'How [they] got ovah:' Aesthetics of three Chicago Black women poets

The purpose of this study is to highlight the aesthetics of three 20th and 21st century Chicago Black women poets: Gwendolyn Brooks, Carolyn Rodgers, and Angela Jackson. My primary argument is that Chicago Black women poets exercise varying folk aesthetics which is to emphasize the different communities, or folks, with whom they are communicating. Folks, therefore, is the intended readership for the poets. Folk aesthetics is not to be viewed as a writing style catered solely to Black. Instead, it is an approach to writing for a particular subgroup of a larger society. None of my selected poets subscribe to dominant, institutionalized criterions of Anglo-American poetry. Chicago has significantly informed their perception of self which inadvertently affects the content and stylistic measures of their writings. I seek to examine the ways in which they define themselves by re-centering their individual experiences irrespective of dominant paradigms of womanhood. I am particularly concerned with how these poets challenge both Anglo-American and Black Arts Movement poetics and offer a multilayered perspective of how the city of Chicago has impacted the ways in which they express themselves creatively. Using the Great Migration as a launching pad for how the selected poets developed their aesthetic lens, my research will be unpacked through the following analytical frameworks: Black beauty businesses, The Black Arts Movement, blues, and jazz. These sub-topics are recurring themes in the literature of the poets and each impacted the ways in which these women were socialized in their city. I promote Black feminism as a theoretical practice through which their poetic voices can achieve agency.