An Aspect of Chatter, Alive in the Today and People: A Computational Approach to the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks

AN ASPECT OF SHELF,
ALIVE IN THE PLACE AND SMOKE
 
                                             a poem Gwendolyn Brooks could have written,
                                             from the www.forevergwenbrooks.com project.

It is the chains of our seas.
 
In a boxes in guns there is this none.
How ecstatic.
Golden law in our black,
someone cry-forward, we whisper each other
are rough lies and interruptions.
 
Golden light is in the place.
 
Because the darkness is at the today
we cannot dying very long.
 
Some crunching, although
white others are in ourselves again.
Nothing settled
mine blackness and right wool
nobody golden and straddled as a virginity.
In chili, each down radiant terrific,
sweaty.
 
There is a moment in boxes
when lover is not to be understood.
I cannot bear steak.
This is the discreet chatter;
the chitterling of not-to-end.
 
On the street we goes.
We coming
in rough directions
down the white street.

The long poem RIOT! marks an important juncture in Brooks’s publishing career. Her previous book In the Mecca was published and distributed by Harper & Row, a large, white-owned, well-connected trade publisher. Though Harper & Row ensured that her work would reach a wider audience, they also made it possible for her and her work to be treated as tokens of liberalism for a white audience, an audience that did not share her social convictions and commitments. Thereafter she published exclusively with black-owned publishers, like Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press and Haki Madhubuti’s Third World Press. It was Broadside Press that published RIOT! and sold it for $1.00 (imagine that today!), and Brooks reinvested the profits back into the press.

On the back-cover Brooks states the specific context from which the work arises and within which it must be read: “Riot is a poem in three parts, only one part of which has appeared in print before. It arises from the disturbances in Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.” To call the events “disturbances” sounds a bit euphemistic, but the implication is that something is amiss at the foundations of the social fabric, and a riot is but one expression of the systemic inequalities. In the case of the poem, the riot exemplifies one manner of the self-assured Black cultural awareness rising at the time. The poem constitutes a direct address to Black communities but also to the white establishment personified in the character of “John Cabot,” an example of educated white liberalism clinging to signifiers of value like “golden hair,/wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,” with his “Jaguar and Lake Bluff,” all forgotten in the face of “the Negroes” who “were coming down the street” like an earthquake-triggered wave. The poem addresses those who cannot or will not understand holding the streets as an organic and necessary form of resistance to the gridlock that would sweep black people into rigidly defined and impossible spaces.

The riot as community action and as a text is about unsettling the white presence (John Cabot) who is so undone by the presence of “the Negroes” on the street that his mind is wiped clear of the artifacts of wealth and whiteness that heretofore have granted him a privileged social place:

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,
all whitebluerose below his golden hair,
wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,
almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;
almost forgot Grandtully (which is The
Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch);
               almost
forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray
and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim's,
the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.

At Cabot’s exclamation “Don’t let It touch me! the Blackness! Lord!” he becomes comically out of sync with his surroundings. Having lingered too long at his own fair, he lacks the necessary awareness to understand how the situations have changed and are changing right in front of him; he even lacks the capacity to understand the riot’s trigger. Here Cabot reads as irrelevant, even absurd. Where Cabot, a stand-in for white reproachment, condemns the rioters, Brooks inquires and explores. Brooks allows the rioters to speak and in doing so does not conflate whiteness with the “universal humanism” from which the non-white has been traditionally excluded. As James D. Sullivan notes in “Killing John Cabot,” this humanism uncritically draws its strength from this exclusion, but Brooks shows the necessity of treating whiteness not as universal, but as its own racial category.

As Lawrence Lieberman notes in “On the Brink of Seccession,” RIOT! features Brooks’s signature style: “Her random mix of rhymes, half rhymes, and internal rhymes is governed by a persistent musical pulse.” I wouldn’t describe these mixtures as random but perhaps unconventional and surprising in the way the musicality rewards the reader. Regarding her poem “The Wall,” Lieberman is “most taken by the way she [Brooks] remarkably condenses meaningful actions into compact nouns, nouns that rumble with the energy of covert events held at bay.” This energy is evident in compound nouns that Brooks employs in RIOT!, as in “In seas. In windsweep.” The internal rhyme on the “ee” sound is continually echoed throughout the poem, especially in the repeated mention of the “street” onto which the anger, frustration, and forward-facing possibilities have spilled. Throughout her corpus Brooks makes extensive use of portmanteaus and neologisms (“watermirrors,” “blackblues”) in ways that stress the texture and materiality of her vast lexicon. Nouns or adjectives act as verbs or modify verbs, as in the case of “long-straddle” and “long-stomped.”

RIOT! is a poem in three parts: “Riot,” “The Third Sermon on the Warpland,” and “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire.” The first two parts focus on the riot and the voices of the rioters, but the final part is a single poem that James D. Sullivan suggests, in “On the Brink of Secession,” expresses Brooks’s “utopian views” in the aftermath of the disturbances. The tone is cautiously positive and uplifting, but without resorting to easy platitudes about the way forward. Rather, the aftermath of the riot is experienced by two lovers (representing an “aspect” of love), whose morning-after broaches the possibility of unification and cultural responsibility through love of one’s community. The long poem ends with a scene of tenderness, intimacy, and rebirth in the figure of the Phoenix as the two lovers awaken into a new day. Their love rises out of the ashes of an attempt to reject and dismantle systemic oppressive structures, but at the end of the poem they go about their respective days:

On the street we smile.
We go
in different directions
down the imperturbable street.

The street has no reaction or response to the riot or the love. That it remains unchanged suggests that although the transformation has begun, it is unfinished and requires more work. It is on this poem that ends the collection where I want to linger, and where I use computation to extend the possibilities of this aftermath by reimagining the final part through the lexicon used in the long poem.

