SOURCE: "Gwendolyn the Terrible: Propositions on Eleven Poems," in Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 233-44.

[In the following essay, Spillers examines the form, language, and unassuming subjects of Brooks's poetry. "The style of Brooks's poetry," writes Spillers, "gives us by implication and example a model of power, control, and subtlety."]

For over three decades now, Gwendolyn Brooks has been writing poetry which reflects a particular historical order, often close to the heart of the public event, but the dialectic that is engendered between the event and her reception of it is, perhaps, one of the more subtle confrontations of criticism. We cannot always say with grace or ease that there is a direct correspondence between the issues of her poetry and her race and sex, nor does she make the assertion necessary at every step of our reading. Black and female are basic and inherent in her poetry. The critical question is how they are said. Here is what the poet has to say about her own work:

My aim, in my next future, is to write poems that will somehow successfully "call" all black people: black people in taverns, black people in alleys, black people in gutters, schools, offices, factories, prisons, the consulate; I wish to reach black people in mines, on farms, on thrones: not always to "teach"—I shall wish often to entertain, to illumine [Emphasis Brooks]. My newish voice will not be an imitation of the contemporary young black voice, which I so admire, but an extending adaptation of today's G. B. voice.

Today's G. B. voice is one of the most complex on the American scene precisely because Brooks refuses to make easy judgments. In fact, her disposition to preserve judgment is directly mirrored in a poetry of cunning, laconic surprise. Any descriptive catalog can be stretched and strained in her case: I have tried "uncluttered," "clean," "robust," "ingenious," "unorthodox," and in each case a handful of poems will fit. This method of grading and cataloguing, however, is essentially busywork, and we are still left with the main business: What in this poetry is stunning and evasive?

To begin with, one of Brooks's most faithfully anthologized poems, "We Real Cool," illustrates the wealth of implication that the poet can achieve in a very spare poem:

      We real cool. We
      Left school. We
      Lurk late. We
      Strike straight. We
      Sing sin. We
      Thin gin. We
      Jazz june. We
      Die soon.

The simplicity of the poem is stark to the point of elaborateness. Less than lean, it is virtually coded. Made up entirely of monosyllables and end-stops, the poem is no non-sense at all. Gathered in eight units of three-beat lines, it does not necessarily invite inflection, but its persistent bump on "we" suggests waltz time to my ear. If the reader chooses to render the poem that way, she runs out of breath, or trips her tongue, but it seems that such "breathlessness" is exactly required of dudes hastening toward their death. Deliberately subverting the romance of sociological pathos, Brooks presents the pool players—"seven in the golden shovel"—in their own words and time. They make no excuse for themselves and apparently invite no one else to do so. The poem is their situation as they see it. In eight (could be nonstop) lines, here is their total destiny. Perhaps comic geniuses, they could well drink to this poem, making it a drinking/revelry song.

Brooks's poetry, then, is not weighed down by egoistic debris, nor is her world one of private symbolisms alone, or even foremost; rather, she presents a range of temperaments and situations articulated by three narrative voices: a first-person voice, as in "Gay Chaps at the Bar."

     We knew how to order. Just the dash
     Necessary. The length of gaiety in good taste.
     Whether the raillery should be slightly iced
     And given green, or served up hot and lush.
     And we knew beautifully how to give to women
     The summer spread, the tropics of our love.
     When to persist, or hold a hunger off.
     Knew white speech. How to make a look an omen….

an omniscient narrator for the ballads:

     It was Mabbie without the grammar school gates
     And Mabbie was all of seven
     And Mabbie was cut from a chocolate bar
     And Mabbie thought life was heaven….

And then a concealed narrator, looking at the situation through a double focus. In other words, the narrator ironically translates her subject's ingenuousness. To this last group of poems belongs "The Anniad," perhaps one of the liveliest demonstrations of the uses to which irony can be put.

