An Exceeding Sun: Michael Anania on Gwendolyn Brooks

Photo by Lura Burnette

When Quraysh Ali Lansana first invited me to blog about Gwendolyn Brooks, I was elated to be allowed this opportunity to write about such an influential American poet and Chicago icon. However, a few days later, I began to worry about what exactly I had to contribute to the larger conversation regarding Brooks. In my fretting, I realized that one of the many things I have always admired about Brooks is her ability to bridge communities and categories, acting as a spokesperson not only for the black community, but for multiple communities; in other words, I love her universality and her inclusivity: women and men, young and old, poets and non-poets, academic and non-academic, regional and international. Ultimately, Brooks’s work beckons everyone. So, in the spirit of beckoning and bridging, I reached out to one of my mentors, another significant Chicago figure, University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Professor Emeritus Michael Anania, who knew and interacted with Brooks, to ask him some questions about her work and influence on the Chicago literary landscape.

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To provide us some context, can you tell us about the first time you heard about Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as the first time you actually met her?

Michael Anania: I first read a Gwendolyn Brooks poem in 1959 or 60, when I was still an undergraduate. I’m not sure of the context. It certainly wasn’t for a class; contemporary poetry wasn’t taught in those days, but I was writing in earnest, and so read whatever I could find.  I first thought of her as a source for what I was doing in 1963 or 64 when I was working on the poems in The Color of Dust and trying to find a way to both occupy a sensibility and comment on it.

I met her and her husband Henry for the first time in Chicago in 1967 at a party in the apartment Karl Shapiro and his wife Teri had on Fullerton.  John Nims was there, I think, and Ralph Mills.

We were both scheduled to speak at the 4C’s conference on April 5th, 1968, the morning after Martin Luther King was killed.  Gwen cancelled her reading, saying briefly that she couldn’t read, and that she needed to be back in Chicago.  I cancelled, as well, and we left.  I flew home, so saw the west side burning from the air.  Gwen took the train.  The first time I read with her was the next week, at a memorial reading for Dr. King at Northwestern.

Where was the 4C’s being held when you and Brooks found out about Dr. King’s assassination? What was the Chicago literary landscape like in the aftermath of this national tragedy?

MA: The 4C's conference was in Minneapolis.

By 1968 the activities surrounding the John Logan poetry workshop* in the Fine Arts Building downtown had ended.  The Big Table** fuss was over.  Poetry magazine went on and Chicago Review still published, and Tri-Quarterly was becoming a force internationally. By 1967 Obasi, the Black Arts Movement related workshop, was going.  In the early 60s Hoyt Fuller revived the Negro Digest at Johnson Publications (Ebony, etc).  The magazine became with Fuller’s editorship more movement directed, especially in '66 with a Black Power issue.  Sometime around 1970, it became Black World.

In a very real sense, there were two literary cultures, three if you consider Saul Bellow and Stern at the University of Chicago, and its two extremely distinguished but locally unknown poets, Konstantinos Trypanis and A.K. Ramanujan. The weekend after the assassination, though, Charles Newman and Bill Henkin arranged a reading at Scott Hall on the Northwestern campus.  The readers included Gwendolyn Brooks and her husband, Henry Blakely, Carolyn Rodgers, Haki Madhubuti, Karl Shapiro, Bill Knott, Dave Etter, and me. There remained divisions, of course, but that Sunday night was the first step in a history of more inclusive public events.

Carlos Cumpian just reminded me of Paul Carroll’s poetry radio show on WFMT-FM, “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” that started in 1972 and lasted through the decade.

[*In the early 60s a group of poets, led by Jordan Miller, including Marvin Bell, Charles Simic, Bill Knott, Bill Hunt, Naomi Lazard and Barbara Harr, got John Logan to come up from Notre Dame once a week to conduct a workshop in Jordan's office in the Fine Arts Building.  **Big Table was a magazine created by Paul Carroll in 1959 to publish work by the Beats from a suppressed 1958 issue of the Chicago Review.]

Can you discuss Brooks’s influence on you—how was her work a source for, or in conversation with, what you were doing while crafting the poems in The Color of Dust? And, can you expand on what you mean when you say “both occupy a sensibility and comment on it?” How does Brooks’s work specifically do this?

MA: I suppose that my first interests in her work had to do with voicing; that is, how to give dignity to the dialect; and how to render the blighted visual space without perching the poet-observer at an elevated point of condescension.  I wanted The Color of Dust to begin where I did, in the projects situated in a ghetto, so I began with an elegy that stepped out of the physically regimented geography of the projects "red brick,” into the worn, broken, and cracked world of the Clark Street boundary.

By "occupy a sensibility" while at the same time commenting on it, I had in mind Annie Allen and the way Brooks fully occupies Annie's world and her speech, but clearly stays involved as an active guide and observer. This is also the case with "kitchenette building," where the concrete particulars of the space have an intimacy only personal familiarity can convey, but—and this is the hard part—without either backing off into a poetic distance or slipping entirely into character.

