Although the Poetry Foundation works to provide accurate audio transcripts, they may contain errors. If you find mistakes or omissions in this transcript, please contact us with details.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Poet and the Riot

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation. This episode was originally published in September of 2015. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, “The Poet and the Riot.” Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” King had seen a few riots in his time, and he himself inadvertently became the spark of others.

Newscast Recording: Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the Civil Rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

Curtis Fox: In the spring of 1968, when King was assassinated, this language of the unheard was shouted by tens of thousands of African Americans in cities throughout the country. Chicago, in particular, erupted. Eleven people died. Thousands were arrested. Dozens of buildings burned. Twenty-eight blocks on the west side were severely damaged. The Illinois National Guard couldn't handle it, so President Johnson sent in an army division.

Haki Madhubuti: Essentially, people were rebelling—I refuse to use the word riot—against the injustice that they had dealt with ever since their birth.

Elizabeth Alexander: Riots are understood in mainstream America in 1968 as a universally terrible thing. They're not understood as the language of the unheard. They're understood as something scary and destructive.

Gwendolyn Brooks: Because the Negroes were coming down the street.

Curtis Fox: Today on the podcast, we're listening to and talking about a poem that Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in response to the Chicago riots of 1968. It's called simply “Riot,” and it approached its subject in such an unusual way that it became that rare thing: a controversial poem. Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Kansas, but she grew up and spent her entire life living in and writing about Chicago. By 1968, she was a Chicago institution and one of the country's preeminent poets. She'd won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry long ago, back in 1950, and in the tumult of the mid-1960s, after contact with young leaders of the Black Arts Movement like Haki Madhubuti, her work took a conspicuously political turn. She dropped her longtime publisher, Harper and Row, and reconsidered her audience.

Haki Madhubuti: Gwendolyn Brooks, after 1967, had made a decision to write primarily for Black folk.

Curtis Fox: In 1968, Haki Madhubuti's name was Don Lee, and he edited a magazine out of Chicago called Black Expressions. After the 1968 riots in Chicago, he commissioned Gwendolyn Brooks.

Haki Madhubuti: I felt then that we needed a more seasoned voice to really look at what was happening in the streets. And, so, I just asked her: Will she consider writing something for the magazine around what's going on today?

Elizabeth Alexander: The entire country is in the midst of tremendous upheaval and artists of conscience—Brooks foremost among them—are saying, how can my work serve and speak to this moment?

Curtis Fox: Like Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Alexander is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. We asked her and Haki Madhubuti to comment on the poem, and we start with the epigraph—that quote from Dr. King.

Gwendolyn Brooks: “A riot is the language of the unheard” — Martin Luther King.

Elizabeth Alexander: What does this mean: “The language of the unheard”? Who's not being heard and who are they not being heard by? Where does power reside? Where has power been abused? How will the people, as it were, be heard?

Curtis Fox: The poem begins by describing its one and only character, a rich white guy by the name of John Cabot.

Gwendolyn Brooks:

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,

all whitebluerose below his golden hair,

wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,

almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;

almost forgot Grandtully (which is The

Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost

forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray

and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,

the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.

Curtis Fox: OK, it's rude to interrupt a poem, I know, but let's talk about that stanza a bit before moving on.

Haki Madhubuti: John Cabot. Cabot is a very prominent name.

Elizabeth Alexander: So, here we have someone who is a descendant of a founding father. We have a Mayflower person. We have a Harvard person.

Gwendolyn Brooks: John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe. . .

Haki Madhubuti: And John Wycliffe was essentially an English forerunner of the Protestant Reformation. This history is critical if you're gonna really totally understand how she's positioning John Cabot. It was not only a cultural and a racial difference, it was a class difference. He was of the upper class.

Gwendolyn Brooks: All whitebluerose below his golden hair, wrapped richly in right linen and right wool, almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff. . .

Haki Madhubuti: Now Jaguar in the Black community during this time was almost a foreign. . . it is a foreign language. Nobody drove a Jaguar. And, of course, Lake Bluff— that's an area of vacations and stuff that we never get to.

