Gwendolyn Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

This collection comprises "A Street in Bronzeville," "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith," "Negro Hero," "Hattie Scott," "Queen of the Blues," "Ballad of Pearl May Lee," and "Gay Chaps at the Bar." The first and last of these, and "Hattie Scott," are each a series of shorter poems.

The (twenty) poems composing "A Street in Bronzeville" are like snapshots. There is, there must be, a shot in Rear Window that pans from window to window as it tracks James Stewart's gaze, lingering briefly on each framed tableau and providing a glimpse of private life? This is kind of like that, minus the illicit voyeurism. (There is even a murder, grimmer than Thorward's.) Where Hitchcock has the apartment building, the poet has the Bronzeville street. Emergent from the snapshots compositely is not some whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Although the street stands objectively there even if different snapshots had been taken, the specificity of the snapshots is the point, the individuality of the moments captured and the people.

(This is wholly different from the experience of reading The Waste Land. Sometimes you feel, your love for individual lines of it notwithstanding, if "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," that any fragments would have done. Why this clever construction rather than another, Eliot's more than capable? Why should it be "Those are pearls that were his eyes." rather than another line of another bard's about another drowned character? [Though this is the Bard.] Why should it be this young man carbuncular rather than another, interchangeable, that the typist and Tiresias are waiting for? [Though neither of them would tell or care either...])

"The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith" I linked to, above (it's long, it's vivid, it's splendid); "Negro Hero" ("to suggest Dorie Miller") may be the poem from which I draw for my quote collage, because it wears anger on its face; "Hattie Scott" comprises five vignettes in Hattie's distinctive voice: she's the sharpest-drawn character in the collection, I think, because the poet lets her speak without, it seems, much formal intervention--it seems, but it isn't so. "Queen of the Blues" sustains its very short lines across a long enough stretch of vertical inches that it shouldn't work but it does. "Ballad of Pearl May Lee"--"Ballad of Pearl May Lee"! My favorite. I do have a taste for the lurid. Yet of course the poet is being more than lurid here. A man is lynched. But the risk of this move, to lynch a man in a poem that splays itself open to the charge of luridness--I think that's stunning. "Gay Chaps at the Bar" comprises twelve sonnets and has this headnote:

. . . and guys I knew in the States, young officers, return from the front crying and trembling. Gay chaps at the bar in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York . . . .

LIEUTENANT WILLIAM COUCH
in the South Pacific

The sonnets (the first two of which are here) are Brooks's "souvenir for Staff Sergeant Raymond Brooks and every other soldier" and make for sober, gentle, slow reading. They are slant-rhymed; Elizabeth Alexander, who specifies (in her introduction to The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks) [despite the "every other soldier" of Brooks's dedication] that the sonnets are on black soldiers, writes:

Brooks grasped the profound contradictions these soldiers faced, fighting for their country but knowing all along that they would remain second-class citizens—think, for example, of black soldiers who liberated concentration camps being forced to ride in the back cars of military trains upon their return while German prisoners of war rode in the front. Brooks said that the sonnets of “Gay Chaps at the Bar” are off-rhyme because “I felt it was an off-rhyme situation.”

I don't know whether Brooks meant to gesture to Wilfred Owen and his slant-rhymed "Strange Meeting."