Two things drew me back to this endeavor of addressing Gwendolyn Brooks. Thus, what I had to say about Gwendolyn Brooks lived in my computer’s files and not in the world beyond that.
But I got hung up, as I acknowledge in the essay, by a stanza I did not understand in the longer poem.
I began the essay in Washington, focusing on a line that has always been terribly important to me. When I returned to re-read this essay, I was struck by how ‘ethical’ its orientation was.