In 1989, when I was beginning my studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and five years before I would come to Chicago for the first time, you were serving as Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Advisory Panel, which presented Brooks with a $40,000 Lifetime Achievement Award that year. Would you mind discussing this moment in history? Who else was there to celebrate this significant award?

MA: The Lifetime Achievement Award was a fairly rare thing.  I’m not sure I can give you the whole panel, in part because the Literary Policy Advisory Panel was separate from the Fellowship Panel, where the Lifetime nomination originated.  I was on both panels. Lucille Clifton was there, so were Marge Piercy, Richard Howard, Peter Cooley, Victor Perera, and others.

The idea of having the Award and the $40,000 check presented in a public ceremony was Steve Goodwin’s.  Steve was Director of Literature then.  He hoped that the Award would draw more attention both to the recipient and to the Literature Program and asked me as Chair to make the presentation.  It was part of a literary festival launched that year at Navy Pier.  The occasion was organized by Michael Warr. Nora Blakely, Gwen’s daughter, was there, so were Angela Jackson, Walter Bradford, Haki Madhubuti, Reginald Gibbons, and Christine Newman.  I wish I could remember more of the audience, but the presentation was made on a raised platform outdoors and the audience was mostly standing along the Chicago River.

However, this was not my first time officiating at a ceremony for her.  When UIC gave her an Honorary Doctorate, I wrote the citation and presented the hood at commencement. In writing the citation, I had in mind the way her poems, from the beginning, gave us a sense of quest and need, not just of the bitter closeness of the kitchenette but of the frail necessity of dream and endurance there among a much harsher vocabulary. It is certainly a poetic achievement to find in your own world a new topography for poems, but it is great—perhaps, a measure of greatness—to give such a full sense of how the human spirit fills and reshapes those spaces.

I’m intrigued by this idea that Brooks creates a new topography for poems, providing “a full sense of how the human spirit fills and reshapes those spaces.” What specific poems of hers do you think map out this lived topography so well? And how?

MA: By then I suppose I had In the Mecca in mind, in addition to Annie Allen and Maude Martha. Her spaces, which could have had the lurid pathos of ghetto documentaries or literary naturalism, have neither. And her voice always has both understanding, enthusiasm, and dignity. So we enter with her into a world at once difficult and socially repressed, that has its own soul and the soul's "society.” "a song in the front yard" is an early example, and "Kitchenette" is another, as well as the mention of "the civil balance" in the much later poem "To Black Women."

As the chairman for the previously mentioned literary panel, you noted that Brooks “has given us a sense of the breadth and depth of humanity.” What specific works of hers do you most enjoy reading and teaching, and why?

MA: “We Real Cool” was always in the “Sampler” I gave out to undergraduate Introduction to Poetry classes and to beginning poetry writing classes.  With O’Hara’s “Lana Turner has collapsed…” and Creeley’s “I Know a Man.” I used it to discuss person and voice and the way that speech so readily locates the poem …and concision, of course.  I assigned other Brooks poems, as well, and returned often to “Boy Breaking Glass” both for its acceptance of radical gesture as an individual aesthetic but also for its very open, discursive form.

Could you speak more about “Boy Breaking Glass,” elaborating on what you mean when you say “its acceptance of radical gesture as an individual aesthetic”?

MA:  “Boy Breaking Glass” is remarkable in a number of ways.  The “broken window” is the boy’s art, so not just an act of defiance or destruction but of creation.  Also, the already broken window, not the thrown rock or the shatter, is “a cry.”  The completed artwork, the broken window, is, active, a cry, though it is quickly also “raw” and “sonic,” shattering, and with sharp irony “is old-eyed premiere.”  But “art” in the opening stanza gets a parenthesis, the first of several interruptions in the poem.  This “art” is “success” as a reviewer might have it, “that winks” as the contemporary artist might, “aware” of both “elegance” and “treasonable faith.”  In another injection, the “beautiful flaw and terrible ornament” (a Yeatsian bit) are associated with the glass, but in the next line “barbarous and metal” modify “little man,” the boy, and the parallel grammar and structure of the two lines create another identity for the two.

The pattern of interruption and disjunction continues through the poem with quotations that seem to be the boy’s, though their rhetoric is clearly not—“If not a note, a hole,” note as both musical note and message and “If not an overture, a desecration.”  You can read this as social rationalization or as Dadaist argument—the boy and Duchamp making the same point.  The next quotation has another kind of voice, older, with a kind of common wisdom, followed by a statement of social alienation.   The quotation makes a break between two couplets, which, if somewhat genial, are disjunctive in other ways—“Full of pepper and light/ and Salt and night and cargoes”—has no antecedent image or discursive mode, though it seems to connect to the “cup of tea.”  “The music is in minors” doubles ‘minor’ as in minor key and ‘minor’ as boy, which refers us back to note, hole, overture, and desecration. Is the accusation, “you who threw my name away,” directed at the poet or at the “us” represented by the earlier “our”?  More engaging is the reference for “this” in the next line.  Does it refer to the lost name or is it the broken glass, which is “everything I have for me."  The final stanza offers series of things that are out of reach—Congress, lobster, et al., “A sloppy amalgamation.” What follows—a mistake, a cliff, a snare—can be read as an extension of the judgment, still, of the “sloppy” established social order, but “hymn” and “an exceeding sun” seem to turn the poem back to the boy, especially in the closing pun.

