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Tess
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But could a dream send up:
Confinement and Escape in Gwendolyn Brooks's Domestic Sonnets
Confinement and Escape in Gwendolyn Brooks's Domestic Sonnets
Gwendolyn Brooks once referred to her writing as “folksy narrative,” yet she often uses given forms to weave both vernacular and narrative strains—giving her folk narratives life in lyric space. Brooks’s forms are many and varied: Her early work from A Street in Bronzeville on contains many twelve-line poems, as well as ballads in the voices of characters in one neighborhood. Her later work (Anniad, In the Mecca) often emerges in nearly docupoetic reported form that has epic scope. Yet among Brooks’s many uses of form, her sonnets hold a special role: Across her career they emerge as a site to explore the confines of racism, poverty and domestic duty, as well as becoming a perch from which to glimpse a sidelong view of liberatory freedom. Indeed amid Brook’s uses of myriad poetic forms, she returns again and again to the sonnet as a vehicle for exploring domestic space, both in order to depict the confines of racism, and domestic duty, and also to frame the possibility within lyric space of imagining freedom. This ten minute talk will focus on three Brooks sonnets from disparate points of her career: “my dreams my works must wait till after hell;” “kitchenette building”; and “the sonnet ballad”— space. How do these verses both capture the particular disenchantments and enclosures of domestic spaces, while also using the tools of the sonnet to suggest some space—even imaginary space—for liberation?
Tess Taylor is the author of five collections of poetry, including The Misremembered World, The Forage House, and Work & Days. In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, part of Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, at the Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press.