A pun on The Aeneid or The Iliad, the title of this piece prepares us for a mock heroic journey of a particular female soul as she attempts to gain self-knowledge against an unresponsive social backdrop. At the same time, the poem's ironic point of view is a weapon wielded by a concealed narrator who mocks the ritualistic attitudes of love's ceremony. The poem is initially interesting for its wit and ingenuity, but eventually G. B.'s dazzling acrobatics force a "shock of recognition." Annie, in her lofty naiveté, has been her own undoing, transforming mundane love into mystical love, insisting on knights when there are, truly, only men in this world. Annie obviously misses the point, and what we confront in her tale is a riot of humor—her dreams working against reality as it is. We protest in Annie's behalf. We want the dream to come true, but Brooks does not concede, and that she does not confirms the intent of the poem: a parodic portrayal of sexual pursuit and disaster.

Shaped by various elements of surprise, "The Anniad" is a funny poem, but its comedy proceeds from self-recognition. Brooks gives this explanation:

Well, the girl's name was Annie, and it was my pompous pleasure to raise her to a height that she probably did not have. I thought of The Iliad and said: 'I'll call this "The Anniad."' At first, interestingly enough, I called her Hester Allen, and I wanted then to say "The Hesteriad," but I forgot why I changed it to Annie … I was fascinated by what words might do there in the poem. You can tell that it's labored, a poem that's very interested in the mysteries and magic of technique….

From the 1949 Pulitzer Prize winning volume, Annie Allen, "The Anniad" may be read as a workshop in G. B.'s poetry. Its strategies are echoed in certain shorter poems from A Street in Bronzeville and The Bean Eaters, particularly the effective use of slurred rime and jarring locution in "Patent Leather" and "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith." In narrative scope and dramatic ambition, "The Anniad" anticipates In the Mecca, written some twenty years later.

Forty-three stanzas long, "The Anniad" is built on contradictions. Locating their "answer" or meaning constitutes the poem's puzzle and reward. Here are the two opening stanzas:

     Think of sweet and chocolate,
     Left to folly or to fate.
     Whom the higher gods forgot
     Whom the lower gods berate;
     Fancying on the featherbed
     What was never and is not.
 
     What is ever and is not.
     Pretty tatters blue and red,
     Buxom berries beyond rot,
     Western clouds and quarter stars,
     Fairy sweet of old guitars
     Littering the little head
     Light upon the featherbed….

After saying all we can about the formal qualities of these stanzas, we are still not certain about the subject of the poem. By means of slurs and puzzles of language, the action is hustled on, and circumlocution—"tell all the truth, but tell it slant"—becames a decisive aspect of the work's style. This Song of Ann is a puzzle to be unraveled, and the catalog of physical and mental traits deployed in the first fifteen stanzas becomes a set of clues. Not unlike games or riddles played by children, the poem gathers its clues in stanzas, and just as the questioner in the child's game withholds the solution, the speaker here does the same thing, often to the reader's dismay. However, once we know the answer, the game becomes a ritual where feigned puzzlement is part of the ceremony. In a discussion of Emily Dickinson's poetry, Northrop Frye points out that the "riddle or oblique description of some object" is one of the oldest and most primitive forms of poetry. In "The Anniad" the form gains a level of sophistication that is altogether stunning.

The dilemma of Annie is also that of "Chocolate Mabbie": the black-skinned female's rejection by black males. The lesson begins early for the black woman, as it does for young Mabbie. A too well-known theme of black life, this idea is the subject of several G. B. poems, but usually disguised to blunt its edge of madness and pain. With Mabbie's experience in mind, then, we are prepared for the opening lines of "The Anniad" and their peculiar mode of indirection.

The color theme is a crucial aspect of the poem's proposition and procedure, posing light skin and dark skin as antagonists. The question is not merely cosmetic, since hot combs and bleaching creams were once thought to be wonder workers, but it penetrates far and sharp into the psychic and spiritual reaches of the black woman's soul. I know of no modern poet before Brooks to address this subject, and as she does so, she offers the female a way out not only by awaking the phobia, but also by regarding it as yet another style of absurdity. The point is to bury inverted racism in ridicule and obscure reference, but not before contemplating its effects.

In "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie," the situation goes this way:

     Out came the saucily bold Willie Boone.
     It was woe for our Mabbie now.
     He wore like a jewel a lemon-hued lynx
     With sandwaves loving her brow.
 
