Collage, Confession, and Crisis in Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming

Abstract

In 2003, Alison Halliday was one of the first scholars to define the verse novel for young readers, explaining that "while there is an increasing role for narrative elements in these verse novels, they continue to be made up of separate lyric poems. [...]the verse novel links each poem within the text in a linear fashion" (223). Much like photography, the haiku depends upon both the writer/creator and the reader/viewer. [...]the response of the reader constitutes a significant portion of the impact of the poem. Each of the paratextual elements (family tree, scrapbooked photo pages, and author's note) further invites the reader to examine the verse novel not only as a fictive or poetic work, but also as a window into Woodson's personal history. [...]each of these accompaniments romanticizes the way in which memory and childhood are portrayed-the pages of photographs and the prefatory family tree create the feeling of opening an actual, material scrapbook. The idea of writing stories that didn't deal with them just seemed so unrealistic and not true" (157). [...]for Woodson, the connection between her writing and the tradition of the problem novel addresses an underlying truth that constitutes the core of writing for young people.

In discussing the writing process for her 2014 verse novel Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson has said, "Memories don't come back as straight narrative. They come in little bursts with white space all around them. It felt more realistic to write mine as poems" (qtd. in Galanes). Brown Girl Dreaming traces the experiences of Jackie, a first-person speaker who is representative of the author's childhood self, and explores issues that affected the speaker's family, including racism and the civil rights movement, divorce and the broken family, and illness and death. Further underscoring her role as archivist,¹ Woodson explains in her author's note to Brown Girl Dreaming: "that's what this book is-my past, my people, my memories, my story" (323).² While Woodson's work is primarily lyrical, it contains, dispersed among the free-verse poems, a series of eleven haiku and is bookended by a series of scrapbook-like documents-including a family tree, several family photo album pages, and an author's note-that reveal the autobiographical elements to the reader. In this respect, Brown Girl Dreaming is not just about a personal and national history, but also about formal experimentation and the politics of form; this emphasis on form leads to what I term "the collage effect."³

Traditionally, collage has its roots in the plastic arts and is broadly defined as the layering and linking together of miscellany within a single work. However, scholars such as Rona Cran and Rachel Farebrother have demonstrated that collage in literary texts moves beyond the assemblage of fragments, "bringing ideas into conversation with one another" (Cran 4), encouraging a "sense of defamiliarization" in the reader/viewer in order to fix attention on "uneasy realities" in contemporary culture (Farebrother 9), and ultimately emerging as a powerful site for political resistance. I argue that in contemporary children's and young adult literature, the collage effect is used in order to unsettle the traditional Künstlerroman, the artist's coming-of-age narrative, and make visible the political and social forces that help to shape the writer's developmental process. Woodson's verse novel employs collage in both form and content by blending lyric, document, image, and found family object in order to give voice to the difficulties experienced by her protagonist and to explore both confession and crisis. Specifically, the collage effect highlights the way in which Brown Girl Dreaming engages with movements in contemporary American poetry and children's literature: namely, confessional poetry and the problem novel.

Confessional poetry, as first described in 1959 by M. L. Rosenthal in his review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies, is the blending of the poet and the persona in poem and often includes the exploration of sometimes controversially personal subject matter. Within Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming, confession takes the form of acknowledged autobiography by the author through attention to painful experiences in her childhood that helped to shape her as a writer. This is most evident in her haiku series, as well as in the three introductory poems. The juxtaposition of haiku and free verse, family tree and personal photographs, the lyric expressive style and the documentary mode, and the author's note and paratextual material contributes to the overall collage aesthetic and confessional experience. The central problem explored in Woodson's text is racism and its impact on young people. In order to foreground the political and social themes in Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson layers and draws connections between the fragments of Jackie's experiences and those of historically significant figures in the African American community, among them, most notably, the poet and activist Langston Hughes. Hughes's influence on Woodson is exemplified throughout her collection, but most clearly in her poem "learning from langston." Understanding the connections brought about by the collage effect enables readers to trace Woodson's movement from private self-exploration to public political advocacy.

Defining and Historicizing the Verse Novel for Young Readers

To begin, it is important to situate a discussion of collage, confession, and crisis in Brown Girl Dreaming within the context of the verse novel form, as well as the traditions of contemporary American poetry and contemporary children's literature from which it draws. While confession and crisis are evident in many contemporary verse novels for young readers (such as Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust [1997], Patricia McCormick's Sold [2006], and Kwame Alexander's The Crossover [2014]), I focus on Brown Girl Dreaming both because of its critical acclaim and because it serves as a representative example of the techniques and effects found in many other contemporary verse novels. Similarly, Woodson is not the only verse novelist drawing on the traditions of collage in her work; authors such as Marilyn Nelson, Helen Frost, Sharon Creech, and Carole Boston Weatherford also make use of this mode in their poetry.

