Notes

Preface

  1. 1. Jericho Brown, “Poetry and American Empire” (presentation, Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Salem, May 2, 2015).
  2. 2. Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews, and Commentaries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 131.
  3. 3. Ibid., 132.
  4. 4. Haki R. Madhubuti, Honoring Genius: Gwendolyn Brooks; The Narrative of Craft, Art, Kindness and Justice (Chicago, Third World Press, 2011), 6–7.
  5. 5. Ibid., 7.
  6. 6. D. H. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry & the Heroic Voice (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 53.
  7. 7. Ibid., 55.

Introduction

  1. 1. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1987), 28.
  2. 2. “Gwendolyn Brooks: 1917–2000,” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation
    .org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/gwendolyn-brooks.

Hacking at the Root

  1. 1. Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (Chicago: Third World Press, 1993), 1. First published by Harper & Row in 1953. Hereafter, page numbers in this chapter are cited in parentheses.

Juxtaposed Dichotomies

  1. 1. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press), 349.
  2. 2. Ibid., 351.
  3. 3. Julie Rose, “A Brutal Chapter in North Carolina’s Eugenics Past,” NPR, December 28, 2011, www.npr.org/2011/12/28/144375339/a-brutal-chapter-in-north-carolinas-eugenics-past.
  4. 4. Brooks, Blacks, 350.
  5. 5. Ibid., 351.
  6. 6. Ibid., 351, 352.
  7. 7. Jeremy Knight, “Regency Benefits Street: How Images of the Poor Fascinated
    the 18th Century Rich.” Culture24, September 22, 2015, www.culture24.org
    .uk/history-and-heritage/art537112-regency-benefits-street-horsham
    -museum-on-eighteenth-century-images-of-the-poor.
  8. 8. Ibid.
  9. 9. Brooks, Blacks, 352.
  10. 10. Ibid., 351, 352.
  11. 11. Ibid., 350.
  12. 12. Ibid., 349.
  13. 13. Ibid., 352.
  14. 14. “The Murder of Emmett Till: People & Events: Roy Bryant (1931–1994), Carolyn Bryant (1934–) and J. W. Milam (1919–1981),” American Experience, PBS, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/p_defendants.html.
  15. 15. Brooks, Blacks, 333.
  16. 16. Ibid, 334.
  17. 17. Ibid.
  18. 18. Ibid., 335.
  19. 19. Ibid., 335–36.
  20. 20. Ibid., 336.
  21. 21. Ibid., 337.
  22. 22. Ibid.
  23. 23. Ibid., 338.
  24. 24. Ibid., 339.
  25. 25. “The Murder of Emmett Till.”
  26. 26. Ibid.
  27. 27. Brooks, Blacks, 339.
  28. 28. Ibid., 336, 337, 338.
  29. 29. Claude McKay, “The Lynching,” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org
    /poems-and-poets/poems/detail/56983.
  30. 30. William Ross Wallace, “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” Famous Poems from Bygone Days, Martin Gardner, ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 153.
  31. 31. “Gwendolyn Brooks,” National Women’s Hall of Fame, www.womenofthehall
    .org/inductee/gwendolyn-brooks/.
  32. 32. “The Murder of Emmett Till: Mamie Till Mobley (1921–2003),” American Experience, PBS, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/peopleevents/p_parents.html.
  33. 33. Charles Whitaker, “Gwendolyn Brooks: A Poet for All Ages,” Ebony (June 1987): 156.

A Poetics against Obscuring

  1. 1. Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems (New York: Harper Collins, 1963), 2.
  2. 2. Ibid.
  3. 3. Ibid.
  4. 4. Brooks, Blacks, 116.
  5. 5. Quoted in B. Denise Hawkins, “An Evening with Gwendolyn Brooks: The Pulitzer Prize–Winner and Poet Laureate Shuns Pretense, Invites Challenges,” Black Issues in Higher Education, 11, no. 18 (1994): 16, 20–21.
  6. 6. Brooks, Blacks, 116, 117.
  7. 7. Ibid., 117, 118.
  8. 8. Ibid., 119.
  9. 9. Toni Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, Marie Evans, ed. (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1984), 339–45.
  10. 10. Quoted in Hawkins. “An Evening with Gwendolyn Brooks,” 16, 20–21.

