Gwendolyn Brooks, Black Poetry, and Me

As a graduate student at City College in 1970, I encountered an academic and cultural ambience distinct from the largely multicultural one we know today. My beloved mother had died in 1969, radically altering my world. I was reentering my youthful domain of poetry and poetry readings, thanks to an old college friend, Paul Blackburn, while I was resuming my studies after a hiatus of twenty years. Someone told me that a person of my ethnic heritage—Arab American, an unfamiliar category at the time, in my case Lebanese with Greek ancestry—was in town, a poet named Etel Adnan. I attended her reading at St. Mark’s Church and greatly enjoyed her experimental work. But there was no one else on the scene I could discuss her with as a fellow “ethnic.” Blackburn, on the other hand, became my mentor. He was a follower of Charles Olson, whose poetics became the subject of my master’s thesis. He introduced me to the poets he had scheduled for two reading series at Max’s Kansas City and at Dr. Generosity, both bistros long gone into history. Blackburn’s tastes were sure and eclectic. He appreciated Black poets. They were the ones, moreover—like Jayne Cortez and Sonia Sanchez—to whom I related. Why?

There were several reasons. I was especially drawn to their musicality and to their politics, to the vitality of their work, charged with the personae and issues of an Earth we were currently inhabiting and despoiling. I invited Sonia Sanchez to read with me at City College; I was thrilled that she accepted. Discovering the jazz-infused work of Jayne Cortez inspired me to write a poem about her drum poem.

The affinities were deep. As a child, I listened to my father reciting classical Arabic poetry, which sounded profoundly musical. My mother, who had been educated by French nuns, taught me French and had me memorize French poems, which also had a strong lyrical component. She often sang me to sleep—usually in French. Both my parents spoke English; my mother and her sisters also knew Greek. My grandmother, who had been raised in a Prussian orphanage, additionally spoke German. As an adolescent, I loved Frost, Whitman, Whittier, and Dickinson, along with the English romantic poets, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley. I admired the rhythms and onomatopoeia in their work before understanding sonority structures in a more sophisticated way. Later on I was swept into the vitality of their radical ideas and political concerns. My own work was musical and political. I wanted to communicate with my fellow humans about our lives and how we might live in harmony.

My mother’s family—her widowed mother, three brothers, and four sisters—were musical. Aunt Rose and Aunt Jerry sang; Uncle Al was featured in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as a “one-man band.” At home I was raised on intellectual and social values. We discussed politics, in my house and at the weekly gatherings at Grandma’s. I recall her listening to the radio and exclaiming “Shaitan!”(“Devil!”)—presumably at some Republican opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The “New Deal” filled us with hope. Rather than the hallowed “competition” of today’s socioeconomic lexicon, our watchwords in those days were “community” and “cooperation.” My grandmother’s matriarchy found its parallel in the cohesion of the Black church

And then there was Gwendolyn Brooks.

We met in 1971, at The City College of New York where I had completed my master’s degree and she, as Distinguished Professor in the Arts, accepted me as an auditor of her class. But she spoke to me before that. Her first book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945) about impressions of Chicago life in the 1940s, guided my writing about my own neighborhood in Notes on 94^th Street (1972), my first book. From the pages of her poetry I heard her resonant voice. It included me. It spoke to my daily life. It told me that everybody was important. In her poem, “Second Sermon on the Warpland” from In the Mecca, Brooks writes, “A garbageman is dignified as...