Marking a significant moment in twenty-first-century literary culture, the verse novel for young readers has emerged as a significant and popular hybrid form that engages with multiple genres including poetry, prose, and drama. The earliest practitioners include Virginia Euwer Wolff and Hesse, and in recent years, verse novels have won many of the most prestigious awards in the field of children's literature.⁴ Most importantly for my purposes, African American authors, some of whom are among the award winners, are making a significant contribution to this burgeoning mode of poetic expression.⁵ Despite its newfound recognition, the verse novel is not a new form in either children's or adult literature; in both cases it dates back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁶ The recent expansion in the publication of the verse novel for young readers has corresponded with a similar trend in poetry for adults, with works for both audiences tackling a wide variety of subject matter and employing a multitude of formal strategies even within a single text, from haiku to sonnets to free verse.

In 2003, Alison Halliday was one of the first scholars to define the verse novel for young readers, explaining that "while there is an increasing role for narrative elements in these verse novels, they continue to be made up of separate lyric poems. Thus the verse novel links each poem within the text in a linear fashion" (223). Two years later, in their discussion of the form in "It Could Be Verse: The 2005 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry," Richard Flynn, Kelly Hager, and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr. noted that "the poet who chooses this form fashions an over-arching narrative, making explicit the links between the individual poems and foregrounding the teleological structure of the whole. By highlighting the paths that lead from one poem to another, verse-novelists draw attention to the book as a constructed whole, with a pattern and a logic to its design" (429). That same year, moving away from structure and focusing on content, Joy Alexander argued that the verse novel explores a "single perspective, thought, voice, or incident," that "the form lends itself to the confessional and to the expression of feelings" (281), and finally, that "the most prominent feature of the verse-novel is voice" (282).

In 2011, after over a decade of verse novel production, scholarly opinions began to solidify with the landmark publication of editors Shelby Wolf, Karen Coats, Patricia Enciso, and Christine Jenkins's Handbook of Research on Children's and Young Adult Literature. Patty Campbell had previously underscored the critical shift to the emotional aspect of verse novels in her 2004 article "The Sand in the Oyster: Vetting the Verse Novel" Campbell suggested that most verse novels are told in the present tense using first-person narration and that "they are all intensely internal, focused on the characters' feelings. … Characteristically, the action centers on an emotional event, and the rest of the novel deals with the characters' feelings before and after" (614). In their contribution to the 2011 Handbook, "A Burgeoning Field or a Sorry State: U.S. Poetry for Children, 1800-Present," Laura Apol and Janine L. Certo echoed the importance of narrative, defining the children's and young adult verse novel as "characterized by a series of short individual poems linked by topic, character, and plot, though it is the inclusion of plot that differentiates this form from a collection of poems on a theme. Most often, the poems are arranged in chronological order … the ordering of the poems is important to the developing narrative line" (284-85; italics in original). In the same volume, Mike Cadden further noted in "Genre as Nexus" that the verse novel provides "brief, lyrical glimpses of character and thought" and that structurally it is "mostly air" (309).

Looking back on these definitions, it is clear that the contemporary verse novel for young readers is characterized by its hybrid construction. In the same vein as the hybrid pictorial and textual narratives of Jeff Kinney and Brian Selznick (Diary of a Wimpy Kid series [2007-present] and The Invention of Hugo Cabret [2007], respectively), the verse novel combines elements from poetry, fiction, and drama. It is this convergence of generic conventions that makes the form distinctive. The verse novel, as I define it, is a series of poems linked by a central narrative thread. Fragmentation and white space are significant for what they require of the reader, who must pause for contemplation and fill in the gaps created by a collage of language, line, poem, scene, and paratext; this process creates an intimacy between the reader and the speaker of the poems. The presentation of voice is a key feature of the form as well: poems may be told in the first person, focusing on one character's experiences, or they may explore multiple characters' perspectives; either way, the narrative voice usually highlights characters' internal processes and frequently emphasizes the confessions and problems of its speakers. By weaving together narrative and the confessional voice, the verse novel provides the structural space necessary for reader contemplation and becomes a mode in which young readers can actively participate in the making of meaning by putting together the fragments of someone else's life and then parlaying the resulting insights into a deeper understanding of their own experience.

