SOURCE: A review of Blacks, in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No. 3, Fall, 1990, pp. 567-73.

[In the following review, Baker offers an overview of Brooks's poetry and favorable evaluation of Blacks.]

When a compendium of her poetry entitled The World of Gwendolyn Brooks appeared in the 1970s, the Poet Laureate of Illinois seemed fitly rewarded for a life of creative labor. The collection represented more than three decades. And its very name seemed proper and patently personal—a tribute to the genius behind its assembled offerings. "The world of Gwendolyn Brooks," one thought. "Yes, that is certainly appropriate for a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Poet Laureate, a guardian, model, and mentor in the world of American and Afro-American letters."

Yet, in 1987, with less than exultant fanfare, "the world of Gwendolyn Brooks" gave way to the unadorned, firmly bound, and privately published compendium BLACKS. Issued under her own publishing imprimatur, The David Company, the new collection bears strikingly large gold letters on its cover which spell BLACKS. Beneath, and in smaller type, the poet's name appears. From the proper "world" of Gwendolyn Brooks, we move to the common denomination BLACKS. A reading of BLACKS reveals the striking appropriateness of the retitling.

To read the new volume is to be struck once more by Brooks's genius at portraiture. A Street in Bronzeville (1945) is a series of vignettes, pithy character studies, and portraits of people who in a later volume are called The Bean Eaters (1960). Like Annie Allen (1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize, Brooks's novella Maud Martha (1953) is an extended portrait, a lyrical evocation of days, years, people, and events in the everyday lives of Afro-American women. These early works are a kind of apprenticeship for the energetic portraits that appear in In the Mecca (1968).

What appreciative reader of Brooks's poetry can soon forget the exquisite yellow youth of Jessie Mitchell's mother; the glories of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery; the sartorial aesthetics of Satin Legs Smith; the wonders of Hattie Scott; a venomous eulogy by Pearl May Lee; the loiterings of a Bronzeville Mother in Mississippi; Kid Bruin, Mrs. Small, Sallie Smith, or a stunning Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat? Or who can fail to recall an encounter with poetical sections such as "A Catch of Shy Fish" or "Young Heroes?"

The impression left by Brooks's portraits is that of a universe crafted by an inventive artist. No, perhaps it is better described as a gallery of originals midwived into language. In "To Keorapetse Kgositsile" Brooks writes: "Art is life worked with: is life / wheeled, or whelmed: / assessed: / clandestine, but evoked." Rather than paint or clay, her own medium is a mind that evokes, names, provides common denominations in language that is clean, often spare, and wondrously economical.

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

What strikes a reader about Brooks's seven "real cool" pool players at the Golden Shovel, or her pragmatic "Old Mary," or a "Bronzeville Man with a Belt in the Back" is their utter commonness. Named by the poet, they are felt always to have existed as BLACKS—as occupants of a common street—sharers of a common lean cuisine of beans.

But to see Brooks merely as a creator of portraits is scarcely to distinguish her from a host of other American writers. For the portrait, as an emergent form of Enlightenment individualism, has enjoyed a ruggedly individualistic poetic heyday in American letters. From Theodore Ward's Simple Cobler of Aggawam, through Lowell's Hosea Biglow, Whitman's democratic vistas, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River people, Sandburg's Bunk Shooter and other denizens of Chicago, to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg gallery, portraiture marks a vernacular tradition. As Brooks works the tradition, it descends directly from Sandburg and Masters. It is entirely correct to add, however, that the poet's Afro-American predecessors such as Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown were also within her general field of influences. A survey of Hughes's myriad volumes reveals a veritable cornucopia of urban, Afro-American portraits. And Brown's Southern Road, with its stirring pictures of Maumee Ruth, Big Boy Davis, Sister Lou, Sam Smiley, and others, offers a rural counterpart to Brooks's urban gallery.

If the poetic staple of her work is so familiar to American letters, no critical account can claim to have defined the poet simply by labeling her a portraitist. We might supplement the claim by noting that Brooks's people are of African descent and can thus be said to add a unique racial and cultural mixture to the general gallery. But this addendum runs head on into the reality of her black predecessors. Fenton Johnson, Countée Cullen, Hughes, and Brown had all provided distinctively African American portraits in advance of Brooks.

The poet's uniqueness does not reside, then, simply in her portrayal of the commonplace. It resides most decisively in another feature of her poetical world—namely, her clear rejection of glorifying ideologies of the common man. Her people have neither the blues temperateness of Sterling Brown's strong men getting stronger, nor the joie de vivre of Langston Hughes's black urbanites, who want to dig and be dug in return. They are not proponents or exemplars of obtainable egalitarian goals. They are not blessed with a consciousness of mission—a sense of manifest destiny or a surety of predestined roles in the unfolding of a mighty national enterprise. They live always at the limits of a bitterly tested tolerance. Old Mary acknowledges:

     My last defense
     Is the present tense.
     It little hurts me now to know
     I shall not go
     Cathedral-hunting in Spain
     Nor cherrying in Michigan or Maine.

