The Poetry of Rodgers by Carolyn M. Rodgers

First published:Paper Soul, 1968; Two Love Raps, 1969; Songs of a Black Bird, 1969; Now Ain’t That Love, 1969; For H. W. Fuller, 1970; Long Rap/Commonly Known as a Poetic Essay, 1971; How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems, 1975; The Heart as Ever Green, 1978; Translation, 1980; Eden, and Other Poems, 1983

Type of work: Poetry

A Chicago Upbringing

Carolyn M. Rodgers was born in Chicago in 1945, the youngest child of Clarence Rodgers and Bazella Rodgers, natives of Little Rock, Arkansas. Rodgers was reared near Forty-seventh Street in Chicago, an area that was home to many popular blues singers. As a child she was active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Her poem “Portrait” speaks personally: “mama . . . / saved pennies/ fuh four babies/ college educashuns.” In “I Have Been Hungry,” she confides, “my father never wanted three girls/ and only one son.” An avid reader, young Carolyn took dramatic elocution lessons, memorizing and reciting works by such black poets as Paul Laurence Dunbar and Langston Hughes. At nine, Rodgers started keeping a journal, and in her teens she began writing poems. After high school, Rodgers sang and played the guitar in coffeehouses and even contemplated a singing career. “But,” she says, “the night life scared me away from singing professionally.”

After she graduated from Hyde Park High School, Rodgers attended the University of Illinois at Urbana, where her first published poems appeared in a literary magazine, and then finished all but one course in the bachelor’s degree program at Roosevelt University. (In the 1980’s, she completed her bachelor’s degree and also earned a master’s degree in English at the University of Chicago.) During her Roosevelt University years, Rodgers met Gwendolyn Brooks, who proved to be a supportive critic; within a year or so after sending out poems for publication, Rodgers had work accepted and published in Negro Digest.

Rodgers found employment with the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in the mid-1960’s, working with high school dropouts who, she says, helped provide her with subject matter for her poems, stories, and plays. As a young freelance writer, she traveled, gave readings, and met many established black writers.

Rodgers’s reputation as a poet dates from her publication of several small books of poems in 1968, 1969, and 1970—first at Third World Press in Chicago and then at Broadside Press in Detroit. Though her reputation rests more on her bold writings during these years than on any of her later publications, she has continued to write, progressively moving away from her early militant stance and toward more relaxed, even humorous, poems that focus on religion, traditional morality, and the poet’s private life—though Rodgers does not forsake the black experience as subject.

In 1968, while still in her twenties, Rodgers was a recipient of the first Conrad Kent Rivers Writing Award. She has also earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Society of Midland Authors Award, and a Carnegie Award. Her book How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems was nominated for a National Book Award in 1976. Even with such recognition, her career has not always been easy; there were times before 1984, she says, when “I continued writing and publishing and practically starving to death.”

The Black Arts Movement

Despite Rodgers’s evolution toward poems that are calmer in tone, her early subject matter, stance, and association with other African American activists in the late 1960’s allied her initially with the Black Arts group in Chicago, a school of militant liberationist poets, of whom Don L. Lee (who later took the name Haki R. Madhubuti) is best known. Critics also identify Rodgers as an “OBAC poet” because of her active membership after 1967 in the Writers Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture. A participant in the Gwendolyn Brooks poetry workshop in the late 1960’s, Rodgers acknowledged her affection and indebtedness in “To Gwen with Love” in 1971.

Rodgers’s career has included lectureships or writer-in-residence appointments at Columbia College and City College, Chicago; the University of Washington; Albany College, Georgia; Malcolm X College, Chicago; and Indiana University at Bloomington. Her many publications include poems and articles in such magazines as The Nation, Ebony, The Black Scholar, and Black Arts Anthology. Since the early 1970’s, her work has been regularly anthologized in collections of modern black poets, and Rodgers has made frequent appearances as lecturer or as reader of her poems.

Displaying open form—a free-verse medium that is not rhymed or metrical—Rodgers’s best-known poems employ street language, eccentric lower-case letters, texts erratically placed on the page or spaced within the line, oddly placed capitals, capital-letter strings, italics, dialectal spellings (such as “sistuhs”), clippings (“sd” for “said,” “u” for “you”), nonsyntactic phrases, elliptical dots, unpunctuated lines that suggest associative (or dissociated) thought or speech, and lines linked by initial parallel structure, as in “Poems for Malcolm”:

I want uh love poemI want uh trust poemI want uh unity poemI want uh Liberation poem.

