Aggravated into Writing: Margaret Walker, Iowa, and the Workshopping of African American Literature

This essay provides the first in-depth literary and biographical analysis of Margaret Walker's time in 1939–40 as a poetry student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. There, she clashed with her teacher, Paul Engle, over the proper form and content of African American poetry, a conflict that anticipates many recent testimonials of the marginalizing of writers of color in MFA programs. Walker nonetheless credited Engle with having "aggravated [her] into writing": she accepted his direction to write pastoral folk ballads—published in her landmark volume of modern Black poetry, For My People (1942)—rather than protest poems, but she subversively infused them with both the political radicalism of her earlier work and implicit critiques of the discipline imposed by the Writers' Workshop. Walker's simultaneous influence by and resistance to Engle instructively models the negotiations performed by African American writers in white institutional spaces, or what Hortense Spillers calls the "work of the black creative intellectual" within the academy. Walker's encounter with Engle also reveals the origins of many of the institutional assumptions of the postwar creative writing program in the complex political and aesthetic discourses of Depression-era leftism. My reading of the Walker–Engle encounter at Iowa, and its literary products, makes a case for recognizing the dialectically constructive and restrictive role the academic writers' workshop has played in African American literary history, a role much more foundational than usually recognized by scholars of both African American literature and the history of the MFA program.