Lester laments in "Strong Men, Riding Horses":

     What mannerisms I present, employ,
     Are camouflage, and what my mouths remark
     To word-wall off that broadness of the dark
     Is pitiful.
     I am not brave at all.

So much for barbaric yawps. Whimpers are the stuff of Bronzeville, not big bangs.

The jazz singer Mose Allison intones: "It's just as well the world ended / Things weren't going that well anyway." His assessment defines the universe of Brooks's common folks. Implicit in the poet's portrayals, in fact, is a grammar of dissent. Frontal irony and subtle antagonism are directed against all romantic ideologies of progress and metaphysical salvation. Race, class, gender, and nationality are the grounds of divisiveness and conflict that put such ideologies to shame. Skin color as a sign of race in America, for example, can cause unappeasable anguish. Maud Martha thinks: "… it's my color that makes h[er husband] mad…. What I am inside, what is really me, he likes okay. But he keeps looking at my color, which is like a wall. He has to jump over it in order to meet and touch what I've got for him." Class causes white women who are putative "lovers of the poor" to grow sick with fear and disgust. Philanthropically entering narrow halls of poverty, they are overcome by sights, sounds, and smells of the lower class. Nationality fosters crescendos of "Doomer"—unending war with unending destruction of "gay chaps" who serve as cannon fodder. Gender confines women to agonizing spaces; they are locked in gray rooms filled with heavy-diapered children … and vermin. One of the most sickening gender images in Brooks's poetry occurs in Maud Martha: "She could only stand helpless, frozen, and watch the slick movement [of a roach] suddenly appear and slither, looking doubly evil, across the mirror, before which she had been calmly brushing her hair." Possibilities for heroism are few in a world overdetermined by race, class, gender, and nationality. The bleakness of this universe is in part a function of Brooks's modernism. Commencing her career during "The Great War," she seems to have absorbed a healthy dose of the artistic malaise that prompted somber reveries of a Godless and irreversible universe of atomic fission. But her grammar of dissent is not entirely a by-product of the era in which she began her career.

Her antagonism to glorifying ideologies is also a product of a distinctive artistic credo—a signal aesthetics. Her creative orientation is designed, in fact, to match a world that guarantees the "commonness" of blacks through its restrictive codes of race, class, nationality, and gender. Adornment, embellishment, flamboyance, and proclamations of heroism are as anomalous in such a world as (to summon the poet's own image) "a rose in a whiskey glass." Stability, sanity, physical and mental development, and day-to-day safety survival depend upon an almost brutal refusal of self-deception and artistic idealism.

What insures and guards the day in Bronzeville is not the exalted proper name, but a common denomination. Mrs. Sallie Smith of In the Mecca instructs us: "First comes correctness, then embellishment! / And music, mode, and mixed philosophy / may follow fitly on propriety / to tame the whiskey of our discontent!" What is common is, also, proper or appropriate in the world of the Mecca. Similarly, in the world of "the children of the poor," it is necessary first to "civilize a space"—to claim and name a territory of one's own—before embellishing the air with notes of "hurting love." Again, Satin Legs Smith is the very bewitcher and bewilderer of what Brooks calls "flowers" and harmonies of a "Western field"; his is a common (communally accepted) splendor.

Two poems resonantly define Brooks's aesthetics. The first, entitled "The Egg Boiler," reads:

     Being you, you cut your poetry from wood.
     The boiling of an egg is heavy art.
     You come upon it as an artist should,
     With rich-eyed passion, and with straining heart.
     We fools, we cut our poems out of air,
     Night color, wind soprano, and such stuff.
     And sometimes weightlessness is much to bear.
     You mock it, though, you name it Not Enough.
     The egg, spooned gently to the avid pan,
     And left the strict three minutes, or the four,
     Is your Enough and art for any man.
     We fools give courteous ear—then cut some more,
     Shaping a gorgeous Nothingness from cloud.
     You watch us, eat your egg, and laugh aloud.

The "egg boiler" is not like Hawthorne's artist of the beautiful. He is a craftsperson of the ordinary. Rather than delicacy of inscription or grace beyond the reach of art, he longs for a weighty and nourishing creativity. As he defines the world, traditional idealistic aesthetics are laughable. While there is, surely, more than a little irony intended by the poem's speaker (after all, she is the cloudland aesthetician and creator of the "you" who mocks her), there is also a sharp critique of idealistic art. And it is the egg boiler who finally emerges as sympathetic. He (or she) is an artist of the commonplace with whom we can identify in his (or her) conversion of everyday rituals into poetry "Enough."