The Politics of Neglect

  1. 1. Quoted in Mary Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left in the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 301n10.
  2. 2. Quoted in Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, “1994 Gwendolyn Brooks Interview: An Evening with Gwendolyn Brooks,” www.jmu
    .edu/furiousflower/archives/94hawkins_brooks_intervi.shtml    .
  3. 3. Zofia Burr, Of Women, Poetry, and Power: Strategies of Address in Dickinson, Miles, Brooks, Lorde, and Angelou (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 139.
  4. 4. Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923–1955 (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988), 388–89.
  5. 5. Major Jackson, “Wallace Stevens after ‘Lunch,’” Poetry Foundation,
    www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/02/wallace-stevens-after-lunch/.
  6. 6. Elizabeth Alexander, “Meditations on ‘Mecca’: Gwendolyn Brooks and the Responsibilities of the Black Poet,” in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry, Molly McQuade, ed. (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2000), 369.
  7. 7. Brooks, Blacks, 21.
  8. 8. Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Boy Died in My Alley,” Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, www.writing.upenn
    .edu/~afilreis/88v/brooks.html.
  9. 9. Brooks, Blacks, 64.

We Still Cool?

  1. 1. “Voting Rights,” American Council for Civil Liberties, www.aclu.org/issues
    /voting-rights.
  2. 2. Brooks, Blacks, 331.
  3. 3. Fox Butterfield, All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (New York: First Vintage Books, 1995).
  4. 4. The Hateful Eight, directed by Quentin Tarantino (New York: The Weinstein Company, 2015).
  5. 5. “Two Women Shot on Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 29, 2016, http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/two-women-shot-on-dan
    -ryan-expressway/.
  6. 6. Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: First Touchstone, 1993), 2, 8, 28.
  7. 7. Ibid., 28.
  8. 8. “Gwendolyn Brooks Reads We Real Cool,” YouTube video, 2:18, posted by Robert Ricardo Reese, November 1, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaVfLwZ6jes.
  9. 9. Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington, Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
  10. 10. Miles White. From Jim Crow to Jay-Z: Race, Rap, and the Performance of Masculinity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
  11. 11. Kendrick Lamar. “Untitled 7,” untitled unmastered, Genius.com, https://genius
    .com/Kendrick-lamar-untitled-07-2014-2016-lyrics.
  12. 12. Kendrick Lamar. “The Blacker the Berry,” To Pimp a Butterfly, Genius.com, https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-the-blacker-the-berry-lyrics.
  13. 13. Nitsuh Abebe, “25 Songs That Tell Us Where Music Is Going,” New York Times, March 10, 2016, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/10/magazine/25-songs
    -that-tell-us-where-music-is-going.html.
  14. 14. Lamar, “The Blacker the Berry.”
  15. 15. bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004). 146.

Double Vision

  1. 1. Quoted in Alexander, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, xxii.
  2. 2. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2, M. H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt, eds. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), 43–59.
  3. 3. Brooks, Blacks, 28.
  4. 4. Ibid.
  5. 5. Ibid
  6. 6. Ibid.
  7. 7. Ibid.
  8. 8. Ibid.
  9. 9. Ibid.
  10. 10. Alexander, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, xiv.
  11. 11. Ibid.
  12. 12. Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, 44.
  13. 13. Brooks, Blacks, 331. Hereafter, page numbers in this chapter are cited in parentheses.

“I Do Not Sell Well”

  1. 1. Carmen L. Phelps, Visionary Women Writers of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 7.
  2. 2. Ibid., 96.
  3. 3. Ibid., 59.
  4. 4. Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 27.
  5. 5. Ibid.
  6. 6. Ibid., 28.
  7. 7. Phelps, Visionary Women, 209.
  8. 8. Ibid., 148
  9. 9. Angela Jackson, And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New
    (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 133.
  10. 10. Ibid.
  11. 11. Carolyn Rodgers, how i got ovah (Chicago: Third World Press, 1975), 42.

Building an Architecture of Love

  1. 1. Gwendolyn Brooks, In Montgomery and Other Poems (Chicago: Third World Press, 2003), ix. Hereafter, page numbers in this chapter are cited in parentheses.

