermons are primarily oral and public. Despite Brooks’s consequent widening of the lyric’s introspective space, however, on the level of language these poems remain private, even enclosed, and intensely literary.
Brooks published two “Sermons on the Warpland” at the end of In the Mecca, and one in her next book of poetry, Riot (1969). Brooks needs to work her way into this powerful voice in stages, always apparently ambivalent; in the first sermon she encloses her preaching in quotation marks, in the second she pronounces without mediation, and in the third she steps back from sermonizing directly, although her attitudes about the rioting she depicts remain implicit. Within the series, the title accumulates many different resonances. First, as R. Baxter Miller notes, Brooks alludes to the Sermon on the Mount (150). Her alternate geography also suggests the “warped land” or even the “Waste Land” of a racist and riot-torn America; it refers, especially in the first poem, to the “war planned” by black nationalists against white America, and even a “warplane,” a carrier for this militant message.2
The first “sermon” is the shortest, and Brooks sets off its homily in quotation marks, distinctly marking its voice as not her own. Brooks may be engineering this distance partly to avoid, with characteristic reticence, the presumption of divine inspiration. However, the “Single Sermon” is delivered by a chorus of “several strengths,” suggesting that the poet functions as a medium through which many people speak; the sermon then becomes a people addressing itself, minimizing Brooks’s literary authority. This poem emphasizes mediation through this chorus and through the quotation marks, but such intercession occurs implicitly in all of Brooks’s sermons: while the mother speaks for herself, the preacher always serves as a conduit for higher forces. Brooks’s shift to a mediating sermonic voice suggests her new role as spokesperson, if an ambivalent one, in the Black Arts Movement.
“The Sermon on the Warpland” avoids traditional poetic form, instead organizing itself around the imperative and inspiring rhetoric of the pulpit. “Prepare to meet/ (sisters, brothers) the brash and terrible weather,” the poem demands; “Build now your Church” (Blacks 451-52). Although the sentence structures are vocative, however, the poem also contains a metaphoric and intensely alliterative, randomly rhyming language that counteracts its apparent purposes. The sound-play pleases the ear, but some phrases do not possess any clearly assignable meaning. The second “Sermon on the Warpland” amplifies this effect by giving orders that make no immediate sense. Brooks does not tell her flock to march, to pray, to fight; she demands that they read, think, and interact with her language so that they themselves bear responsibility for interpreting her imperatives. The goal her sermon states, the “health” that will be achieved, involves “the heralding of the clear obscure” (451): this oxymoron declares the rightful place of the difficult, or even the irrational, in any poetry, including the poetry of the pulpit (and, here, of the oracle).
Lyric brevity and compression, figured in images of enclosure, perform a positive function in the first poem. The future, the sermon declares, germinates in “doublepod,” containing “seeds for the coming hell and health together” (451). Progress becomes organic, the word “hell” breaking out of its pod, swelling or maturing into “health,” the full-grown flower. This blossoming out of stasis requires the building of a new church, “never with brick nor Corten nor with granite,” but “with lithe love” (452). Again, Brooks invokes paradox as her ideal; this building will resemble a Church, will shelter and enclose, but it will exist as an imaginative, not a physical, structure. Its cement will correspond to the bonds between people.
In “The Second Sermon on the Warpland,” slightly longer and written in four numbered parts, Brooks addresses her community directly. Her imperatives are metaphorical: “Live!/ and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind” (Blacks 453); “Define and/ medicate the whirlwind” (455); “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind” (456). The most difficult series of directives occurs in the second section of this quartet:
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.
(454)
Brooks may be here assuming a public pose, meaning to inspire, but this is no populist poetry; this passage sounds less like oratory and more like an excerpt from an avant-garde literary journal. Her diction again mimics growth, and blooming as “salve” is repeated more largely in “salvage,” echoing the movement from “hell” to “health.” As Brooks continues to argue, there exists no “easy” way to “straddle the whirlwind” that is the chaotic world of 1968; apparently a colloquial voice won’t do it any better than the “sweetest sonnet” (454). She orders each reader to do his or her own “defining,” rather than providing clear directives herself.
In the fourth and last section of the “Second Sermon,” Brooks resurrects the speaker of “Big Bessie throws her son into the street” (400) at the end of Selected Poems. In the earlier piece, Big Bessie produces large but relatively lucid orders: “Be precise,” “Hunt out your own or make your own alone,” “Go down the street” (400). Her inclusion reinforces the connection between these two kinds of voices, the maternal and the preacherly. In the “Second Sermon,”
Big Bessie’s feet hurt like nobody’s business,
but she stands—bigly—under the unruly scrutiny, stands
in the wild weed.
In the wild weed
she is a citizen,
and is a moment of highest quality; admirable.