Gwendolyn Brooks: Almost forgot Grandtully (which is The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch). . .

Haki Madhubuti: Scotch is not our drink, OK?

Gwendolyn Brooks: Almost forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s. . .

Elizabeth Alexander: The kidney pie at Maxim's. Maxim's being in Paris. You know, this is a traveled person.

Haki Madhubuti: Kidney pie, you know, a kidney pie is a maxim. But Maxim is a very expensive, exclusive restaurant.

Gwendolyn Brooks: The Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. . .

Elizabeth Alexander: John Cabot stands for wealth and privilege and whiteness that are unexamined. Some might think she sets him up as a straw man, but I think she sets him up as the problems of concentrated privilege in our society.

Curtis Fox: So here's where we're at in the poem. John Cabot, in his Jaguar, has almost forgotten all his privileges and luxuries, the kidney pie at Maxim's.

Gwendolyn Brooks: The Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri. . .

Curtis Fox: Because something quite unusual is happening around him.

Gwendolyn Brooks:

Because the Negroes were coming down the street.

Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty

(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)

and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.

In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.

And not detainable. And not discreet.

Curtis Fox: In other words, John Cabot has found himself in the middle of a riot.

Elizabeth Alexander: “Because the Negroes were coming down the street.” What? What is going to happen? There's this sense of anticipation, which is the question mark, the unknown, the wild hope of riot because “the Poor were sweaty and unpretty, not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka.”

Curtis Fox: What does that refer to?

Elizabeth Alexander: She's talking about Black people, Winnetka being a wealthy Chicago suburb.

Haki Madhubuti: I've lived in Chicago for over 60 years, and I still haven't been to Winnetka.

Gwendolyn Brooks: And they were coming toward him in rough ranks. . .

Haki Madhubuti: Now, rough ranks. Other people might say a mob. But again, the poet and Gwendolyn Brooks: rough ranks.

Elizabeth Alexander: I love how these people. . . it turns to this wonderful, natural imagery in seas, in wind's sweep. This is a force of nature. This is history. It's happening.

Gwendolyn Brooks: They were black and loud. And not detainable. And not discreet.

Elizabeth Alexander: So, detainable and discreet takes you back to the dainty Negroes—especially with those D's: dainty, detainable, discreet. When you only let one in, or you only let a couple in, then you feel that the Negro problem is contained.

Curtis Fox: But for John Cabot, in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Negro problem is suddenly not contained, and he's revolted by the Black people coming toward him.

Gwendolyn Brooks:

Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot

itched instantly beneath the nourished white

that told his story of glory to the World.

“Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered

to any handy angel in the sky.

Elizabeth Alexander: “Any handy angel.” So, he's suddenly trying to find religion to save his butt before this windswept mass of people come and get him.

Haki Madhubuti: “Don't let It touch me.” It's not they, it's it. You see what I'm saying? They're not even people.

Elizabeth Alexander: “John Cabot itched instantly beneath the nourished white.” Nourished white is such a phrase.

Curtis Fox: We would say today privilege, right?

Elizabeth Alexander: Well, she's so much better than we are. I mean, we might, you know, we might say privilege, but I mean. . . nourished. We've had these food images, but, you know, if it is the white body, it's a white body that's been nourished with heavy, overrich food.

Gwendolyn Brooks:

But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove

and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath

the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,

malign, mocked John. 

Elizabeth Alexander: The angel who he thought was so handy is, in fact, a Black angel, an African-American angel, as one with the crowd aligned with the views of the crowd, and thus coming with “the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili.”

Gwendolyn Brooks:

And, in terrific touch, old

averted doubt jerked forward decently,

cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,

and the desperate die expensively today.”

John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire

and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!

Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”

Curtis Fox: And that's how the poem ends. John Cabot is killed in the riot.

Elizabeth Alexander: He does not go down reformed.

Haki Madhubuti: Because those being the final words of Jesus Christ, “Forgive them, for they know not know what they do.” You know, nailing him to the cross.

