Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen

Since the 1970s, many critics of contemporary American poetry have focused on the issue of subjectivity, particularly the "I" or speaker in poetry and its political implications. Far fewer studies have focused on the subjectivities of actual audiences for recent poetry, though reader-response critics and reception theorists have extensively discussed how individual readers interpret novels old and new.¹ Because most reader-response theorists focus on novels and narrative, the shifting conventions within different poetry communities do not often figure into their examination of individual reader's interpretive practices. Though this essay will describe both the real and imagined readers of these poetries, it is most concerned with delineating how different his-torical and critical moments, specifically the Black Arts movement and post-structuralism, shape poets' notions of their audiences and determine how that work is received and understood. This essay joins other recent scholarship that assembles an alternative tradition of African American avant-garde poetry—in contrast to long-prevailing notions of accessible, plain-spoken black poetry—and it contributes to that scholarship a focus on poetry by women as well as a focus on the popular and critical reception of such work over four decades. Through examining how the cultural and critical contexts around each poet shifted, one can more clearly trace how American paradigms of race and writing have changed and continue to change.

Those critics who have discussed contemporary poetry's audiences have called for poets to liberate readers—to different ends and via different means. For instance, back in 1971, Ron Karenga called for poetry of the Black Arts movement to rally and uplift readers around a new racial identity, to "reflect and support the Black Revolution . . . to expose the enemy, praise the people, and support the revolution."² As Karenga saw it, readers would collectively receive from artists clear messages that would help to forge a new consciousness of racial identity and of the need for revolutionary action. Just over a decade later, in 1983, Lyn Hejinian called for "open texts" that are "generative rather than directive, [that] emphasize . . . process, [and] . . . resist the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; [that] resist reduction and commodification."³ Hejinian and other language writers sought a poetic revolution, whose political effects they awaited. Rather than receiving doctrinal, closed messages, or deciphering the author's intentions, each reader would participate in the making of his or her message and develop a new consciousness of how language (over)determines identities and meanings. While poets and theorists have worked very hard indeed to reconcile these two visions of art's relation to politics, poets writing in the wake of poststructuralism have until recently tended to write with an eye toward either sociopolitical or linguistic revolution.

For poets of color coming of age since the 1970s, these artistic imperatives—to write the revolution or to write the process of linguistic revolution—have often been felt as competing, contradictory demands. Where the Black Arts movement and much poetry influenced by it called for audiences to recognize a new racial pride and a coherent group identity, poststructuralist writing, language writing, and poetry in their wake called for readers to question the literary and linguistic formulations of identity, to distrust the "I," and to interrogate fictions of autobiographical progression, coherence, or consistency within subjectivity. Of course, much poetry of the Black Arts movement tackled social and linguistic opposition at once. Dense, self-reflexive, disjunctive work by Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Clarence Major, as well as Gwendolyn Brooks, appeared in the 1960s and '70s. However, as Aldon Nielsen notes in Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, in subsequent critical discussion of Black Arts poetry the legacy of the movement has narrowed, focusing on a few accessible works and poets, thereby "ensuring the invisibility of the...