This poem could easily have carried its initial argument through without all this fragmentation.  Simply put, for the boy the broken glass is both identity and by implication an art form.  What Brooks does is to deliberately strain the poem, formally, referentially, and rhetorically.  Her goal seems to have been to implicate the poem in both the act’s “beautiful flaw” and “terrible ornament” and to accept part of the boy’s accusation as having been turned toward her.  The question that is implicit in the poem’s opening is whether the boy’s art redefines (or de-defines) art in general, just as Dada, say, did in the 1920s and so reshapes, shatters, the poem.  Most of Brooks’s poems are tonally and rhetorically consistent throughout.  The break here is remarkable and both aesthetically and morally astute.

We read together frequently.  I can still hear her voice doing “We Real Cool” or “The Life of Lincoln West,” but she rarely read “Boy Breaking Glass.”

You mentioned earlier that you wrote the citation for Brooks when UIC presented her with an Honorary Doctorate. In what year did Brooks receive her Honorary Doctorate, and what was the overall literary climate like at UIC at this time?

MA: In 1975.  I'm surprised at how early it was. The decision to award Brooks the degree came from the Chancellor's office.  The procedure was probably initiated by Grace Holt, the first chair of African-American Studies.  There is a committee on honorary degrees, which I served on years later. How it fell to me to write the citation and confer the degree, I have no idea.  There was a luncheon in the Circle Center before the Commencement.  I sat with Gwen and the Chancellor and his wife.  Someone asked Brooks how she felt about getting this honorary doctorate.  She said it felt pretty much like the 26 others.

By 1975, the literary climate was pretty energetic. The UIC MA Program for Writers was underway, with me, Paul Carroll, and John Nims teaching poetry.  Fiction was taught by Gene Wildman and Robie McCauley, who was still at that time fiction editor at Playboy.  James Park Sloan came right around that time. Sterling Plumpp was at UIC but had moved to African-American Studies. Johari Amini and Haki Madhubuti, known then as Don L. Lee, had left. The first generation of MA students (in poetry, Paul Hoover, John Jacob, Dean Faulwell, Maxine Chernoff, Brooke Bergan, and John Rezek; in fiction, Rochelle Distelheim and Pamela Painter) graduated in the early 70s.

In the 60s and early 70's, Ralph Mills had a small budget from the dean for readings.  When that dean left, I joined the Student Activities Funding Committee and began the long relationship at the Circle Center that funded readings in poetry and fiction for almost 30 years. In the mid-70s we had Creeley, Diane Wakoski, Brooks, Ishmael Reed, Denise Levertov, Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Rodgers, Carolyn Kizer, Guillermo Cabrera-Infante, Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Charles Wright, and more.  Also influenced, I guess, by me and Paul Carroll, both little magazine editors, the students began creating magazines and small presses--Mojo Navigator(e), Oink!!, The Banyan Press, The Wine Press, Another Chicago Magazine, Syncline.  The list goes on.  None of these publications had university support.  The Wine Press broadsides and chapbooks were hand-printed in the print studio in the art department, but I urged the students to stay away from university funding and its problems. With Arts Council support, they sponsored reading series around the North Side, in art galleries mostly.

In closing, could you share with us one of your favorite anecdotes that you have regarding Gwendolyn Brooks?

MA: When Gwendolyn Brooks was Poetry Consultant to The Library of Congress (now the position is called Poet Laureate), she had me invited to read there.  When I arrived at the Jefferson Building, she came down to the lobby to greet me and take me up to the Poetry Consultant’s office.  Along the way, we encountered members of the building’s staff, custodians, ushers, security people, and the elevator operator.  Most, but certainly not all, were black.  She paused to greet each person and introduce me.  “Mr. Williams, this is Michael Anania.  He’ll be reading for us tonight.”  In every case, she knew the person’s name, and in every case addressed them as Mr., Miss, or Mrs.  It was not merely a matter of manners or civility but an example of her sense of balance, “civil balance,” as I said earlier.

Michael, thank you so much for leaving us with this loveliest of recollections about Ms. Brooks! In her honor, may we all find a little more “civil balance” in ourselves. And, thank you, for your own kindness and generosity in sharing with us this information about Brooks as well as providing an overview of Chicago’s literary scene at particular points in history.

Also, much gratitude to Quraysh Ali Lansana for inviting and providing the opportunity for Michael Anania and me to engage in this conversation about one of the literary greats.