The Forever Gwen Brooks project grew out of love for and interest in Brooks’s poems, especially RIOT!, because it marks a definitive shift in her publishing priorities. I was also interested in the muted hopefulness of the final poem and the grammatical structure of her lines and sentences. There isn’t anything specific about the poem that calls out for a computational approach or analysis, but the patterns of syntax in general provides rich ground for computation. I use computation in writing by composing or remixing codes (usually Python and JavaScript) to randomly sort and rearrange input text according to pre-determined syntactical templates. I use programming codes because a true randomness can be achieved, as opposed to my arbitrary word choices. Because I exert considerable control over the input text, the result of a computationally mediated poem isn’t a poem without a central concern or focus, but a poem that extensively meditates on its subject via syntactical shifts.

“It is the morning of our love.” The intensity of Brooks’s opening line derives from the directness of the statement, creating an indisputable location for the world of the poem. Syntactically, I read this as “It is the noun of our noun.” I loosely mapped out the structure of each line in the poem according to my best understanding, and created a template where most of the nouns, verbs, pronouns, and adjectives became variables. What I kept constant were phrases that indicated statements, some pronouns, and other seemingly arbitrary lexical bits. For example, while some pronouns became variables, others like the possessive pronoun “our” in the first line, remained constant. This example isn’t arbitrary in that it preserves what I think is a distinctive feature of the poem—what the community claims for itself after the riot. The “our” belongs to the lovers, but I also read it as belonging to the larger black community. What other possibilities exist for black claiming/reclamation and revolution in the text?

After mapping out the poem’s structure line by line, I made lists of verbs, adjectives, and nouns that appeared in the entire text. First I did this by hand (RIOT! is less than a thousand words in total so this wasn’t too difficult) but in subsequent refactorings of the project I have used a part-of-speech tagger to confirm my findings. Statistically, the text is roughly 32% nouns, 15% verbs, and 8% adjectives (including repetition, so not unique tokens.) What I envisioned was a code that made it possible for all of the nouns in the text to pass through the locations of all the nouns in the template of the final poem, and the same for adjectives and verbs. The first iteration of the project still uses my original hand-made lists, with some variations, and I am at work on a 2.0 version that makes use of the speech-tagged lists.

The beauty of Brooks’s language is not that it can be swapped around to mean essentially the same thing in any given instance, but that cycling through her diction reveals how all of it is central to the poem’s main themes of black resistance and revolution. I chose this poem for a computational project for its ready and recognizable syntactical structure, and also because it comes at the end of the long poem and can serve as a lens of hopeful discomfort through which the entirety of the poem can be read. The execution of each ‘cycle’ isn’t flawless—sometimes tenses shift or noun and verb agreements don’t match, but the intention isn’t to reach grammatical perfection. Rather, Brooks’s poems often defy customary syntactical rules and foreground a sense of play. The regenerated poems, even with slight grammatical lapses, still offer themselves for deep engagement that will reward a reader. In the first iteration of the project, an attempt to ‘solve’ some of the verb/tense disagreements resulted in adding more verb tenses to the corpus so the output poems are more closely representations of work Brooks could have written than exact duplications of how the language appears in the original text. Still, I find the results uncanny in their evocations:

AN ASPECT OF PIG,
ALIVE IN THE WHITE AND SONATAS
 
It is the black of our hell.
 
In a deathintheafternoon in blackness there is this everything.
How blackness.
White sermon in our geography,
anything rattling, we siren each other
are young wiggles and joy
 
Black light is in the linen.
 
Because the head is at the place
we cannot crying very long.
 
Anyone up, although
bright everyone are in myself again.
Several cry-forward
yours discreet and expensive pie
nobody rose and helps as a hats.
In people, all steal white young,
desperate.
 
There is a moment in black
when wire is not to be understood.
I cannot bear glass.
This is the white Phoenix;
the world of not-to-end.
 
On the street we hold.
We down
in thrilling directions
down the discreet street.

The action of the poem as a whole is retained, as it takes place in the “street.” The implication at the end of the long poem is that the revolutionary potential of the riot is as-yet unrealized in many “separate” directions, and I find that energy to be amplified in the various iterations of how the individuals (now the collective “we”) go down the street and the qualities of the paths before them, thrilling and discreet. What I notice, too, is that Brooks’s poetic sensibility allows for her poems to contain sonatas and chitterlings, joy and “deathintheafternoon.” The generator puts these possibilities into much closer contact with each other and to my ears, the result sounds very much like Brooks. Even with my slight manipulations of the word lists, I consider each poem to be a potential poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. In them I see the multiplication of Brooks’s love for the black community and the black revolutionary potential embedded in her lexicon.

I think one of the reasons I chose to use computation to engage with Brooks’s work is out of a slight fear that her work and legacy will recede into a past we become too careless to retrieve and engage with, lest anyone forget the immense groundwork she has laid for writers, especially black writers. I conceive the Forever Gwen Brooks project as both homage and cenotaph to Brooks, as a way to experience her work in the space of the could-have-been, what she could have written. The first iteration of the generator is available for the public to use, and I invite anyone to click through and sit with a potential Brooks poem. The project exists in the digital space and the number of poems that can be generated is dizzying; may her work extend into future forevers.  The versions are not saved or cached and subsequently disappear into the ether with each click, but with this ephemerality each poem is as singular and rare as Brooks herself. 

———

References

Brooks, Gwendolyn. RIOT! Broadside Press. Detroit, Michigan. 1969.

Lieberman, Lawrence. “On the Brink of Secession: Gwendolyn Brooks.” The American Poetry Review. Vol. 43, No. 6. 2014.

Sullivan, James D. “Killing John Cabot and Publishing Black: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Riot.” African American Review. Vol. 36, No. 4. 2002.