Alternet on Gwendolyn Brooks's 'Radical Poetry'

Alternet shares with its readers an excerpt from Angela Jackson's new book, A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun: The Life & Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks (Beacon Press, May 2017). As you may have noticed, here at the Poetry Foundation we're celebrating Gwendolyn Brooks's centennial. As Jackson writes, during her lifetime, Brooks possessed "a place no other African American poet or writer held." Let's start there:

A Street in Bronzeville was published in August 1945. It hit Afro- America with the force of an atomic bomb. But it was by no means destructive. It was life-affirming for black people, who often felt a strong need to prove they were equal to whites because many whites were so blatantly disproving of this essential fact. Gwendolyn was important because she surpassed not only the expectations of whites about black people but whites themselves.

The first poem in the collection is “the old-marrieds.”

But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say
Though the pretty-coated bird had piped so lightly all
       the day.
And he had seen the lovers in the little side-streets,
And she had heard the morning stories clogged with sweets.
It was quite a time for loving. It was midnight. It was May.
But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say.

The speaker of the poem is omniscient, observing the absence of intimacy in an intimate setting. The eye of the poet is penetrating, as in a newsreel; the language pristine, almost mocking as the poem begins.

Whether Gwendolyn’s intention was to create a newsreel effect or not, she begins her most public announcement of herself as a poet by breaking with the past. This is neither a dialect nor sentimental poem; it is neither blues-infused, as Hughes’s work was, nor exotic. The characters in the bed are not the stereotypically hypersexual Negroes of the white imagination. They are sedate, mature, and sexually repressed. No one had imagined Negroes in poetry in this way before. They were surprisingly, refreshingly human. Indeed, Gwendolyn began with a surprising imaginative and empathetic leap. She was a young poet, twenty-eight, writing about middle-aged or elderly people. She was a relatively young wife writing about a couple who had been married for decades.

Read on at Alternet.