“Velvety Velour” and Other Sonnet Textures in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the children of the poor”

  1. 1. Joyce Ann Joyce, “The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks: An Afrocentric Exploration,” in On Gwendolyn Brooks: Reliant Contemplation, Stephen Caldwell Wright, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 251.
  2. 2. Henry Taylor, “Gwendolyn Brooks: An Essential Sanity,” in Wright, On Gwendolyn Brooks, 256.
  3. 3. Brooks, Selected Poems, 4.
  4. 4. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, rev. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 116.
  5. 5. William Carolos Williams, “The Poem as a Field of Action,” in Twentieth-Century American Poetics: Poets on the Art of Poetry (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004), 57.
  6. 6. Brooks, Selected Poems, 53.
  7. 7. Ibid., 53.
  8. 8. Ibid., Selected Poems, 4.
  9. 9. Ibid., Selected Poems, 52
  10. 10. John Keats, “On the Sonnet,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, shorter 4th ed., Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, John Stallworthy, eds. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 506.
  11. 11. Stephen Burt and David Mikics, introduction to The Art of the Sonnet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 21.
  12. 12. Brooks, Selected Poems, 53.
  13. 13. Ibid.
  14. 14. Ibid.
  15. 15. Ibid.
  16. 16. Angela Jackson, “In Memoriam: Gwendolyn Brooks,” in Wright, On Gwendolyn Brooks, 279.
  17. 17. Brooks, Selected Poems, 53.
  18. 18. Ibid.
  19. 19. Ibid.
  20. 20. Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), 61.
  21. 21. Louise Gluck, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (New York: Ecco, 1994), 44.

The Form of Paradox

  1. 1. Mildred R. Mickle, Gwendolyn Brooks: Critical Insights (New York: Salem Printing, 2009), 78.
  2. 2. Madhubuti, Honoring Genius, 4.
  3. 3. Brooks, Blacks, 106.
  4. 4. Shockley, Renegade Poetics, 34.
  5. 5. Adrienne Johnson Gosselin, “Beyond the Harlem Renaissance: The Case for Black Modernist Writers,” Modern Language Studies 26, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 37–45.
  6. 6. Ibid.
  7. 7. Ibid.
  8. 8. Gloria Wade Gayles, “A Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks—Sheldon Hackney,” in Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, Gloria Wade Gayles, ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 155.
  9. 9. Brooks, Blacks, 99.
  10. 10. Brooks, Report from Part One, 44.
  11. 11. Ibid., 158.
  12. 12. Shockley, Renegade Poetics, 41.
  13. 13. Ibid.
  14. 14. Brooks, Blacks, 106.
  15. 15. Ibid., 101.
  16. 16. Ibid., 100.
  17. 17. A. Yemisi Jimoh, “Double Consciousness, Modernism, and Womanist Themes in Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘The Anniad,’” MELUS 23, no. 3 (1998): 177.
  18. 18. Brooks, Blacks, 99.
  19. 19. Ibid., Blacks, 78.
  20. 20. Brooks, Blacks, 100.
  21. 21. Shockley, Renegade Poetics, 34.
  22. 22. Brooks, Blacks, 99.
  23. 23. Shockley, Renegade Poetics, 297.
  24. 24. Brooks, Blacks, 109.
  25. 25. Ibid., 100.
  26. 26. Ibid., 99.
  27. 27. Ibid.
  28. 28. Ibid., 101.
  29. 29. Ibid., 103.
  30. 30. Marilyn Hacker, “Brooks, H. D., and Rukeyser: Three Women Poets in the First Century of World Wars,” Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org/poets.org
    /text/brooks-h-d-and-rukeyser-three-women-poets-first-century-world-wars.
  31. 31. Brooks, Blacks, 109.

Art “Urges Voyages”

