Heralding the Clear Obscure: Gwendolyn Brooks and Apostrophe

. . . 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...