     It was Mabbie alone by the grammar-school gates.
     Yet chocolate companions had she:
     Mabbie on Mabbie with hush in the heart.
     Mabbie on Mabbie to be.

An interesting contrast to Mabbie's ballad is "Stand Off, Daughter of the Dusk":

     And do not wince when bronzy lads
     Hurry to cream-yellow shining.
     It is plausible. The sun is a lode.
 
     True, there is silver under
     The veils of the darkness
     But few care to dig in the night
     For the possible treasure of stars.

If metaphor is a way to utter the unutterable, then "cream-yellow shining" and "veils of darkness" hint at It, but both are needlessly quaint, drawing attention away from the subject. Not one of her best or most interesting poems, it does articulate the notion of rejection without preaching a sermon about it. In "The Anniad," by contrast, the mood is sardonic and words are ablaze with a passion to kill, both the situation and one's tendency to be undone by it.

The male lover's ultimate choice to betray "sweet and chocolate" leads Annie's "tan man" to what he would consider the better stuff:

      … Gets a maple banshee. Gets
      A sleek-eyed gypsy moan.
      Oh those violent vinaigrettes!
      Oh bad honey that can hone
      Oilily the bluntest stone!
      Oh mad bacchanalian lass
      That his random passion has!

Clever synecdoche works here for the poet rather than against her, as it does in "Stand Off," and its comic distortions are reinforced by slant rhyme in the last two lines of the stanza. "Bad" honey is the best kind in colloquial parlance, "bad" having appropriated its antonym, and in the midst of "vinaigrettes" and "bacchanalian lasses," it is a sharp surprise.

"Tan man" himself gets similar treatment:

      … And a man of tan engages
      For the springtime of her pride,
      Eats the green by easy stages,
      Nibbles at the root beneath
      With intimidating teeth
      But no ravishment enrages.
      No dominion is defied.
 
      Narrow-master master calls;
      And the godhead glitters now
      Cavalierly on his brow.
      What a hot theopathy
      Roisters through her, gnaws her walls,
      And consumes her where she falls
      In her gilt humility.
 
      How he postures at his height;
      Unfamiliar, to be sure,
      With celestial furniture.
      Contemplating by cloud-light
      His bejewelled diadem;
      As for jewels, counting them,
      Trying if the pomp be pure….

Rodent, knight, god, by turn, "Tan man" is seen from a triple exposure: his own exaggerated sense of self-worth, the woman's complicity with it, and the poet's assessment, elaborated in the imaginative terms implied by the woman's behavior. Given the poem's logic, the woman and the man are deluded on opposing ends of the axis of self-delusion. As it turns out, he is not the hot lover "theopathy" would make him out to be, but Annie denies it, fearing that to say so would be to evoke an already imminent betrayal:

     … Doomer, though, crescendo-comes
     Prophesying hecatombs.
     Surrealist and cynical.
     Garrulous and guttural.
     Spits upon the silver leaves
     Denigrates the dainty eves
     Dear dexterity achieves …
 
     Vaunting hands are now devoid
     Hieroglyphics of her eyes
     Blink upon a paradise
     Paralyzed and paranoid.
     But idea and body too
     Clamor "Skirmishes can do.
     Then he will come back to you."

This scene of "ruin," brought on by sexual impotence, gains a dimension of pathos because it anticipates the woman's ultimate loneliness, but this judgment is undercut by the caricature of the male.

In order to fully appreciate the very pronounced contrast between other G. B. poems and this one, we should note the quality of images in "The Anniad." The dominant function of imagery here is auditory rather than visual, because Brooks, as well as the reader, is so thoroughly fascinated with the sound of words: for example, "Doomer, though, crescendo-comes / Prophesying hecatombs." This heavy word-motion is sustained by the most unlikely combinations—"surrcalist and cynical." "garrulous and guttural," etc. The combinations are designed to strike with such forceful contrariness that trying to visualize them would propel us toward astigmatism. We confront a situation where the simple image has been replaced by its terministic equivalent, or by words which describe other words in the poem.