Curtis Fox: You know, it's all but impossible to feel sorry for John Cabot because the poem puts us readers in the uncomfortable position of feeling OK about his death.

Haki Madhubuti: Right.

Curtis Fox: That's an unusual strategy in a poem.

Haki Madhubuti: It is. And it's the first for Gwendolyn Brooks. This was the first. And I think that it really upset a lot of people—primarily white people—who read it and really dismissed it. And actually, it's one of her best poems.

Curtis Fox: Is John Cabot a realistic character? Are we meant to take him as a fair representation of a wealthy white man in 1968? For Elizabeth Alexander, John Cabot is a stand-in for something bigger than one man.

Elizabeth Alexander: John Cabot is an idea. John Cabot is not literally there. He's an idea that's got to go. He's an idea that's obsolete. He's an order that can no longer stand.

Curtis Fox: Haki Madhubuti disagrees. John Cabot is a realistic character, he says, though he does admit that he's drawn a bit broadly.

Haki Madhubuti: I think that obviously she piles on a little bit, but. . .

Curtis Fox: She does, yeah.

Haki Madhubuti: Yeah, she does.

Curtis Fox: The bigger questions are: What does the poem say about the Chicago riots of 1968? And what did Gwendolyn Brooks think of the role of riots in African-American history? Haki Madhubuti says that the poem is an expression of Gwendolyn Brooks's political evolution.

Haki Madhubuti: She was beginning to understand that, as King said, a riot was the voice of the unheard, but also recognizing that this was an uprising, this was a rebellion. These are empowering acts of young people, and not-so-young people. And when you begin to understand the tradition of this country, nothing changed without rebellion. You know, whether it's the war against England or the war between the states, it's a violent country. And, so, nothing changes without violence. And, so, this is how she. . . we looked at what was going on in the ’60s and what's going on now in 2015. You look at a place like Ferguson, where the entire police department has suffered. Maybe one or two are white, where the entire governing body, from the mayor to the city council, are white. Where, essentially, they were running a criminal enterprise by stopping Black people and fining them for whatever reason. And if the Black people could not pay the fine, they ended up in jail and the fines doubled and tripled. Alright? So, the whole enterprise, the whole Ferguson, whole enterprise, was a criminal activity. That has changed. That changed because of the uprising and the rebellion of people in Ferguson.

Elizabeth Alexander: I think if there's anything to take from this section today, it's that unjust orders cannot stand.

Curtis Fox: Notice that Elizabeth Alexander referred to “Riot” as a section, and, as a matter of fact, it is part of a larger work of three poems that were later published in a book. Alexander says that if you really want to understand “Riot” and what Brooks had to say about racial violence, you have to read all three poems together. John Cabot, she says, stands for a social order that's got to go. And his death clears the way for the next poem, “The Third Sermon on The Warpland.”

Elizabeth Alexander: And it starts with a definition of phoenix from the dictionary: “In Egyptian mythology, a bird which lived for 500 years and then consumed itself in fire, rising renewed from the ashes.” That's where we are after this unwell social order has gone down. Now it's like, what's gonna rise from the ashes? And we're in Egyptian mythology. We're in a Black cosmos. When we enter that poem, the earth is a beautiful place. And then in the next stanza, the Black philosopher says. . .

Curtis Fox: That Black philosopher lays out a vision for how African-American life can be reborn out of the ashes of the riot. And the third poem in the series is a beautiful short lyric about lovers meeting for an intimate moment amid the turmoil in the streets.

Elizabeth Alexander: I think that's really important because I think that it lends tremendous depth to her critique, that she's not just satirizing an easy target, but rather she's saying, what does it mean to, quote, flail in the hot time? What does it mean for riot to be language of the unheard? How can we return to—especially young people in Black communities—for the answer about what's next in what is apparently a perennial struggle?

Curtis Fox: You can read “Riot” and many other poems by Gwendolyn Brooks on our website. You can find this podcast in iTunes and on SoundCloud. If you like this episode, please link to it on Facebook or Twitter or let us know directly what you think. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.