The Sonnets of Satin-Legs Brooks

The legend of Gwendolyn Brooks's stylistic shift from traditional Anglo-European prosody to free verse and the ideals of the black aesthetic is well known by her readers and abundantly chronicled by her critics. Of the many forms the poet employed in her long writing career, the sonnet in particular has come to represent the very question of poetic form for Brooks. Her two powerful and important sonnet sequences, "Gay Chaps at the Bar" (1945) and "the children of the poor" (1949), have received careful readings from scholars, both as poems in their own right and as crucial steps in the development of her aesthetics.¹ Yet even in studies not focused on the sonnet, the form looms conspicuously large in accounts of Brooks's career, most especially in her own accounts. Critics compulsively mention her sonnets, whether or not those poems are relevant to their discussions, and sometimes even detect the form where there is no sonnet at all.² Their frequent mention in histories of her career may seem unwarranted by the number of sonnets Brooks wrote. If we take into account only her two last collections of poetry, Blacks (1987) and In Montgomery (2003), there are just above twenty sonnets among the nearly two hundred poems (and the number of poems not in sonnet form would increase considerably if we counted the complete works in each original volume, verse in her children's books, and her uncollected poems). But it is not so much the quantity of sonnets she wrote, nor even their often stunning quality, but the status of the sonnet in her thinking about art that makes these poems central—even though she did not write sonnets during the last forty years of her career. Brooks may not have written another sonnet after her radicalization in 1967, but she adamantly continued to rely on that form as she pondered aesthetic questions and attempted to formulate a new poetic program that served her political ideals.

As Brooks pointed out in 1969, "I really haven't written extensively in many forms" (Conversations 45). Having said that, however, she goes on to assert that the few sonnets she has written are too much: "I have written many more sonnets than I'm sure I'll be writing in the future, although I still think there are things colloquial and contemporary that can be done with the sonnet form." The distinction she draws here and elsewhere between her past and future writing refers, of course, to her well-known political awakening at the Second Fisk Writers' Conference in 1967, where she encountered young writers of the "new black consciousness" and abandoned her integrationist views. This transformation was felt in all aspects of her life—personal, public, and poetic—as she made new friendships and professional alliances, began publishing with black presses, and worked indefatigably to encourage and support young black writers.³ The change in her poetry, however, came much more slowly and equivocally. Though she and many of her readers would divide her work into pre–1967 and post–1967 phases, into white or "Negro" writing (poems in traditional forms) and "black" writing (free-verse black aesthetic poems), the poems themselves register how difficult it was for Brooks to adjust her aesthetics to her politics.⁴

Indeed, in the years following her transformation, Brooks expresses ambivalence rather than certitude about the relationship of politics to aesthetics. For example, she becomes suspicious of rhyme but thinks she may be able to retain it if the rhymes are "incidental and random" (Conversations 68). She repeatedly recounts her decision to abandon iambic pentameter (Report from Part One 195) and yet eventually informs young black poets that "[t]he community, incidentally, often converses in iambic pentameter" (Young Poet's Primer 11). She swears to cease writing lyrical poems: "Never again will I write a poem that sounds like ["When Mrs. Martin's Booker T"], that just ripples on, is easily rhymed, and just spills out of the consciousness" (Conversations 123). Yet for every "never again" in Brooks's predictions about her new poetry, there is...