"Life ruptured then looped back": Affiliation as Process in Major Jackson's "Urban Renewal" Series

The Kellys groped for power / and we, affiliation.

—Major Jackson ("Urban Renewal: XIV," lines 25-26)

In a special issue of Callaloo devoted to the new wave of black poetry, Charles H. Rowell describes its participants—part of perhaps "the largest literary group of working black writers that the US has ever known" (vii)—as a group who have "learned, and … teach their readers to take nothing for granted" (ix). Among them, Harryette Mullen finds a number of poets whose work is situated "between declarative representations of blackness and a critical engagement with the cultural and discursive practices by which evolving identities are recognized, articulated, and defined" (n. pag.). Their dominant ethic is suspicious of aesthetic and ideological fixity and thus, as Rowell argues, promulgates a "vision of the world [which] challenges the old verities and renders them uncertainties" (ix). While grateful beneficiaries of the black cultural tradition, poets of this cohort are nonetheless, in the best sense of the jazz tradition Rowell invokes, inspired to use all that is available to them—whatever they feel works—in their poetry. While so doing, they strive to avoid the trap the poet Thomas Sayers Ellis warns against, "that they begin to respond to the tempest (to survive and to be heard), forgetting all the time that anything they create, if they are black, is black, and is black art" (89).

Major Jackson, one of this new body of poets, writes a long epistle to Gwendolyn Brooks in his latest volume, Hoops (2006).¹ Apostrophizing the now-deceased poet, Jackson recalls her influence on some of the poets of his generation (in this instance, the Cambridge-based Dark Room Collective [DRC]), styling them "the inheritors of your black pride" (Hoops 94, "Letter to Brooks: Allegheny," line 73). Not only are these poets bequeathed the elder poet's pride, but Jackson extends Brooks's legacy, suggesting that because of the ground Brooks cleared, the struggles she fought, and the model she set, these young poets were in a position to form "A cadre to unselfconsciously sound / Off Hayden, Baraka, Dove, and Wright. / To become our next black literary lights" (75-77). I read Jackson's inclusion of Amiri Baraka in that list as at once inevitable and striking. Certainly Baraka must be included in any discussion of latter-day black letters as a figure whose impact needs engagement in one form or another. On the one hand, Baraka's commitment to the voices, concerns, and rhythms of black and oppressed peoples has been unyielding for more than forty years, making him for many the foremost model of the committed artist. On the other hand, his name has become poetic shorthand for an extroverted, divisive, and intransigently ideological writer, a practitioner of what Michael G. Cooke refers to as "kinship by exhortation" (131). Such criteria would appear to place him at irreconcilable odds with the more measured, introspective, lyrical poetics of Robert Hayden, Rita Dove, or Jay Wright. Could it have been possible thirty-five years ago, when many of these younger poets were just beginning to grapple with the written word and when many of these elder poets were grappling with each other, to imagine this list coming together? In effect, we might imagine the détente between Baraka and Larry Neal's Black Fire (1968) and Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto's Chant of Saints (1979), the two emblematic anthologies, one nationalist, one self-consciously literary, that, although published eleven years apart, when placed adjacently appear to be at each other's throats.²

In this context, the question Jackson soon follows with sounds both expansive and defiant: "Who did we not celebrate? America could / Never deal with a diverse canon of poets" (85-86). On the one hand, Jackson's statement obviously announces its commitment to the issues of representation and pluralism, to "really fac[ing] a people's poetry" reflecting the multiple traditions and peoples of the United States (89). However, a brief return to the dissonant note that "Baraka" sounds in the midst of "Hayden … Dove...