No.21 - February 2018
Poetry Aloud, Part 2: The Great Gwendolyn Brooks
The first time I heard the late Gwendolyn Brooks give a poetry reading was also the first time I found myself in a large audience of any kind that was not overwhelmingly white. I’d been to many readings by then, and of course I’d heard readings by African American poets, but no one as famous as Brooks. Looking back, I realize that I was surely not the only white face in the place. It just felt like it, due to the novelty of seeing relatively large numbers of black faces all around. Obviously this in itself was educational, my learning beginning even before Miss Brooks stepped onto the stage.
This would have been around 1979 or 1980, I believe. I was then a graduate student in a mostly white poetry program at a major university. The auditorium, which was on another campus, was packed. There was an electricity in the air I’d not experienced before, except perhaps while in a similar hall in about 1976 waiting for Bob Dylan to appear. I wasn’t deeply knowledgeable about Brooks. Of course I was aware that she was universally considered one of our best poets, and as a student of American poetry may even have known that she had been the first African American (or Black, as she herself preferred) to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. That was way back in 1950, and she’d been famous ever since, included in every major anthology.
But I didn’t know her work well, except for the small, fairly untypical poem that was in all those anthologies, “We Real Cool.” My ignorance wasn’t entirely my fault. At the time, the only readily available book of Brooks’s was a 1963 selected poems containing none of her important work of the later 1960s and beyond. So if I thought much about the matter, I probably considered her old, and maybe past her prime (she was in her early sixties then). For me the occasion was special only insofar as it was my chance to catch a renowned figure from that amazing generation of American poets born in the ‘Teens and Twenties. I’d already heard the likes of Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, W. S. Merwin, Stanley Kunitz, Maxine Kumin, and many more. Brooks was just one more name for my life-list.
I didn’t expect my whole attitude toward poetry to begin evolving that day, but that’s more or less what happened. It wasn’t that she was a wild performer. She was not highly theatrical in her presentation. Like every other big name poet I’d heard, she stood stationary behind a lectern, shuffled papers, made pleasantries and comments in between poems, and thanked her hosts effusively. Her reading style was a bit peculiar, it’s true, with exaggerated inflections and odd, non-syntactical pauses. But she was certainly no more mannered than the recordings I’d heard of Ezra Pound or W. B. Yeats. Her odd rhythms were less pronounced, say, than Robert Creeley’s painfully halting style. And she was smart and funny in person, always a plus.
What challenged my preconceptions was an aspect of poetry readings that I’d frankly never given enough thought to, despite attending quite a few. Previously I’d always concentrated on the skill of the poet at reading aloud, and of course the quality of the poems themselves. What I never much considered was the role of the audience in all this, including the community that comes to life, however briefly or imperfectly, when a poet connects with her readers, and vice versa.
To my embarrassment now, I also did not know then that Brooks was particularly well known in the African American poetry world as a tireless promoter of other poets, a legendary teacher and activist, and someone who gave unstintingly of her time and energies (and occasionally her money) to support and encourage the young, especially the poor and the disadvantaged. She was a beloved and a wise elder and role model, which clearly the rest of the audience knew well. So I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, when everyone rose in a hearty and lengthy standing ovation the moment she walked onstage, before she had even said a word. Even Allen Ginsberg didn’t receive standing O’s just for walking out. This was something else. It was, to a young white poet, rather disorienting at the same time as it was hugely inspirational. Brooks was being honored not just for her poems—which were and are excellent—but for who she was.
Later I learned about all these aspects of Brooks’s career, and often taught her work once I had become a professor myself. By 1994 I was featuring her in a senior seminar that had as one goal the exploration of how influential poets come to be influential, how their work both shapes and is shaped by historical, personal, and social forces. Seeing her engage with that audience in 1980 was one thing that started me thinking seriously about such matters, an investigation that finally led me to design and teach a course for many years called Poetry Aloud. In that class we explored not just the many ways poetry is presented publicly but also the ways poets interact with their audiences. In other words, I became increasingly fascinated with the phenomenon of the poetry reading as part of the oral tradition. I was intrigued by what’s new, of course, but equally by what’s old: those aspects of presenting poetry that are ancient, even pre-dating the written word. Words like shaman, griot, and bard get thrown around loosely, but that’s what Brooks was: not simply an ambitious and accomplished writer, but someone who spoke importantly to and for a community.
