Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement

Chapter Four: Muddying Clear Waters: Carolyn Rodgers’s Black Art

95 Chapter Four Muddying Clear Waters: Carolyn Rodgers’s Black Art Women writers of the BAM were often susceptible to gendered critiques, and writers like Chicago poet Carolyn Rodgers received their fair share of these, particularly from their male peers. The relationship between gender and artistic production and/or performance was reinforced through such critiques, which subsequently impacted the BAM’s objectives and continues to influence the ways in which readers and scholars perceive the legacy of the movement today. “As they articulated black manhood through the pen, the gun, the penis, and the microphone, male poets in the Black Arts Movement defined and reified revolutionary black male identity” (Pollard 173). Chicago Black Artist Hoyt Fuller composed the introduction to Rodgers’s first published collection, Paper Soul, published by Third World Press in 1968, which includes language reflecting the kind of critical and gendered biases to which women artists of this period were subjected by their male peers. As Fuller was then managing editor of Johnson Publications ’ journal the Black World, his review of Rodgers’s work was especially influential in her emerging career as a writer. Her perspective, both sharp and sweeping, encompasses the broad regions of what is and also the clear image of what might be; and her language, honed with bitterness and tipped with grace, swaggers along the brutal street and prances into the parlors: it does not know its bounds . . . Her prose is spare and angular, geared to essence, but hard only when she wills it; and always it is stamped with an elegance so effortless and deep that it seems inborn: it is like her own frame, slim and straight, and as subtly feminine as a virgin’s blush . . . Carolyn Rodgers will be heard. She has the artist’s gift and the artist’s vision . . . (1–2) Muddying Clear Waters: Carolyn Rodgers's Black Art 96 Fuller was an integral figure in the process of developing the aesthetic of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), and his gendered critique of Rodgers’s literary talent as a black woman poet is not without an acknowledgment of her abilities to communicate the literary and cultural ideals that defined the BAM in Chicago and nationwide. His own language in characterizing the poet’s style explicates more than the craft and technique exhibited by Rodgers, but it also suggests the degree to which her work reflects an artistic perspective that is decidedly “female” within the context of the BAM’s nationalist and cultural aesthetic—one for which male writers have been overwhelmingly credited for having designed. Fuller’s references to Rodgers’s “slim and straight” physicality are aligned with her “sharp and sweeping” perspective, and it is the employment of gendered language in his description of Rodgers’s work and in referencing her femininity that is so conspicuous here. (Incidentally, Rodgers’s poem “For H. W. Fuller,” which appeared in OBAC’s journal Nommo, in turn, includes references to Fuller’s masculinity as a celebrated mentor and Chicago Black Arts icon.)1 In the study entitled The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers, Calvin Hernton critiques the overtly masculine culture of the black vernacular tradition that is useful in framing Fuller’s comments during the height of the BAM: [T]he masculine perspective itself, concerning the manhood of the black race has always occupied center stage in the drama of Afro-American literature . . . [B]eing at once Black, American, and Female, [black women] have been victimized by the mountain of sexism, not only from the white world but from the men of the black world as well . . . There is much work to be done. The mountain must not merely be scaled, it must be destroyed. (50, 56) In keeping with the critique of the gendered dimensions of the BAM within the history of black cultural expression in Chicago and beyond, Karen Jackson Ford writes: Carolyn Rodgers, a Chicago poet who first learned her trade in the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writer’s Workshop meetings and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Writers Workshops, was distinctive as a new black woman poet in the late 1960’s, when she published her first two books for her vehement adherence to the Black Arts program. Noted for her vulgarity and other excesses, Rodgers was quickly criticized by other Black Aesthetic 97 Muddying Clear Waters: Carolyn Rodgers's Black Art practitioners for...