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This chapter discusses two Black Arts writers who benefited from War on Poverty patronage: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Gwendolyn Brooks. In The System of Dante’s Hell and In the Mecca, the two writers developed distinct versions of participatory art. Like much of Baraka’s Beat-period work, The System of Dante’s Hell thematizes his dissatisfaction with the white counterculture and desire to create art that could connect him with black urban audiences. However, the novel draws on the counterculture’s essentialist conception of lower-class culture in ways that would continue to shape Baraka’s cultural nationalist output of the late 1960s. In contrast, Brooks’s In the Mecca rejects the immersive drama that defines Baraka’s Black Arts. Inspired by her Community Action Program–sponsored work with Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, the collection insists that minority poets use the resources of poetic form to achieve a calibrated distance from their lower-class subjects.

This chapter talks about how Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks, perhaps the two most famous literary figures of the Black Chicago Renaissance, shared a common struggle to discern a new black consciousness in the physical and metaphoric spaces of Chicago's South Side streets. The chapter analyzes the photographic 12 Million Black Voices of Wright and Edwin Rosskam, as well as Wright's last novel, The Outsider, to show how he depicted the confining realities of the kitchenette apartment along with the segregated, overcrowded city pavement of black neighborhoods. It compares Wright's attempt to define and defy these urban realities to poet Gwendolyn Brooks' Street in Bronzeville and Maud Martha that similarly elucidated the intense material deprivation of African Americans.

This chapter turns to the rise and fame of Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks through the genre of autobiography. Wright's Black Boy (American Hunger) and Gwendolyn Brooks' Report From Part One indicate these authors' awareness of spatial realities and how they transformed the city of fact into the city of feeling, into their writing. The chapter details the dialogue between Wright's and Brooks' fiction and their urban surroundings as residents and then as prize-winning authors. Through various literary and sociological projects, Wright and Brooks initiated an investigation of place, coherency, and consciousness in Chicago's flats, alleyways, blocks, and one-room kitchenette apartments.

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s previously ignored blues sonnets from the early 1940s, which open up a new perspective on the trajectories of African American modernist writing. In these little-known sonnets, Hughes revived the formal experimentation of the twenties by bringing together high-modernist and vernacular elements. The chapter traces the transformations of this “synthetic vernacular” (Matthew Hart) in the work of the outstanding poets of the post-war period, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden. It shows how these poets made the sonnet a crucial—if overlooked—laboratory for the Afro-modernist project that shaped African American literature from the 1940s into the 1960s.

Examining a number of key essays written by black writers in the late 1940s and the 1950s, this chapter chronicles an uptick in claims regarding the catholicity of black literature and the implications of this shift for the way religion was valued. Writers such as James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Robert Hayden, and Ann Petry offered different perspectives on the role of writers and the relationship between race and American literature. Rather than simply narrating universalism’s triumph, these artists and intellectuals displayed a concern with digging more deeply into the particulars of black life—including its religious traditions—in service to an assertion of racial catholicity. They also erred on the side of valuing aesthetic craft and cultivating the specific forms most capable of achieving such universality. Here the particulars of religion figured as key to arguing that racial aesthetics, and thus black people, were by definition American.

The opening chapter reads two mid-century poets, Lorine Niedecker and Gwendolyn Brooks, as chroniclers of socioecological transition in the immediate postwar period. While environmental historians have recently turned attention to the suburbs as the key site of inquiry into changing postwar conditions, the chapter emphasizes the rural and urban peripheries as locales that reveal many of the emerging characteristics of the Great Acceleration. Turning first to Lorine Niedecker, the chapter describes her development of a poetics attentive to uneven development, residual forms of life, and ecosystemic degradation in the mixed economy of rural Wisconsin. The second half of the chapter moves from Niedecker’s rural Wisconsin to Brooks’s urban Chicago. Brooks explores the production of space in relation to the forms of environmental racism emerging in South Side housing and neighborhood conditions after 1945.

This chapter continues the investigation of the two authors with a comparison of Wright's 1941 photographic essay 12 Million Black Voices and his final literary publication, The Outsider, set in Chicago and Harlem, to Brooks' 1945 collection of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, and her only novel, Maud Martha (1953). The chapter argues that migration to the city and its unkept promise of freedom left African Americans on Chicago's South Side suspended between two planes of existence. The harshest points of this suspension were the one-bedroom kitchenette apartments that began to burst as more migrants poured into Bronzeville. Through their work, Brooks and Wright illustrates an acute consciousness of the symbiotic relationship between the streets of Bronzeville and opportunities for cultural production.

The Introduction maps out the goals and course of the book, moving from a practical demonstration of the interpretive gains of alternative reading strategies for a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks to a historical survey of the previously unconnected theoretical claims for a poetics of materiality and the radical formalism adequate to a poetry of radical artifice. With a focus on the paragrammatic networks of the signifier theorized by Julia Kristeva, the Introduction traces a lineage from Stéphane Mallarmé and William Carlos Williams to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jan Mukařovský and Roman Jakobson, to Robert Creeley, Robert Smithson, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson. The Introduction concludes with the political implications of such radical formalism, drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière and Sara Ahmed.

This chapter considers the outcomes of some interactions among black South African and African American writers discussed in preceding chapters, but “updated” here in the context of the 1980s. It explores how earlier transnational engagements led to a series of subsequent texts and interpersonal relationships as the global antiapartheid movement began to reach its apex. Those works—by Richard Rive, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks—attest to the impress of earlier writers (Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Bessie Head) and, by returning us to the matter of cultural influence, point to the considerable role South Africa and its writers played in shaping African American writerly imaginations. Furthermore, it is argued that Cliff's poem “Constructive Engagement” plays with the name of the Reagan-era U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa to powerful effect.

This chapter focuses on the South Side Community Art Center and the South Side Writers' Group that predate the fame of Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks. As pillars of the Bronzeville's community, these institutions of art and literature generated a unique aesthetic consciousness/political ideology for which Chicago Black Renaissance would garner much fame. The chapter emphasizes how the artists and authors of both institutions evidenced a strong commitment to and conditioning by the streets and people of Bronzeville. The aesthetic formula characterized by these visual arts and literary groups collided in ways that always articulated a vital political and modern consciousness that sustained the Renaissance movement into the 1940s.

This chapter traces the complex interplay of race, geography, and cultural criticism that permeated the Renaissance as a whole. Beginning with the categorization of the neighborhood as the Black Belt and ending with heralding itself as “Bronzeville,” the chapter examines the interaction of newly arrived migrants with previously settled African Americans that bloomed into an exciting community. It specifically analyzes two popular intersections in the South Side of Chicago—the “Stroll” district (the intersection of 35th and State Streets) during the early 1920s, and the intersection at 47th and South Parkway. This intersection, along with the Stroll, served as foundations and sources of work for famed African American musicians, artists, and writers, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

The most immediate reason why poets, like anyone else, may be interested in money certainly includes their being short of it. This chapter brings together poems that are about problems related first to not having money, and needing to request support from more powerful and wealthy persons, then to means-testing when confronted by someone begging, and how such encounters relate to a poet’s own need for financial support, to problems with charitable giving and distance, leading to a discussion of two poems questioning the value of saving and bequeathing nothing but money. The chapter includes discussions of money-related poems or passages from longer works by Chaucer, Jonson, Johnson, Wordsworth, Graves, Loy, Bishop, Brooks, and Larkin.