Brooks's intensely cultivated language in "The Anniad" appears to rely heavily on the cross-reference of dictionaries and thesauri. Lexis here is dazzling to the point of distraction, but it is probably a feature of the poem's moral ferocity. It is clear that the poet, like others, has her eye on the peculiar neurosis that often prevails in sexual relationships. Rather than dignify it, she mocks its vaunted importance, exaggerating its claims nearly beyond endurance. In effect, exaggeration destroys its force, desanctifying hyperbolean phallic status. At the same time, it appears that a secondary motivation shadows the primary one—the poet's desire to suggest a strategy for destroying motives of inferiority in the self. This psychological motif in Brooks's early poetry is disturbing. At times it appears to verge on self-hatred, but style conceals it. "Men of Careful Turns" offers an example, I think, by depicting an interracial love affair corrupted by racism and certain intervening class loyalties. To conceal her disappointment, the black female narrator claims moral superiority over the white male, but in this case, as in "The Anniad," the literal situation is carefully disguised.

In the hands of a lesser poet Brooks's pyrotechnics would likely be disastrous, but G. B. achieves her aim by calibrating the narrative situation of the poem to its counterpart in the "real" world. Grounded in solidly social and human content, the poem is saved from sliding off into mere strangeness. The mischievous, brilliantly ridiculous juxtapositions achieve a perspective, and we gain thereby a taste for, rather than a surfeit of, exaggeration toward a specific end: to expose the sadness and comedy of self-delusion in an equally deluded world.

By contrast, a poem whose principle of composition is based on continuity of diction is another of the sonnets, "Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity." A model of precision, the poem reworks a single sentence to elaborate its message:

     Each body has its art, its precious prescribed
     Pose, that even in passion's droll contortions, waltzes,
     Or push of pain—is its, and nothing else's.
     Each body has its pose. No other stock
     That is irrevocable, perpetual
     And its to keep. In castle, or in shack.
     With rags or robes. Through good, nothing, or ill.
     And even in death, a body, like no other
     On any hill or plain or crawling cot
     Or gentle for the lilyless hasty pall
     (Having twisted, gagged, and then sweet-ceased to bother),
     Shows the old personal art, the look. Shows what
     It showed at baseball. What it showed in school.

This concentration on a single notion is essential to the working out of the poem, and the qualifying phrases, which establish momentum, create the effect of the poem's being made in front of us. The careful structuring of the body's lines, imitated in time and space, is inherently strategic.

In its directness of presentation, "Still Do I Keep My Look" (like "Gay Chaps at the Bar") may be relegated to the category of what might be called G. B.'s "pretty" poems: the sword has been blunted by a closer concession to the expected. An excerpt from "The Old Marrieds" provides another example:

       But in the crowding darkness not a word did they say
       Though the pretty-coated birds had piped so lightly all the day.
       And he had seen the lovers in the little side streets.
       And she had heard the morning stories clogged with sweets….

The opening poem of A Street in Bronzeville, "The Old Marrieds" belongs to G. B.'s early career. Its tender insistence is matched elsewhere: for instance, "In Honor of David Anderson Brooks, My Father" and "The Bean Eaters," both from the volume The Bean Eaters. An aspect of the poet's reality, this compassionate response to the lives of old people has its complement in her version of the heroic. Two poems from In the Mecca, "Medgar Evers" and "Malcolm X," are celebratory:

The man whose height his fear improved he arranged to fear no further. The raw intoxicated time was time for better birth or a final death.

Old styles, old tempos, all the engagement of the day—the sedate, the regulated fray—the antique light, the Moral Rose, old gusts, tight whistlings from the past, the mothballs in the love at last our man forswore.

Medgar Evers annoyed confetti and assorted brands of businessmen's eyes.

The shows came down: to maxims and surprise and palsy.

Roaring no rapt arise-ye to the dead, he leaned across tomorrow. People said that he was holding clean globes in his hands.

A poem for the slain civil-rights leader of Mississippi, "Medgar Evers" reconciles celebration and surprise. G. B. has not exaggerated a feature of reality—Evers' heroism—but has invested that reality with unique significance. A similar notion works for "Malcolm X," with a touch of the whimsical added:

     Original
     Ragged-round.
     Rich-robust.
     He had the hawk-man's eyes.
     We gasped. We saw the maleness.
     The maleness raking out and making guttural the air
     And pushing us to walls.
 