  1. 1. W. E. B. DuBois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” WEBDuBois.org, www.webdubois
    .org/dbCriteriaNArt.html.
  2. 2. George Stavros, “An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks,” in Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, 41.
  3. 3. The self that I am is a Black Feminist/womanist/poet/artist/intellectual/activist
    /educator who was born in Chicago and came of age in the 1970s in central Illinois, who has traveled from a working-class to middle-class existence using an education earned at historically white universities, and who struggles to write truth while entrapped in the oppressor’s language.
  4. 4. Stavros, “Interview,” 51.
  5. 5. George E. Kent, A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990), 133.
  6. 6. Harold Bloom, introduction to Gwendolyn Brooks (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000), 1.
  7. 7. Kent, Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, 140.
  8. 8. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks, 53.
  9. 9. Claudia Tate, “Gwendolyn Brooks,” Black Women Writers at Work, Claudia Tate, ed. (New York: Continuum, 1983), 42.
  10. 10. Tate, “Gwendolyn Brooks,” 43.
  11. 11. Alexander, introduction to The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, xiii.
  12. 12. Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Crazy Woman,” in The Bean Eaters (New York: Harper, 1960), 46.
  13. 13. Brooks, The Bean Eaters, 46.
  14. 14. Ibid.
  15. 15. Ibid.
  16. 16. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” African American Literature: An Anthology, 2nd ed., Demetrice A. Worley and Jesse Perry, eds. (Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Publishing, 1998), 226–27.
  17. 17. Brooks, The Bean Eaters, 46.
  18. 18. Ibid.
  19. 19. Richard Goodman, “In Search of the Exact Word,” Writer’s Chronicle, September 2004.
  20. 20. Brooks, The Bean Eaters, 46 (my italics).
  21. 21. Ibid. (my italics).
  22. 22. Alexander, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, xviii–xix.
  23. 23. Tate, “Gwendolyn Brooks,” 40.
  24. 24. Brooks, Report from Part One, 183.
  25. 25. Quoted in Tate, “Gwendolyn Brooks,” 44.
  26. 26. Hoyt Fuller et al., “Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks,” in Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, 68.
  27. 27. Brooks, Report from Part One, 183.
  28. 28. Gwendolyn Brooks, Annie Allen (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
  29. 29. Brooks, In Montgomery, 39–56. Originally published along with seventeen other poems in Brooks, Gottschalk and the Grand Tarantelle (Chicago: Third World Press, 1988) and later republished as “II Song of Winnie” in the twenty-three-page Winnie (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991).
  30. 30. Ibid., 54–55.
  31. 31. Olga Dugan, “In the Catbird Seat: The African American Contribution to 20th-Century American Poetry,” Journal of African American History 100, no. 4 (2015): 748–73.
  32. 32. Ibid., 754.
  33. 33. For more information about Saatjie (Sara) Baartman, a nineteenth-century Black woman who was forced to live a large part of her life as a curiosity, a curio on display, see Clifton Caris and Pamela Sculley, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
  34. 34. Brooks, In Montgomery, 55.
  35. 35. Ibid.
  36. 36. Ibid.
  37. 37. Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” African American Literature, 191.
  38. 38. Langston Hughes, “I, Too,” African American Literature, 192–93.
  39. 39. Brooks, Blacks, 55.
  40. 40. Claude McKay, “If We Must Die,” 191.
  41. 41. Brooks, Blacks, 55.
  42. 42. bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (Boston: South End Press, 1993), 65.
  43. 43. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art.”
  44. 44. For more information on Brooks’s empowered Black women personas, see Lorraine Bethel, “The Infinity of Conscious Pain: Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female Traditions,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, Gloria T. Hull, Patricia-Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 179.
  45. 45. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art.”
  46. 46. Stavros, “Interview,” 37.
  47. 47. Brooks, In Montgomery, 47.
  48. 48. Ibid.
  49. 49. Ibid., 46.

Mundane and Plural

  1. 1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 51.
  2. 2. Blanchot, “The Instant of My Death,” in The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Elizabeth Rottenberg, trans. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5.
  3. 3. Ibid.
  4. 4. Brooks, Blacks, 470.
  5. 5. Mel Watkins, “Gwendolyn Brooks, 83, Passionate Poet, Dies,” New York Times, December 5, 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/12/05/books/gwendolyn
    -brooks-83-passionate-poet-dies.html    .
  6. 6. Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, and Juliana Spahr, “Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Riot’ and the Opt Out,” Jacket2, March 15, 2014, http://jacket2.org/commentary
    /gwendolyn-brookss-riot-and-opt-out.
  7. 7. Brooks, Blacks, 470.
  8. 8. Bernes, Clover, and Spahr, “Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Riot.’”
  9. 9. Ibid.
  10. 10. Ibid.
  11. 11. Brooks, Blacks, 471.
  12. 12. Ibid., 470.
  13. 13. Ibid.
  14. 14. Ibid., 470–71.
  15. 15. Charles Whitaker, “A Poet for All Ages,” Ebony 52, no. 8 (June 1987): 160.
  16. 16. Alexander, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks.
  17. 17. James D. Sullivan, “Killing John Cabot and Publishing Black: Gwendolyn Brooks’s ‘Riot,’” African American Review 36, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 557–69.
  18. 18. “Primer for Blacks,” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org
    /poems-and-poets/poems/detail/51838. Originally published in     Primer for Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991).
  19. 19. Sullivan, “Killing John Cabot.”
  20. 20. Blanchot, “The Instant of My Death,” 5.
  21. 21. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 53.
  22. 22. Poetry Society of America, “Q & A: American Poetry—Kasim Ali,”
    www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/qa_american_poetry/page_10/.

