Voice Over

by Roderick Clark

Anyone who has read the collections A Street in Bronzeville or In The Mecca has to be aware that Ms. Brooks was one of the most important poetic voices to emerge on the American landscape in the 20th century. Anyone who ever heard her recite the lines of, say, The Saturdays of Satin Legs Smith in her evocative voice knew the extraordinary power she possessed to illuminate the richness of everyday experience, and to remind us of our humanness.

Her contributions as a teacher were equally remarkable. “She mentored literally three generations of poets—black, white, Hispanic, Native American,” long-time friend, poet, and literature professor Haki Madhubuti, the founder of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Creative Writing and Black Literature at Chicago State University told the Associated Press following her death. “She was all over the map with her gifts.” Ms. Brooks maintained her interest in shaping and cultivating new writers well into her waning years. Her ability to listen with warmth and interest gave her a remarkable rapport with students of all ages. Everyone she touched grew.

Even small gifts bore fruit. In 1970, I was a poor student working part-time in an Italian restaurant to pay the bills. Writing, largely poetry, was nearly all that was truly important to me at the time. Gwendolyn Brooks, up from the University of the Loop in Chicago to teach a special class in poetry writing at the University of Wisconsin, read the poems in my battered notebooks, saw the desperation on my face and let me into her class.

The class, not surprisingly, had a mix of black and white students. In fact—in my life, I don’t think I had ever sat down in a room that small with that many people of color—but at first it did not seem strange to me, since at the time I was something of a loner and felt like an outsider in many contexts. What was new and fascinating to me was to be able to peer through the poetry of these African-American students into the life of a black America that existed parallel with my own, and yet was profoundly different. Simultaneously, for the first time, I began seriously reading books written by black Americans about their life in this country: The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Go Tell it on The Mountain and other works by James Baldwin, many poems by the amazing Langston Hughes, the autobiography of Malcolm X.

Through the poems of fellow students and the works of these writers, I gained new insight into the failures of America, a country that I had worshiped since childhood, and questioned only on issues that impacted me personally: the right to wear my hair long, smoke pot, attend block parties, stay out of Vietnam. Now came a new and terrible truth: that a nation could believe itself to be good and free while at the same time exercising evil and tyranny on some of its citizens.

At that time, many young black writers were trying to come to terms in new ways with the pain and the possibilities of what it meant to be black in a white America. Although she belonged to a different generation, Ms. Brooks had enormous empathy with them. She encouraged them to take pride in their experience, to express their anger and legitimize all the feelings that were connected with owning and illuminating that experience and coping with the oppression they lived with. Gwendolyn taught us all that poetry was a kind of “super journalism,” telling the truth, even terrible truth, more accurately than it could be told in any other way. But it was also part of the writer’s task to bring beauty and perspective to that truth. Poetry was not a way of escaping the world, it was a way of grappling with it. This idea—that poems might provide some of the best “pictures” of reality we had in difficult and confusing times—gave me a new way of looking at, and coping with, my life. Suddenly “art” wasn’t about dropping out—but dropping in. And in the idea that even ugly truths could be fused with beauty and vision, there was another inescapable corollary—that the truth in our lives was as valuable a subject for poetry as anything else.

Ms. Brooks’ “blackness” and the subtle but real black and white tensions in the class were a critical part of our learning. As part of revealing the truth of their lives through their verse, Ms. Brooks and her African-American students needed to express what oppression felt like in America. I do not know how other white students processed those feelings, but I know that seeing America through their eyes caused me to think for the first time about what it meant to be a white student in America, not in the terms of the way black students saw us, but in terms of how we saw ourselves.

While I did not identify with the wealthy white man Gwendolyn Brooks described in her poem Riot: “John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,/all whitebluerose below his golden hair” I knew the type, having grown up across the street from a country club. While I did not envy black students the oppression they experienced, it was clear that many of these students possessed something I had not found in the sloganeering, materialism and psychedelic sensibilities of my white peers: passion and focus, an unambiguous moral vision. Their blackness had depth, texture, a richness. We, in contrast, children of the white European melting pot, were colorless—as transparent as the ice on the gutters of suburban cul de sacs. Our dark-skinned classmates sought a new sense of self—and an inner Africa. But what was left of Europe in us? Fake battle axes above the bar in our dad’s basement den, crowned crests on cheap suits and the labels on bottles of less than perfect scotch, stamp albums in the attic that preserved the images of Hitler and Queen Victoria, old recipes for German strudel or white indigestible Scandinavian cookies scribbled on dusty 3 x 5 cards in our mother’s recipe boxes, handed down from foreign ancestors dead and otherwise forgotten.

And what had really happened in the sixties that would change all that?

In my case, being half Canadian Scots, there was a hint of shame against the joy of pipes and tartans, Scott, and Stevenson. I felt a new horror at knowing that the burning cross Scots had used to rally the clans against English invaders had become here a tool of murder and mayhem. A new humbleness in understanding that my ancestors had been shooing sheep away from the mouths of their caves at a time when Africa had distinctive and powerful cultures.

After the class finished and Gwendolyn Brooks returned to Chicago, she and I continued to correspond as I graduated from the UW and began to wrestle with the challenge of becoming a serious writer. She sent me books she thought might interest me and push me forward. At one point she sent a beautiful LP of herself reading her poetry which contained a breathtaking recital of The Saturdays of Satin Legs Smith, in her eloquent ebony voice. On the flyleaves and jackets of her gifts she would write encouraging remarks. If I needed a recommendation she would write one.

One gift in particular, a copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s The Drunken Ship from Poems of The Damned, translated by Le Clerco, left lines imprinted on my memory: “As I descended streams impassable and dark, I felt my haulers vanish like so many ghosts/ Redskins shrieking, had used them for an arrowmark, nailing them naked first to many-colored post/…Since then I have bathed in the deep poem of the sea…/I have dreamed virent nights with dazzling creamy snows/Kisses that rose to the sea’s eyes, slow , amorous…/Currents gyrating like weird saps that no man knows,/Blue-yellow wakenings of singing phosphorous…”

Her gifts were never random. One poem I wrote in her class was The Day Before Valentine’s, a long, overwritten account of a young white “freak” on drugs coming out of his neighborhood and walking downtown where a riot was unfolding between students and police during the UW Black Student Strike of ’69. Hence the gift of a poem written by a young man who was also adrift and bewildered by the universe was perfectly on target. It was as if she was telling me directly that I had to follow the current of my life, not struggle against it. A great teacher is one who has the perfect instinct for giving each of her students exactly the thing they need to grow.

Ms. Brooks was probably the first person who helped me realize that working with words was to be the focus of my life. Regardless of whether I was going to be a success or starve at it. Regardless of whether I was destined to fail miserably. It was an absolute truth that had been lurking inside me since infancy, one that had been far too scary express to anyone, even my family or friends. In 1973 or so, I sent her a letter telling her that she had helped me open the door to the rest of my life. I don’t remember the exact words I used, but I remember thinking as I posted the letter that this would probably be our last significant communication. I had to jump from the nest—and her gifts and attention were badly needed elsewhere. Since then, in good times or in bad, I have never questioned the life decision to work with words. As she did for thousands of others, Ms. Brooks taught me to face the truth about myself, respect it—and follow it through. The worst in us is often of our own manufacture. The best comes from people like these.

ronellis@hughes.net 04/17/08