     And in a soft and fundamental hour
     A sorcery devout and vertical
     beguiled the world.
 
     He opened us—
     who was a key,
 
     who was a man.

In these two poems, as well as others from the later volumes, Brooks explores various kinds of heroism by means of a shrewd opposition of under-statement and exaggeration. From The Bean Eaters, "Strong Men Riding Horses" provides a final example:

      Strong men riding horses. In the West
      On a range five hundred miles. A thousand.
         Reaching
      From dawn to sunset.
      Rested blue to orange.
      From hope to crying. Except that strong men are
      Desert-eyed. Except that strong men are
      Pasted to cars already. Have their cars
      Beneath them. Rentless too. Too broad of chest
      To shrink when the Rough man hails
      Too flailing
      To redirect the challenger, when the Challenge
      Nicks; slams; buttonholes. Too saddled.
 
      I am not like that. I pay rent, am addled
      By illegible landlords, run, if robbers call.
      What mannerisms I present, employ,
      Are camouflage, and what my mouths remark
      To word-wall off the broadness of the dark
      Is pitiful.
      I am not brave at all.

This brilliant use of familiar symbols recalls the staccato message of movie advertisements. It conjures up heroes of the Western courtly love tradition from Charlemagne to Gawain to John Wayne and Superman. Counterpoised against this implied pantheon of superstars is a simple shrunken confessional, the only complete declaratives in the poem. That the speaker pits herself against the contrived heroes of a public imagination suggests that the comparison is not to be taken seriously. It is sham exactly because of the disparity between public idealism and the private condition, but the comic play-off between the poet's open, self-mocking language (a pose of humility) and the glittering, delirious "dig-me-brag" of the "strong men" is the demonstration, more precisely, of the opposing poles of reality—exaggeration and under-statement. In the world of Gwendolyn Brooks, the sword is double-edged, constantly turning.

Only a fraction of the canon, the poems discussed in this essay represent the poet's range of strategies and demonstrate her linguistic vitality and her ability to allow language to penetrate to the core of neutral events. The titles of Brook's volumes, from A Street in Bronzeville to In the Mecca, suggest her commitment to life in its unextraordinary aspects. Reworking items of common life, Brooks reminds us that creative experience can be mined from this vast store of unshaped material. To see reality through the eyes of the clichéd or the expected, however, is not to revisit it but to hasten the advance of snobbery and exclusion. In her insistence that common life is not as common as we sometimes suspect, G. B. is probably the democratic poet of our time. That she neither condescends nor insists on preciousness is rewarding, but, above all, her detachment from poetry as cult and cant gives her access to lived experience, which always invigorates her lines. By displacing the familiar with the unfamiliar word, Brooks employs a vocabulary that redefines what we know already in a way we have not known it before. The heightened awareness that results brings to our consciousness an interpenetration of events which lends them a new significance.

Some of Brooks's poems speak directly to situations for which black women need names, but this specificity may be broadened to define situations that speak for other women as well. The magic of irony and humor can be brought to bear by any female in her most dangerous life-encounter—the sexual/emotional entanglement. Against that entanglement, her rage and disappointment are poised, but often impotently, unless channeled by positive force. For women writers, decorum, irony, and style itself are often mobilized against chaos. Thus, women don't cry in Brooks's poetry nor does she cry over them, but the poet is remarkably alive and questioning in the dialectical relationship she poses between feeling and thinking. Hers is a tough choice of weapons because it has little use for the traditional status of woman—connubial, man-obsessed. The style of Brooks's poetry, then, gives us by implication and example a model of power, control, and subtlety. No idealogue, Brooks does not have to be. Enough woman and poet, she merges both realities into a single achievement. Comedy and pathos, compassion and criticism are not estranged integers in this poetry, but a tangled skein of feeling, both vital and abstract, imposed on a particular historical order. With a taste for the city and an ear for change, Gwendolyn Brooks restores the tradition of citizen-poet.