Brooks’s Prosody

  1. 1. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One, 83.
  2. 2. Brooks, Blacks, 451.
  3. 3. Ibid., Blacks, 451–52.
  4. 4. Ibid.
  5. 5. Ibid., 454.
  6. 6. Ibid., 455.
  7. 7. Ibid., 456.
  8. 8. Ibid., 477.
  9. 9. Ibid., 472.

The Eros in Democracy

  1. 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy,” www.bartleby.com/71/0537.html.
  2. 2. Brooks, Riot (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969), 22.
  3. 3. Ibid.
  4. 4. Shockley, Renegade Poetics.
  5. 5. Brooks, Blacks, 479.
  6. 6. Ibid.
  7. 7. Ibid.
  8. 8. Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 12.
  9. 9. Ibid., 21.
  10. 10. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation
    .org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45477.
  11. 11. Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014).

Family Pictures, Old & New

  1. 1. Brooks, Blacks, 494.
  2. 2. Ibid.
  3. 3. Ibid.
  4. 4. Ibid., 495.
  5. 5. Ibid.

Breaking Glass and the Sad Shatter of Hope

  1. 1. Brooks, Blacks, 438–39. Originally published in In the Mecca (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).
  2. 2. Ibid.
  3. 3. Ibid.
  4. 4. Ibid., 346–48.
  5. 5. Ibid.
  6. 6. Ibid.
  7. 7. Langston Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America,” The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century, Arnold Adoff, ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 75.
  8. 8. Brooks, Blacks, 438–39.
  9. 9. Ibid.
  10. 10. Ibid.
  11. 11. Ibid.
  12. 12. Ibid.

The Necessary Truth

  1. 1. Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks, 130.
  2. 2. Ibid.
  3. 3. William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in Asphodel, That Greeny Flower & Other Love Poems (New York: New Directions, 1955).
  4. 4. Kate Daniels and Richard Jones, “The Red Pen: Poetry, Politics and Publishing,” in “Political Poetry at Home and Abroad,” special issue, Poetry East 9/10 (Winter 1982/Spring 1983): 7.
  5. 5. Brooks, Blacks, 139–40.
  6. 6. Ibid., 382.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Me

  1. 1. Robert Lee Brewer, “Golden Shovel: Poetic Form,” Writer’s Digest, June 24, 2014, www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/golden-shovel-poetic-form.
  2. 2. Terrance Hayes, “The Golden Shovel,” Lighthead (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 6.
  3. 3. “Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes,” 101sharequotes, http://101sharequotes.com
    /authors/Gwendolyn_Brooks.

Our Black Ms. Brooks

  1. 1. Arnold Rampersad, afterword to Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, Frederick Glaysher, ed. (New York: Liveright, 2013), 212.
  2. 2. Brooks, Report from Part One, 37.
  3. 3. Henry Winslow, “Soft Meditations,” Crisis Magazine 61, no. 2 (February 1954): 114.
  4. 4. Amiri Baraka, “A Wiser Play Than Some of Us Knew,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1987, http://articles.latimes.com/1987-03-22/entertainment/ca-14591_1
    _black-church.
  5. 5. Mary Helen Washington, “Taming All That Anger Down”: Rage and Silence in Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha,” Massachusetts Review 24, no. 2 (1983): 453–66.
  6. 6. Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part Two (Chicago: Third World Press, 1996), 15.
  7. 7. Ibid., 179–80.
  8. 8. Ibid., 179.
  9. 9. Ruth Forman, “Stoplight Politics,” The Political Race, www.starsoftrackandfield
    .com/stoplight-politics-by-ruth-forman/.
  10. 10. Alexander, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, 2.