More on my Poetry Aloud course in later columns. For now, let’s fast-forward to the mid- to late 1990s, when I heard Brooks give a reading for the second time. This night I was ready for her. I had a favorite book or two with me I wanted her to sign, but that was mostly a pretext for chance to meet her and talk briefly. After the reading I waited in line for well over an hour as many dozens of admirers all had some private time with her. (She was well known for never departing an event until everyone in the room who wanted to chat with her had had the opportunity.) Just one an example of her good-heartedness: right ahead of me in line was a shy African American girl who seemed to be in about the 7th grade. When she reached Miss Brooks at last, she was tongue-tied and bashful, clearly in awe. Brooks asked her name, and then, “Do you write poetry?” The girl nodded and gave a barely audible yes. “Wonderful!” Brooks exclaimed, and you could see she meant it. “You must send me some.” She then proceeded to write out her address and gave it to the girl, emphasizing that she expected to hear from her soon. Even though by this time I knew rather a lot about Brooks’s life and career, I was still dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine a single other poet of her stature doing such a thing. I have no doubt that, if that girl did send a poem, she received quite promptly an encouraging reply from Brooks.
By that point in her life, Brooks was fully aware of her stature, and clearly felt a responsibility to teach and serve as role model. I’ll end with one telling example of her employing her considerable charisma and intelligence to that end. (One reason I go to poetry readings is in the hope of experiencing something that’s not found on the page, of course.) The reading was held on a college campus, and in addition to college students there were quite a few younger students as well. I’ll always remember her reading her well known poem, “The Mother,” which concerns abortion, and famously begins, “Abortions will not let you forget. . . .” **
Quite remarkably for a poem on such a sensitive theme, it was published in her first book, in 1945, a time in our national life when abortion was not only illegal almost everywhere, but unlike today was seldom even spoken of in public. I don’t think I ever heard an adult say the word aloud all through my childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, for instance. For her, publishing the poem in 1945 must have been an act of both courage as well as honesty. Brooks prefaced her reading of the poem that night by crisply noting that the two most common questions she received about it were 1) Is it autobiographical?; and 2) What was her political stance on the issue? or, as she phrased it, “How I vote.”
She then announced that no, she herself had never had an abortion, even though the poem does employ a first person narrator. She wrote the poem for a friend who had, in an effort, she explained, to see if she could imagine something of what her friend might have experienced. As to the second question, how she voted, she declared that she would gladly talk politics after the reading, and answer that question in person to anyone who asked. Then she read the poem, powerfully and feelingly, though it was one she must have performed hundreds of times. She gave it all she had.
As she no doubt intended, I wondered why she would answer the first question publicly, but reserve the second for one-on-one conversation. When teaching the poem I always told this story, and asked my student why they thought she behaved this way. After discussion, most students came to the same conclusion that I did. Here’s what we concluded. Brooks knew that there are few issues more controversial than abortion rights, and that most people have long ago formed a firm opinion on the matter. She knew as well that, as soon as she announced her own political position, any response to the poem when read aloud would be filtered through the listener’s own moral, religious, and political beliefs. In other words, we would stop listening to the poem as a poem, and treat it like an editorial or sermon.
What would be lost thereby would be all the poem’s complexity and ambiguity, its artfulness. Any close reading of “The Mother” is bound to make you uncomfortable, no matter what your beliefs, because she includes doubt along with self-justification, and employs at least some imagery and language that listeners on either side will find abhorrent. The poem’s speaker is both remorseful and not, and the poem as a whole cannot easily be called either pro-life or pro-choice. It will never appear on a poster.
But I believe Brooks was in fact after something much more difficult than expressing a poetic opinion, inviting her audience to agree or disagree with how she votes. She was exploring not what people think about abortion but how they feel about it. In mentioning her friend’s abortion, she was insisting on the very personal nature of the theme, and its connection to ordinary experience. And in not revealing her own position, she was insisting on the poem’s psychological complexity.
In short, she was teaching, by example, how a great poem such as “The Mother” can not only succeed at expressing the truth, but also, as Donald Hall once put it, can explore the whole of a complex truth. When I arrived at the front of the line, intending to ask Brooks how she voted, I changed my mind at the last moment. I already knew what I needed to know about her.
