#johnfrancis

I feel like I should qualify my post be saying that poetry is not really my thing.  Not having studied poetry that deeply, there are many nuances to a modernist work such as Brooks’ that I feel moss certainly blew right over my head.  For the purposes of this class however Brooks’ work does provide a fresh perspective on the ‘invisible’ parts of Chicago along with the neglected spaces and people that occupy these ‘invisible’ parts.

I was very interested in how in many of Brooks’ poems it seems that individuals with real or made up names are the focus of the poems.  From Mabbie who was all of seven, to Sweet Annie who tried to teach her mother, to oaken Rudolph Reed, the characters of Brooks’ poems come alive to create a setting and a city that the reader knows exists somewhere out in the world, even if it is somewhere that is beyond the gaze of the reader.  The names of Medgar Evers, Maxie Allen, and the Blackstone Rangers Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop, provide a vivacity and a liveliness to a world that is starkly contrasted in poems where Brooks only says, the negro clown, or the negro hero, or the Bronzeville woman, or the Crazy Woman who would not sing in May.  This contrast was stark enough for me to start paying attention quite closely whenever I noticed that Brooks was either intentionally naming her characters or intentionally not naming her characters.

The difference between the named and the nameless is quite powerful because of the subjects of Brooks poems are by far the nameless, the poor, the under-served, the under-valued, the invisible black residents of Bronzeville.  By giving them names and passion in her poems, Brooks is giving life to a people and a city that many people of her time would much rather pretend did not exist.  By not giving them names, Brooks is shedding light on the scope of the issues and struggles Bronzeville residents face because single names would not do them justice. From the everyman and everywoman to the Annies and Willies, Gwendolyn Brooks helps create Bronzeville to the outside world, a place that she will not let remain invisible.