"The Blackstone Rangers" by Gwendolyn Brooks

Tuesday's POL featured poet is Gwendolyn Brooks, a famous contemporary African American poet. Brooks died in 2000, leaving behind a wealth of poetry and short fiction, along with a legacy of awards and attributions.

Key terms: free verse, alliteration, repetition

The Blackstone Rangers

IAS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES

There they are.
Thirty at the corner. 
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
that do not want to heal.


IITHE LEADERS

Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop.
They cancel, cure and curry.
Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing 
the cold bonbon,
the rhinestone thing. And hardly
in a hurry.
Hardly Belafonte, King,
Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap. 
Bungled trophies.
Their country is a Nation on no map.
Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop
in the passionate noon,
in bewitching night
are the detailed men, the copious men.
They curry, cure,
they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts 
are not divine, vivacious; the different tins 
are intense last entries; pagan argument;
translations of the night.
The Blackstone bitter bureaus
(bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse
unfashionable damnations and descent;
and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand, 
construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace.


IIIGANG GIRLS
A Rangerette

Gang Girls are sweet exotics.
Mary Ann
uses the nutrients of her orient,
but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel 
beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove. 
(Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will 
dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.)

Mary is
a rose in a whiskey glass.

Mary’s
Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils 
fret frankly, lilac hurries on.
Summer is a hard irregular ridge.
October looks away.
And that’s the Year!
                     Save for her bugle-love. 
Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion.
Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under
the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger 
bringing
an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag. 
“Where did you get the diamond?” Do not ask: 
but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask 
and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips
and help him clutch you.

Love’s another departure.
Will there be any arrivals, confirmations? 
Will there be gleaning?

Mary, the Shakedancer’s child
from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at 
her laboring lover ....
                     Mary! Mary Ann!
Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps! 
for sudden blood, aborted carnival,
the props and niceties of non-loneliness—
the rhymes of Leaning.

The Blackstone Rangers was a gang that developed in Chicago in the 1950s, started by "Jeff" Fort and Eu"Gene" Hairston. Initially, the group's intent was to uphold civil rights and protect community kids from other street gangs, and they were even given government funding as a non-profit group, but eventually they expanded membership and became an enormous, power-wielding street gang themselves. In this poem, Brooks examines the group from three different perspectives: the "disciplines," the "leaders," and the "gang girls." The tone is confusing and jagged, such that it is hard for the reader to get a good understanding of what the Blackstone Rangers are. This seems to be her purpose-- in their time, it was difficult to know who the group were. They were "sores in the city / that do not want to heal" (a burden on the community), they "cancel, cure, and curry" their "Nation on no map" (idealists, with a pure idea of their community and their goals to save it), they are the "Ranger / bringing / an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag" (giving stolen gifts to their girls, asking for particular favors in return). The tone of the poem reflects a timid danger - the narrator herself seems to be unsure as to whether she should trust or doubt this large, powerful group of men.

http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/172095