** Note: I haven’t copied the text of “The Mother” here. It’s widely available, both in print and online, and I encourage you to read the whole thing if you haven’t, or haven’t lately. Here’s a link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43309/the-mother-56d2220767a02
The first time I heard the late Gwendolyn Brooks give a poetry reading was also the first time I found myself in a large audience of any kind that was not overwhelmingly white. I’d been to many readings by then, and of course I’d heard readings by African American poets, but no one as famous as Brooks. Looking back, I realize that I was surely not the only white face in the place. It just felt like it, due to the novelty of seeing relatively large numbers of black faces all around. Obviously this in itself was educational, my learning beginning even before Miss Brooks stepped onto the stage.
This would have been around 1979 or 1980, I believe. I was then a graduate student in a mostly white poetry program at a major university. The auditorium, which was on another campus, was packed. There was an electricity in the air I’d not experienced before, except perhaps while in a similar hall in about 1976 waiting for Bob Dylan to appear. I wasn’t deeply knowledgeable about Brooks. Of course I was aware that she was universally considered one of our best poets, and as a student of American poetry may even have known that she had been the first African American (or Black, as she herself preferred) to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. That was way back in 1950, and she’d been famous ever since, included in every major anthology.
But I didn’t know her work well, except for the small, fairly untypical poem that was in all those anthologies, “We Real Cool.” My ignorance wasn’t entirely my fault. At the time, the only readily available book of Brooks’s was a 1963 selected poems containing none of her important work of the later 1960s and beyond. So if I thought much about the matter, I probably considered her old, and maybe past her prime (she was in her early sixties then). For me the occasion was special only insofar as it was my chance to catch a renowned figure from that amazing generation of American poets born in the ‘Teens and Twenties. I’d already heard the likes of Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop, James Wright, Denise Levertov, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, W. S. Merwin, Stanley Kunitz, Maxine Kumin, and many more. Brooks was just one more name for my life-list.
I didn’t expect my whole attitude toward poetry to begin evolving that day, but that’s more or less what happened. It wasn’t that she was a wild performer. She was not highly theatrical in her presentation. Like every other big name poet I’d heard, she stood stationary behind a lectern, shuffled papers, made pleasantries and comments in between poems, and thanked her hosts effusively. Her reading style was a bit peculiar, it’s true, with exaggerated inflections and odd, non-syntactical pauses. But she was certainly no more mannered than the recordings I’d heard of Ezra Pound or W. B. Yeats. Her odd rhythms were less pronounced, say, than Robert Creeley’s painfully halting style. And she was smart and funny in person, always a plus.
What challenged my preconceptions was an aspect of poetry readings that I’d frankly never given enough thought to, despite attending quite a few. Previously I’d always concentrated on the skill of the poet at reading aloud, and of course the quality of the poems themselves. What I never much considered was the role of the audience in all this, including the community that comes to life, however briefly or imperfectly, when a poet connects with her readers, and vice versa.
To my embarrassment now, I also did not know then that Brooks was particularly well known in the African American poetry world as a tireless promoter of other poets, a legendary teacher and activist, and someone who gave unstintingly of her time and energies (and occasionally her money) to support and encourage the young, especially the poor and the disadvantaged. She was a beloved and a wise elder and role model, which clearly the rest of the audience knew well. So I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, when everyone rose in a hearty and lengthy standing ovation the moment she walked onstage, before she had even said a word. Even Allen Ginsberg didn’t receive standing O’s just for walking out. This was something else. It was, to a young white poet, rather disorienting at the same time as it was hugely inspirational. Brooks was being honored not just for her poems—which were and are excellent—but for who she was.
Later I learned about all these aspects of Brooks’s career, and often taught her work once I had become a professor myself. By 1994 I was featuring her in a senior seminar that had as one goal the exploration of how influential poets come to be influential, how their work both shapes and is shaped by historical, personal, and social forces. Seeing her engage with that audience in 1980 was one thing that started me thinking seriously about such matters, an investigation that finally led me to design and teach a course for many years called Poetry Aloud. In that class we explored not just the many ways poetry is presented publicly but also the ways poets interact with their audiences. In other words, I became increasingly fascinated with the phenomenon of the poetry reading as part of the oral tradition. I was intrigued by what’s new, of course, but equally by what’s old: those aspects of presenting poetry that are ancient, even pre-dating the written word. Words like shaman, griot, and bard get thrown around loosely, but that’s what Brooks was: not simply an ambitious and accomplished writer, but someone who spoke importantly to and for a community.