Pulitzer Jury Report

  1. 1. Alan Jabbour and Ethelbert Miller, “A Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks,” in Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, 125–32.
  2. 2. “Frost? Williams? No, Gwendolyn Brooks,” The Pulitzer Prizes, www.pulitzer
    .org/article/frost-williams-no-gwendolyn-brooks.
  3. 3. Heinz-D. Fischer, ed., Chronicle of the Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry: Discussions, Decisions and Documents (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2009).
  4. 4. “1929: Black Creativity and the Julius Rosenwald Fund,” Philanthropy Roundtable, www.philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/the_arts_and_culture/1929
    _black_creativity_and_the_julius_rosenwald_fund.
  5. 5. “Julius Rosenwald,” Highland Park Historical Society, http://highlandparkhistory
    .com/highland-park-legends-program/julius-rosenwald/.
  6. 6. Michael Cunningham, “Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury: What Really Happened This Year,” New Yorker, February 13, 2009; Mike Pride, “A Cold Shoulder for Invisible Man,” The Pulitzer Prizes, www.pulitzer.org/article/cold-shoulder
    -invisible-man; Heinz-D. Fischer, ed.     Chronicle of the Pulitzer, 376.
  7. 7. Ibid., 152.
  8. 8. Ibid., 127.
  9. 9. Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 119.
  10. 10. Heinz-D. Fischer, ed., Chronicle of the Pulitzer, 109.
  11. 11. “Frost? Williams? No, Gwendolyn Brooks.”
  12. 12. Heinz-D. Fischer, ed. Chronicle of the Pulitzer, 153.
  13. 13. Suzanne W. Churchill, “Making Space for Others: A History of a Modernist Little Magazine.” Journal of Modern Literature 22, no. 1 (1998): 47–67.
  14. 14. Kenneth Rexroth, Assays (New York: New Directions, 1961), 155.
  15. 15. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1951), 135.
  16. 16. Ibid., 138.
  17. 17. Quoted in David Frail, The Early Politics and Poetics of William Carlos Williams (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), 211.
  18. 18. Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 157.
  19. 19. Fischer, Heinz-D., ed. Chronicle of the Pulitzer, 249.
  20. 20. “William Carlos Williams, the Art of Poetry No. 6,” interview by Stanley Koehler, Paris Review 8, no. 32 (Summer–Fall 1964): 124, www.theparisreview.org
    /interviews/4486/william-carlos-williams-the-art-of-poetry-no-6-william
    -carlos-williams.
  21. 21. Paul Engle, “Chicago Can Take Pride in New, Young Voice in Poetry,” in On Gwendolyn Brooks, 3.
  22. 22. Louis Simpson, “Taking the Poem by the Horns,” in On Gwendolyn Brooks, 23.
  23. 23. Countee Cullen, Collected Poems of Countee Cullen, Major Jackson, ed. (New York: Library of America, 2013), 5.
  24. 24. Simpson, “Taking the Poem,” 23.
  25. 25. Stanley Kunitz, “Bronze by Gold,” in On Gwendolyn Brooks, 10.
  26. 26. “Frost? Williams? No, Gwendolyn Brooks.”
  27. 27. Ibid.
  28. 28. Alfred Kreymborg to John Ciardi, 3 May 1950, Alfred Kreymborg Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.
  29. 29. Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism & Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 46.
  30. 30. Mark Goodson, “‘If I Stood Up Earlier . . . ,’” New York Times Magazine, January 13, 1991.
  31. 31. “Not a Rhyme Time, 1963–1986,” I’ll Make Me a World, volume 5, directed by Denise A. Greene, aired February 3, 1999 (Alexandria, VA: PBS Video, 1999), VHS.

Concealed and Carried

  1. 1. “UC Berkeley Library – History Room,” Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, www.lib.berkeley.edu/give/historyroom/panel10.html.
  2. 2. University of California at Berkeley News, “Personal Papers of Pulitzer-Winning Poet Gwendolyn Brooks Join Archives at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library,” news release, January 11, 2011, www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2001/01/11
    _brook.html.
  3. 3. Ibid.
  4. 4. Ibid.

Afterword

  1. 1. Brooks, Blacks, 83.