Rodgers’s verse after 1970 uses fewer typographic effects and is quieter on the page, but it remains loosely and informally structured.

In subject matter and theme, Rodgers shared in the beginning the didactic program of the Black Arts and OBAC poets, who wanted African American writers to stop trying to please whites and instead to assert a black identity to which ordinary black readers could respond, thus moving the race toward radical independence from mainstream aesthetic (and political) traditions. Such ideas grew in the context of the freedom-minded 1960’s and the Black Power movement in politics. Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and Martin Luther King, Jr., recur as heroes in poems by the Black Arts writers; the villains are not only “honkies” but also “Negroes” who try to “act white” and thus betray their race. Though Don L. Lee, an early compatriot, found the book weaker than Paper Soul, Rodgers’s Songs of a Black Bird represents her early writings fairly. Race is the book’s theme; being young, black, and involved as a poet in “The Movement” is its subject; and its dedication, “to/ Love/ Truth/ Organization/ Discipline/ Liberation,” summarizes its strident, rigidly exclusive idealism. Its twenty-five poems, ranging between nine lines and three pages in length, show some tension between Rodgers’s committed advocacy of revolution (and the “brothas”) on one hand and her defense of the “sistuhs” (and disillusionment with black males) on the other. The book’s preface by fellow OBAC writer David Llorens praises Rodgers’s “new energy” while conceding that sometimes her verse “comes down hard on brothers.” Rodgers’s short poem “Untitled No. Hurt,” a case in point, is an apostrophe to “all my men”—who were supposed to embody “strength and beauty” but “could not love me,/ because you hate your/ Black/ momma.”

The longest poem in Songs of a Black Bird is “JESUS WAS CRUCIFIED, or, It Must Be Deep (an epic pome),” which Don L. Lee found too burdened with narrative to be “poetic.” This confessional monologue reveals a generational and cultural gap between a radicalized black girl with “educashun” and her working-class mother, who thinks her activist daughter is literally going to hell. The young speaker’s dialectal recounting of a late-night phone conversation moves through a conflict stage (heightened by an all-caps text) to a calmer resolution: “she sd i mon pray fuh u tuh be saved. i sd thank yuh.” The speaker in “It Is Deep,” with a similar mix of frustration and love, describes her mother’s worries “that I am under the influence of/ **communists**/ when I talk about Black as anything/ other than . . . ugly. . . . ” Nevertheless, this “religious-negro” mother is “a sturdy Black bridge that I/ crossed over, on.”

Poems that show standard Black Arts positions include “Greek Crazeology,” a diatribe against black fraternities and sororities for “whitening the minds of their members,” treating pledges as “slaves,” and wasting “TIME & MONEY” that should go “for the r(evolution).” “Unfunny Situation” ridicules readers’ calls for witty poetry: “will we laugh our heads off when our brother’s bodies/ are blown to bits in vietnam . . . ?” One short poem puts “hunkies” at the end of a list of “animals” that “We have always imitated.” “The Last M. F.” has the speaker defend using “the word/ muthafucka” by explaining that the epithet applies only to “pigs and hunks and negroes who try to divide and/ destroy our moves toward liberation.” “Let uh revolution come,” says the poem “U Name this One.” More subtle and poignant is “What Color Is Lonely?,” in which the poet, writing “poems about Black Unity,” sits “for hours that/ trickle befo me like unfreezin water.”

Two poems in Songs of a Black Bird stand out for their drama and their pictographic views of third-person subjects. “5 Winos” sketches down-and-out black men whose drunken music becomes a “most carefully/ constructed a-melodic Coltrane psalm.” (The name of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane punctuates poems by the Black Arts poets.) Rodgers’s poem “For H. W. Fuller” memorializes a quiet black man “standing in the shadows of a/ white marble building/ chipping at the stones. . . . ” Unnoticed, the man eventually effects the building’s downfall. Here Rodgers finds a figurative paradigm for all the patient African Americans who ever worked quietly for freedom, laying careful groundwork for toppling the power structure.