(Blacks 456)
Erkkila argues that Brooks “represent[s] herself in the figure of Big Bessie who moves out of the house” into a public sphere (221); certainly the presence of a strong maternal figure here emphasizes the continuity between all of Brooks’s rhetorical positions. The “wild weed” imagery comprises another thread that binds Brooks’s work back to A Street in Bronzeville: from “a song in the front yard” to “men of careful turns” to this “whirlwind”/“wild weed” scenery, uncultivated land means free and uncharted space where black women can define their own identities. Elsewhere, Brooks speaks affectionately of dandelions, flowers that can grow and delight the eye where nothing else will (Blacks 144). Her summons to “live and go out” (455) demands abandoning enclosures and prim front yards, a recapitulation of her decision back at the end of Annie Allen to “wizard a track through our own screaming weed.”
“The Third Sermon on the Warpland” continues revisiting Brooks’s earlier poetry, but eliminates Bessie and abandons its confident, if obscure, imperatives. This poem, reacting to the 1968 street disturbances in Chicago after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination (Kent 236), instead includes different black male voices: “The Black Philosopher,” twelve-year-old “Yancey,” the Blackstone Rangers. Erkkila argues that, from In the Mecca on, Brooks becomes gradually silenced by the male-identified Black power movement, citing Brooks’s decreased poetic production and increased address to and emphasis on black masculinity in her poetry (218-19). While Brooks does not cease to speak through apostrophe, this poem does enact a relative stifling of the mother and of Brooks’s own authority to guide African-American response to racism.
In the middle of the theft and violence and sirens, a maternal figure surfaces, this time apparently a casualty rather than a tired but strong “citizen.”
A woman is dead.
Motherwoman.
She lies among the boxes
(that held the haughty hat[s], the Polish sausages)
in newish, thorough, firm virginity
as rich as fudge is if you’ve had five pieces.
Not again shall she
partake of steak
on Christmas mornings, nor of nighttime
chicken and wine at Val Gray Ward’s
nor say
of Mr. Beetley, Exit Jones, Junk Smith
nor neat New-baby Williams (man-to-many)
“He treat me right.”
That was a gut gal.
(Blacks 476)
This virgin mother resembles Pepita of “In the Mecca,” who dies sacrificially (Erkkila 218), yielding up her body and voice to “the war planned.” Brooks honors her with a scrap of elegy in the middle of this poem full of angry men. The “Third Sermon” does not represent the death of maternal power or the sermonic voice in Brooks, but it does register the tension between the importance of women’s voices and the loyalty to Black Power that threatens Brooks’s later poetry.
Kent characterizes this poem as utilizing “the ordinary speech, loose rhythms, and communal reference points that could communicate to a mass audience” (A Life 237). The third sermon seems far more likely than the others to achieve Brooks’s stated goal of appealing to a wider audience, as the above passage demonstrates. Even here, however, as Kent notes, Brooks can quickly “leave directness for the metaphorical”; he feels “that in such passages she is in territory that some of the younger writers, with their freer use of street language, would handle more effectively. Thus Gwendolyn’s old style invaded the new one she was attempting to create” (237). I see these sermons not as failures to communicate at the level Brooks professed to be targeting, but as continuations of her aesthetic of complexity and deliberate indirection.
One of the interesting places where Brooks’s old poetry “invades” the new is the allusion to “Gay Chaps at the Bar” in the “Third Sermon.” The labeled jars and cabinets in which “my dreams, my work” are internally preserved become, in the later poem, the larder of the “keeper”:
The Black Philosopher says
“Our chains are in the keep of the keeper
in a labeled cabinet
on the second shelf by the cookies,
the sonatas, the arabesques …
There’s a rattle, sometimes.
You do not hear it who mind only
cookies and crunch them …”
(472)
The constraining chains, themselves enclosures, are concealed in another enclosed space, something like the back of the mind of the dominant white culture. The chains share their space with sweets like sonnets/sonatas, “snacks” that distract their enjoyers from the ominous rattling of irons. The black soldier in Brooks’s early sequence about World War II deposits his peacetime aspirations himself, although the war certainly constrains his options, but Brooks’s black philosopher has no ability to unlock these containers, except through violence. Both, however, address an audience that does not properly understand the direness of the situation. Brooks models “Gay Chaps” on soldiers’ letters to the uncomprehending women back home; this latter speech might be directed to those resisting or disapproving of the explosive anger of Chicago rioters, implicitly including Brooks herself. In this last “Sermon,” Brooks gives far more direct voice to opinions she seems to disagree with than to her own ideas.
Brooks’s most recent work abandons her early conception of the lyric, conceiving it negatively as a fixed, boxed in, static, dead form. She intends to write occasional poetry, speaking to immediate needs with specific purposes. Similarly, the distinction between public and private upon which the lyric often rests—itself private and claiming timelessness, in contrast to public and historical forms like the epic, the novel, and drama—finally collapses for Brooks. Although her poems continue to depend structurally on apostrophe, linking the latest productions with so many of the earliest, the directives emerge more plainly: the suggestively titled Beckonings (1975), for example, illustrates this through the inspirational pieces “A Black Wedding Song” and “Boys. Black. a preachment.” As the voices of the mother and the preacher fuse, public and private worlds and their separate discourses become indistinguishable.