In addition to its combination of various generic qualities, the verse novel also works within multiple poetic traditions: narrative, dramatic, and lyric. While Cadden focuses in "The Verse Novel and the Question of Genre" on the elements of the dramatic that are evident within the form, in this article I focus on the use and blending of the narrative and the lyric. Dick Higgins asserts in Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia that "much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media. This is no accident" (18). He defines "intermedial" works as those that "lie between" categories, noting that "there is fusion between these so that we cannot deal with just one of their origins but must deal with the work as both" (16; italics in original). In his discussion of genre-bending books for young readers, Thomas explains the relationship between traditional poetry and more experimental or nontypical categories of poetry (such as sound poetry, conceptual poetry, visual poetry, and prose poetry), observing that "Having radiated so far from the center [from the typical case prototype of a poem], we reach text that exists in a generic borderland, somewhere between, say, graphic design and poetry, or music and poetry, or philosophy and poetry, texts that could be called … 'intermedial,' or experimental, or … 'avant-garde'" ("Panel as Page" 479-80). The verse novel also lives in this "generic borderland"-somewhere between the lyric, the narrative, and the dramatic.

In addition to its genre-blurring qualities, the verse novel also reaches into the traditions of adult poetry for its influences. As critics such as Apol and Certo, Flynn, and Thomas have suggested, the distinctions between children's and adult poetry are and have always been blurred. Flynn contends that "the idea that an innocent and separate realm of children's poetry should exist at all is questionable at best" (40). Likewise, Thomas points out that "most critical treatments of children's poetry, particularly U.S. children's poetry, divorce the object of their study from its larger, poetic context. That is, children's poetry is usually treated in isolation, as something wholly apart from the poetic traditions of adult poetry" (Poetry's Playground xiii). In light of these observations, I argue that the verse novel form's attendance to issues of confession through free verse and the lyric mode can in fact be associated with similar trends in contemporary adult poetry.

The elements so integral to lyric poetry-emotional expression and the use of the first person-are also intimately related to the confessional mode in poetry.⁷ Gregory Orr suggests that the confessional mode within American poetry was established by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the nineteenth century with their "personal lyric[s] centered in urgent autobiography" (651). It wasn't until the 1950s and '60s that the label confessional was applied to the work of poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton, who utilized the first-person voice of the lyric to explore transgressive autobiographical subjects. Significantly, confessionalism as a movement came about in American poetry during the exact historical moment that Woodson's poetry depicts. While confessional poets of the 1950s and '60s used autobiographical elements in their work to deal openly with taboo topics such as mental illness, familial trauma, alcoholism, and death, Woodson contributes to the tradition of confession within poetry through her frank discussion of racism and childhood.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the postconfessional lyric emerged as "a variant on the autobiographical dramatic lyric," and, as Orr details, the postconfessionals can be understood "as extending and expanding the implications of the original confessional enterprise" and as bringing "lyric strategies to bear on autobiographical material" (650, 654). As Peter Abbs suggests, much contemporary poetry owes a debt to the "space opened up by" confessional poetry as a movement: "From the 1970s onwards, politically motivated poets, particularly feminist and black writers … have drawn on the articulations of trauma as the wellspring of poetry" (82). Woodson's overarching accomplishment in Brown Girl Dreaming is her use of the autobiographical first person and lyric aspects of the confessional mode to address the erasure of African American history and experience through the layering of personal, family, and cultural stories. In Brown Girl Dreaming, she draws attention to the unspoken in her emphasis on the individual and cultural trauma of racism.

Following the development of the confessional movement in poetry, the problem novel in children's literature emerged in the 1960s and '70s as a generic mode focusing on taboo topics of importance in the lives of young people. David Russell notes that "the problem novel" trend, "which focuses on a singular, 'hot' issue that affects the protagonist" (218; italics in original), was "characterized by a franker and more open approach to subjects once thought taboo in children's books" (20). These topics are similar to those explored by the confessional poets: sexuality, puberty, drug use, teen pregnancy, suicide, divorce, and mental illness. Drawing a connection between the problem novel and the confessional mode in her discussion of the young adult novel of development, Roberta Seelinger Trites references the "didactic impulse" of "the first-person confessional narrators of the 1970s problem novel" (71). I would add, along with Trites, that the confessional mode of the problem novel is valuable in its contribution to the tradition of growth narratives in children's and young adult literature, as well as its engagement in a cultural dialogue concerning taboo subjects.