To bestow a common denomination within restricted economies of class, race, nation, and gender in the United States is to seize a nourishing poetic initiative. Common things commonly named have a way of surviving even the grossest human follies. The conclusion of Maud Martha reads: "… and it was doubtful whether the ridiculousness of man would ever completely succeed in destroying the world—or, in fact, the basic equanimity of the least and commonest flower: for would its kind not come up again in the spring? come up, if necessary, among, between, or out of—beastly inconvenient!—the smashed corpses lying in strict composure, in that hush infallible and sincere." These lines seem to contradict my earlier claim about the absence of celebratory ideologies in Brooks's work. Their optimism about the essentiality of the "common" is, however, intriguingly qualified by a second poem about naming and the commonplace.

Immediately preceding "The Egg Boiler" in The Bean Eaters is a poem called "The Artists' and Models' Ball":

        Wonders do not confuse. We call them that
        And close the matter there. But common things
        Surprise us. They accept the names we give
        With calm, and keep them. Easy-breathing then
        We brave our next small business. Well, behind
        Our backs they alter. How were we to know.

Grand occasions such as artists' and models' balls may appear as wondrous events staged by people self-defined as wondrous. These occasions sustain their wonder because they are framed as "balls," as ritual events. It is, in fact, their very separateness from everyday life that provides stability.

Items of everyday use, by contrast, are not so accommodating. Framed only by hastily uttered names and subject always to continuous exchange in the social and verbal world of common folks, they are always in circulation and never separate from hourly commerce. Hence they are the most elusive things of all. They cannot be fixed and held permanent by an ethics and aesthetics of wonder. Like the egg for boiling, the space for civilizing, or the wardrobe and Sunday seductions of Satin Legs Smith, such things are given moment only by a name. But their moment is precariously fragile. Any extension brings another name and alters their "thingness" through parlance and use.

Let me add here, however, that Brooks's own poetical naming often situates itself within a common order rather than employing the vocabularies of such an order for names. Her polysyllabic verse with its taut syntax and her grammatical substitutions of adjectives and adverbs for nouns often make her poems anything but idiomatic. Her grammatical acrobatics produce memorability and subversion. It is difficult to forget a "thaumaturgic lass," a vaudevillean of "magnificent, heirloom, and deft," or a hipster whose title is bestowed by "inamoratas, with an approbation." Subversion results from the appropriation of the full weight and heft of the King's English to portray lives of common subjects. (Classical genre watchers and style setters such as Aristotle and Boileau must cringe each time Brooks unhinges the standard in order to portray the common.)

To return to the question of alteration and the commonplace, it seems fair to say that essentialism—the belief that each "thing" has an enduring essence—has no part in Brooks's aesthetics. The speaker of "The Artists' and Models' Ball" knows, for example, that common names do not capture essence. They exist, as previously noted, as survival strategies. Against the chaos perpetuated by race, gender, class, and national ideologies they offer possibilities for a human and humane—if temporary—ordering of restrictive spaces.

A notion of the ever altering thingness of the commonplace—a shiftiness that requires and is a function of ceaseless naming—is the truly distinguishing notion of Gwendolyn Brooks's art. Her poetical portraits alter each time we call their names. They assume a different thingness each time she, as a brilliant and accomplished public reader, sets them eloquently before us. Their alteration, however, is not merely a result of our willed and continuous naming. An elusive and always expanding space called "context" also causes them to shift—to change in unaccountable ways "behind our backs."

For example, the lackluster and whimpering populace of Bronzeville that was "not brave at all" in the 1940s transformed itself, quite miraculously, in the United States during the 1960s and assumed the common name BLACKS. Thunderstruck as she was by this behind-the-back evolution of her bean eaters and garbagemen dignified as any diplomat, Brooks maintained her aesthetics of two decades' standing. She assumed that her task was to provide a common ground and denomination for these new BLACKS. "Common," of course, as Mrs. Sallie Smith has taught us, can signify appropriate. When BLACKS became bold, heroic rioters jerking the times out of joint, Brooks energetically relinquished her direct and implicit condemnations of nationalistic grandeur. She became a namer of the militant struggle that not so long ago comprised a common ground and cause for BLACKS in the United States. She came to know in her own life what she had always claimed in her aesthetics: Common denomination can sometimes be a matter of dramatic alterations. The job for the poet facing this continuing drama of transformation is to:

      Live not for battles won.
      Live not for the-end-of-song.
      Live in the along.

To live in "the along" is to inhabit the everyday. It is to confront race, class, national, and gender restrictions with a common lexicon. For Brooks it is to do exactly what she has done in offering a newly retitled volume of her work; it is to provide and share in the common denomination of BLACKS.