Content area
Full Text
In a 1961 interview with Studs Terkel, Gwendolyn Brooks expressed unqualified enthusiasm for the ballad: "I love the ballad form" ("A Conversation" 10). But in 1969, when George Stavros asked if she had "given up writing ballads," she hedged: "I don't know. I might write other ballads, but they would be very different from the ones that I have written so far. I see myself chiefly writing free verse" ("An Interview" 45). Brooks's debate with herself about the ballad was only one instance of a much larger examination of poetic forms she undertook when she became radicalized about African American identity and culture in 1967. That year Brooks attended the Second Fisk Writers' Conference and met young black radicals there, a transforming event for her politically and poetically.1 Already a mature and established poet (she had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950), by 1967 Brooks had published three major volumes of poetry-A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), and The Bean Eaters (1960)-books that demonstrated her virtuosity in adapting traditional verse forms to her utterly distinctive style.2 In sonnets, ballads, rhymed tercets and quatrains, rime royal, blank verse, and a highly lyrical free verse, she had depicted the lives of poor black people in some of the best poems of the century. However, despite having made all these verse forms entirely her own, Brooks was persuaded by the revolutionary poets of the new black consciousness that traditional Anglo European verse forms could not serve the purposes of black liberation: "The word went down: we must chase out Western measures, rules, models"3 (Brooks et al. 5). In response to the civil and cultural unrest of the 1960s and 70s, to "physical riot and spiritual rebellion," she argues,
There had to be an understanding that NOW the address must be to blacks; that shrieking into the steady and organized deafness of the white ear was frivolous-perilously innocent; was "no 'count." There were things to be said to black brothers and sisters and these things-annunciatory, curative, inspiriting- were to be said forthwith, without frill, and without fear of white presence. (4)
In the early days of the revolution, she explains, the aesthetic program of the Black Arts poets discouraged "decoration," "dalliance," and "idle embroidery" as techniques of...