Carina del Valle Schorske on 'How Brooks Lives On Through Her Fictional Alter-Ego'

At Literary Hub, Carina del Valle Schorske considers Gwendolyn Brooks's impact, long after her death, through  her revered protagonist, Maud Martha. "Maud Martha, the person, exceeds Maud Martha, the project. Of course, it is through Maud Martha, the project, that Maud Martha outlives Gwendolyn Brooks," del Valle Schorske writes. "What is the nature of this survival? How can we catch hold of the hand they extend, together, into our time?" From there: 

Because the book’s protagonist shares a birthday with Brooks, and also grows up poor, dark-skinned, and brilliant in black Chicago, Maud Martha is sometimes read as a kind of autobiography. Though early critics of Brooks’ poetry were eager to emphasize her “authentic” relationship to the workaday world she described, poetry itself works to maintain the author’s mystery. While prose seems to demand a clear distinction between fiction and nonfiction, the syntax of poetry can sunder subject and object and make language seem a stranger: the question “what is this?” overtakes the question, “is this you?” Is Emily Dickinson celebrating the freedom of poetry when she writes, “I dwell in Possibility — / a fairer House than Prose — / More numerous of Windows — / Superior — for Doors—”?

Maud Martha does not dwell in that fair, superior house: Maud Martha is a work of prose. But it wasn’t always. As Lovia Gyarkye wrote in her recent essay for the New Republic, “After the success of Annie Allen, Brooks began working on ‘American Family Brown,’ a series of poems that focused on the socioeconomic struggles of black Americans. The poems were initially rejected by her publisher and after much back and forth and revision, it became Maud Martha.” For Brooks, Maud Martha was at first a kind of compromise formation, the shape her poetry took when confronted by rejection, the demands of others, and a creative refiguring of her own literary ambition.

Read more at Literary Hub.