Seeking a Broader Audience

In Dynamite Voices (1971), an anthology of black poetry, editor Don L. Lee featured Carolyn Rodgers but noted her “ineffective, unconscious writing” and use of “too many words.” (Given Lee’s own verbose early style, the comment has its ironies.) Lee preached against “writing Black and publishing white,” favoring instead a separatist publishing network for African American writers. In this light, Rodgers’s decision to bring out her 1975 collection How I Got Ovah with Anchor Press/Doubleday in Garden City, New York—with an establishment rather than a black press—appears modestly defiant, a self-assertive act altogether consistent with the independent spirit that her poems show. Rodgers’s selection of previously published poems for How I Got Ovah seems to pay Lee’s dogmatic evaluations little heed; her author’s note implies that she has partly changed her “style” and “mind,” distancing herself somewhat from the movement that Lee dominated: “I want my work to interest as many people as possible,” she says simply. Revised details in several previously published poems confirm her independent drift. The poem “Love—The Beginning and the End,” for example, as it originally appeared in Songs of a Black Bird ended with the intersecting acrostic of the words “WOMAN and BLACKMAN” (sharing an “M” where they crossed), capped by the line “the last aspect is Love is Revolution.” By contrast, the same poem closes How I Got Ovah in a toned-down version that concludes this way:

W O M A N A Nthe last aspect is Love.

Other poems entitled “The Revolution is Resting” and “I Have Changed So Much in This World” likewise suggest moderations in Rodgers’s career as she progressed into the less-turbulent decades after 1970.

Nevertheless, Rodgers’s work in How I Got Ovah crystallizes rather than reforms her earlier work. The truth, as she surely knew, is that the strong young voice that brought her to early prominence was also her assurance of a place in the history of modern African American poetry.

In a comment printed in 1985, Rodgers asserts: “I seek to tell the truth. To explore the human condition, the world’s condition. To illuminate the ordinary, the forgotten, the overlooked, to show that the specific me is often the general you and us. To exemplify God working in man. . . . ” Rodgers wants to write both “simply” and “profoundly” and feels she may be God’s instrument for doing so. Her 1969 poem “Breakthrough” seems, in the subsequent context of How I Got Ovah, to encapsulate well the “many changes,” the “several of me,” the “consistent incongruity” of life, as she oxymoronically puts it, that her poems seek to define. In “To the White Critics,” Rodgers asserts simply, “my baby’s tears are . . ./ a volume of poems.” In “I Have Been Hungry,” the speaker asks, “and you white girl/ shall i call you sister now?” In “Some Me of Beauty,” Rodgers concedes, “the fact is/ that i don’t hate any body any more/ i went through my mean period.”

Though the revolutionary passion of the late 1960’s that undergirded the first voice of Carolyn Rodgers has long ago cooled, poems such as “What Color Is Lonely?,” “For H. W. Fuller,” and “Breakthrough” remain to speak of that lost time. One key role of hers, in fact, appears in retrospect to be that of chronicler to the Chicago movement and the OBAC phenomenon. Thus the chantlike rhythms of the 1970 poem “Yuh Lookin GOOD” catch indelibly an image of the “Meetings meetings meetings . . ./ about us makin it,/ as a people/ as a nation.”

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Black American Women Poets and Dramatists. New York: Chelsea House, 1996. Provides biography, bibliography, and critical analysis of Rodgers and her work.

Colby, Vineta, ed. World Authors, 1980-1985. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1991. Features Rodgers’s own autobiographical report on her life and career and includes chronologically arranged criticism that quotes liberally from her poems.

Collines, Lisa Gail, and Margo Natalie Crawford, eds. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Collections of scholarly reinterpretations of the Black Arts movement’s place in literary and African American history. Situates Rodgers as a one-time member of the movement.

Evans, Mari, ed. Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Includes discussions of Rodgers’s work by various critics, along with editor Evans’s interview with Rodgers.

Gayle, Addison, Jr., comp. The Black Aesthetic. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971. A well-indexed book that discusses Rodgers in various contexts relevant to the literary movements of the 1960’s. Calls her essay “Black Poetry—Where It’s At” (published in Negro Digest in 1969) “the best essay on the work of the new black poets.”

Lee, Don L. Dynamite Voices Volume 1: Black Poets of the 1960’s. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971. Poet/critic Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti) evaluates Rodgers’s “strengths” and “weaknesses”—which, he says, include occasional “misuse of language.” Lee quotes liberally from Rodgers’s poems to illustrate his points.

Turner, Roland, ed. The Writers Directory, 1988-1990. 8th ed. Chicago: St. James Press, 1988. Contains a factual outline of Rodgers’s literary achievements through the mid-1980’s.