More on my Poetry Aloud course in later columns. For now, let’s fast-forward to the mid- to late 1990s, when I heard Brooks give a reading for the second time. This night I was ready for her. I had a favorite book or two with me I wanted her to sign, but that was mostly a pretext for chance to meet her and talk briefly. After the reading I waited in line for well over an hour as many dozens of admirers all had some private time with her. (She was well known for never departing an event until everyone in the room who wanted to chat with her had had the opportunity.) Just one an example of her good-heartedness: right ahead of me in line was a shy African American girl who seemed to be in about the 7th grade. When she reached Miss Brooks at last, she was tongue-tied and bashful, clearly in awe. Brooks asked her name, and then, “Do you write poetry?” The girl nodded and gave a barely audible yes. “Wonderful!” Brooks exclaimed, and you could see she meant it. “You must send me some.” She then proceeded to write out her address and gave it to the girl, emphasizing that she expected to hear from her soon. Even though by this time I knew rather a lot about Brooks’s life and career, I was still dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine a single other poet of her stature doing such a thing. I have no doubt that, if that girl did send a poem, she received quite promptly an encouraging reply from Brooks.
By that point in her life, Brooks was fully aware of her stature, and clearly felt a responsibility to teach and serve as role model. I’ll end with one telling example of her employing her considerable charisma and intelligence to that end. (One reason I go to poetry readings is in the hope of experiencing something that’s not found on the page, of course.) The reading was held on a college campus, and in addition to college students there were quite a few younger students as well. I’ll always remember her reading her well known poem, “The Mother,” which concerns abortion, and famously begins, “Abortions will not let you forget. . . .” **
Quite remarkably for a poem on such a sensitive theme, it was published in her first book, in 1945, a time in our national life when abortion was not only illegal almost everywhere, but unlike today was seldom even spoken of in public. I don’t think I ever heard an adult say the word aloud all through my childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, for instance. For her, publishing the poem in 1945 must have been an act of both courage as well as honesty. Brooks prefaced her reading of the poem that night by crisply noting that the two most common questions she received about it were 1) Is it autobiographical?; and 2) What was her political stance on the issue? or, as she phrased it, “How I vote.”
She then announced that no, she herself had never had an abortion, even though the poem does employ a first person narrator. She wrote the poem for a friend who had, in an effort, she explained, to see if she could imagine something of what her friend might have experienced. As to the second question, how she voted, she declared that she would gladly talk politics after the reading, and answer that question in person to anyone who asked. Then she read the poem, powerfully and feelingly, though it was one she must have performed hundreds of times. She gave it all she had.
As she no doubt intended, I wondered why she would answer the first question publicly, but reserve the second for one-on-one conversation. When teaching the poem I always told this story, and asked my student why they thought she behaved this way. After discussion, most students came to the same conclusion that I did. Here’s what we concluded. Brooks knew that there are few issues more controversial than abortion rights, and that most people have long ago formed a firm opinion on the matter. She knew as well that, as soon as she announced her own political position, any response to the poem when read aloud would be filtered through the listener’s own moral, religious, and political beliefs. In other words, we would stop listening to the poem as a poem, and treat it like an editorial or sermon.
What would be lost thereby would be all the poem’s complexity and ambiguity, its artfulness. Any close reading of “The Mother” is bound to make you uncomfortable, no matter what your beliefs, because she includes doubt along with self-justification, and employs at least some imagery and language that listeners on either side will find abhorrent. The poem’s speaker is both remorseful and not, and the poem as a whole cannot easily be called either pro-life or pro-choice. It will never appear on a poster.
But I believe Brooks was in fact after something much more difficult than expressing a poetic opinion, inviting her audience to agree or disagree with how she votes. She was exploring not what people think about abortion but how they feel about it. In mentioning her friend’s abortion, she was insisting on the very personal nature of the theme, and its connection to ordinary experience. And in not revealing her own position, she was insisting on the poem’s psychological complexity.
In short, she was teaching, by example, how a great poem such as “The Mother” can not only succeed at expressing the truth, but also, as Donald Hall once put it, can explore the whole of a complex truth. When I arrived at the front of the line, intending to ask Brooks how she voted, I changed my mind at the last moment. I already knew what I needed to know about her.
** Note: I haven’t copied the text of “The Mother” here. It’s widely available, both in print and online, and I encourage you to read the whole thing if you haven’t, or haven’t lately. Here’s a link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43309/the-mother-56d2220767a02
© 2018 David Graham