Rodgers, Carolyn M(arie)
RODGERS, Carolyn M(arie)
Nationality: American. Born: Chicago, Illinois, 14 December 1945. Education: University of Illinois, Navy Pier, 1960–61; Roosevelt University, Chicago, 1961–65, B.A. in English 1981; Chicago State University, 1982; University of Chicago, M.A. in English 1984. Career: Y.M.C.A. social worker, Chicago, 1963–68; instructor in Afro-American literature, Columbia College, Chicago, 1969, and University of Washington, Seattle, 1970; writer-in-residence, Albany State College, Georgia, 1971, Malcolm X College, Chicago, 1971–72, and Roosevelt University, 1983; visiting professor of Afro-American literature, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1973; English remediation tutor, Chicago State University, 1981; instructor, Columbia College, 1989–91. Since 1998 faculty advisor to student newspaper and instructor in English, Harold Washington College. Columnist, Milwaukee Courier. Formerly Midwest editor, Black Dialogue, New York. Awards: Conrad Kent Rivers award, 1968; National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1969; Gwendolyn Brooks fellowship. Address: 12750 South Sangamon, Chicago, Illinois 60643, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
Paper Soul. Chicago, Third World Press, 1968.
Two Love Raps. Chicago, Third World Press, 1969.
Songs of a Blackbird. Chicago, Third World Press, 1969.
Now Ain't That Love. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1969.
For H.W. Fuller. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1970.
Long Rap/Commonly Known As a Poetic Essay. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1971.
How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems. New York, Doubleday, 1975.
The Heart As Ever Green. New York, Doubleday, 1978.
Translation. Chicago, Eden Press, 1980.
Eden and Other Poems. Chicago, Eden Press, 1983.
Morning Glory. Chicago, Eden Press, 1989.
We're Only Human. Chicago, Eden Press, 1994.
A Train Called Judah. Chicago, Eden Press, 1996.
The Girl with Blue Hair. Chicago, Eden Press, 1996.
Salt. Chicago, Eden Press, 1998.
Novel
A Little Lower Than the Angels. Chicago, Eden Press 1984.
*Critical Studies: "Contractions in Black Life: Recognized and Reconciled in "How I Got Ovah'" by Estella M. Sales, in College Language Association Journal (Atlanta), 25(1), September 1981; "Imagery in the Women Poems: The Art of Carolyn Rodgers" by Angelene Jamison, and "Running Wild in Her Soul: The Poetry of Carolyn Rodgers" by Bettye J. Parker-Smith, both in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans, Garden City, New York, Anchor-Doubleday, 1984; "The Poetics of Matrilineage: Mothers and Daughters in the Poetry of African American Women, 1965–1985" by Fabian Clements Worsham, in Women of Color: Mother-Daughter Relationships in 20th-Century Literature, edited by Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1996.
Carolyn M. Rodgers comments:
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. I seek to write simply, so that a child might understand, and to write profoundly, so that the educated, the intellectual may enjoy and find mental food. What is written by me is written through me as well. That is to say I am an instrument.
(1995) Reading over my first paragraph, which was written almost ten years ago, I think how noble and idealistic I was. I am sure that right now, today, I would not assign myself such a lofty, monumental task. I think I would say now I write because I love to and I do not know anything better to do except, perhaps, compose music and songs. I hope I leave a rich legacy of Afro-American literature behind, like many of my favorite Afro-American writers did.
* * *Carolyn M. Rodgers's poetry is a poetry of naming. What is to be named is how the personal and the political are interwoven in our behavior, in our dreams, in our daily ideologies. The difficulty for the namer, Rodgers would have us see, is in showing how the strands come together, in making one voice represent the many threads that compose the single psyche within culture: "I've had tangled feelings lately … /there are several of me and /all of us fight to show up at the same time" ("Breakthrough"). In the course of her work Rodgers speaks as a militant for black unity, as a lover, as a daughter, as a devout Christian, as a self-conscious artist. These personae, both complementary and contradictory, constitute a powerful image of black womanhood fighting to define itself against the power and privilege of the white world.
Given the dynamics of racial oppression, the plurality of Rodgers's voice is perhaps less remarkable than the fact of the voice per se. In "The Quality of Change" the poet refers to a muted past that reaches into the present:
we have spent the years
talking in profuse & varied
silences to people
who have erected walls for themselves
to hear through.
Her poems, especially the early works, are efforts to break the silences, to break down the walls. The reader must hear the harshness of life in the streets of Chicago, as in "U Name This One":
where pee wee cut lonnell fuh fuckin wid
his sistuh and blood baptized the street
at least twice ev'ry week and judy got
kicked outa grammar school fuh bein pregnant
and died tryin to ungrow the seed
Those things that have been hidden, hushed, or repressed in black culture must be recognized and understood, as are the forms of "high" white culture. The following is from "To the White Critics":
my baby's tears are a three-act play, a sonnet, a novel,
a volume of poems.
my baby's laugh is the point and view,
a philosophical expression of
oppression and survival
The self that challenges the oppressor also challenges itself, and Rodgers's work makes clear the complications that arise from trying to be free of damaging constraints. Many of her most personal poems address the problem that what is wrong usually comes packaged with what is right. A slavish sexuality may be the most honest ("Now Ain't That Love?"), the least visible revolutionary strategy may be the most effective ("For H.W. Fuller"), and material possessions may provide an intensely necessary pleasure ("Things"). The poems about her mother, for example, "It Is Deep," illustrate the contradictions of maternal gifts. The woman who
thinks that I am under the influence of
**communists**
when I talk about Black as anything
other than something ugly
is also
very obviously,
a sturdy Black bridge that I
crossed over, on
In Rodgers's aesthetic the challenge to the poet is to give form to the "consistent incongruity" ("Breakthrough") that characterizes her life. The measure of her success is our understanding that the incongruity is ours.
—Janis Butler Holm