Haiku as Collage

The use of haiku, and particularly of haiku and free-verse lyrics in a single collection, is not unique to Woodson's verse novel.⁸ The haiku is a notable and useful formal choice for Brown Girl Dreaming in that the classic Japanese haiku sought to suppress individuality and subjectivity so that the writer could enter into a state of nothingness, free from thought or emotion and in unity with nature (Hakutani 2).Woodson's haiku, however, can be linked to the vibrant tradition of the modern American haiku, which demonstrates how human action emulates nature, and in some ways pushes back against the idea that the self must disappear in order to be free and unburdened. Her haiku series pays particular attention to the unspoken, the revelation of trauma, and the writer's coming of age.

Ezra Pound, speaking to the influence that the art of haiku had on his poetry, noted that "in a poem of this sort [haiku], one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective" (467). While the haiku as a form might seem deceptively simple-with its use of regular syllabics (5-7-5) and abbreviated length-or even an obvious choice for a book of poetry aimed at young readers, the form in its American manifestation has roots in the avant-garde movement in American poetry and requires a significant amount of interpretive work from the reader. As Yoshinobu Hakutani maintains, "the haiku poet draws only an outline or a highly selective image, and the reader must complete the vision" (2). Much like photography, the haiku depends upon both the writer/creator and the reader/viewer. Thus the response of the reader constitutes a significant portion of the impact of the poem.

Part of the collage aspect of her work, Woodson's haiku are striking when juxtaposed with the one- to three-page-long free-verse poems surrounding each of them. Her haiku are in direct conversation with the poems that frame them, and in some ways they function as tightly condensed versions of those surrounding poems, synthesizing while simultaneously providing significant insight into the issues explored in each section of the collection. Divided into three topical categories that at times overlap, Woodson's haiku focus on memory and writing, solitude and contemplation, and personal crises or issues. All but one of the poems in the series have the same title, "how to listen," followed by the haiku's number in the series. Significantly, the titles allude to an admonition to children to pay attention when being told to do something by an authority figure, as well as the call that poetry extends to its readers in its emphasis on the aurality of poetry spoken aloud. The titles also suggest the process by which Woodson as a poet learned to listen and to tell the story of her past and her people.

The first haiku in the series, "how to listen #1," appears in part 1 of the verse novel, "i am born." In the poem, memory, body, and emotion intertwine as a reflection of Jackie's early life in Columbus, Ohio, with her mother, father, and siblings: "Somewhere in my brain/each laugh, tear and lullaby/becomes memory" (20; italics in original). This poem encapsulates the drive of the entire collection; the focus of the narrative is on remembering a history in order to gain insight into the self and understand how personal and cultural history shapes an individual. The "Somewhere" with which the poem begins signifies the searching and recovery that the work does for the writer. The words "brain," "laugh," "tear," and "lullaby" emphasize the attention to the embodied experience of the speaker. "Brain" directs the reader again to the thought and knowledge that come from searching; "laugh" and "lullaby" doubly allude to the role of voice in memory through storytelling and language; and "tear" draws attention not only to the visual aspect of memory (the mind's eye), but also to the pain that comes from memory, specifically recollections of hurt, loss, and hate. The final line, "becomes memory" underscores the process of experience developing into memory in the present tense. The word "memory" is the only italicized word in the poem, and, significantly, this final word is one on which the reader lingers because of its italicization and placement. In this poem, the insight that is revealed has to do with how the past and present are woven together in the mind of the speaker/writer. Painful, pleasurable, and soothing past experiences comingle, and the speaker is able to communicate this experience and internal process only through the rhythmic language of poetry.

In the second haiku in the series, "how to listen #2," Woodson examines an early experience in which racist attitudes in her town were directed at her. This poem appears in part 2 of the verse novel in a section entitled "the stories of south carolina run like rivers." In this poem, the speaker confronts the realities of moving from the North to the South-from Columbus, Ohio, to Greenville, South Carolina-as well as the impact of living in the midst of the civil rights movement and in a time when Jim Crow laws still remained in full force: "In the stores downtown/we're always followed around/just because we're brown" (82). Once again, place is significant in this poem, but the focus shifts from the internal space of the mind to the external, public place of "stores downtown." There is also a shift from the first person singular possessive ("my") to the first person plural subjective ("we"). This poem continues the focus on the self and the nature of the self, but again there is a shift from the internal process and experience to the external body. Woodson's attention moves from how the speaker sees herself through her thoughts in retrospect to the way others see her through her racial identity. Formally, the poem also includes end rhyme, which is not standard for the haiku. This use of rhyme ("downtown," "around," and "brown") provides rhythmic, cyclical repetitions for the reader; the poem becomes more playful in its tone and meter in that it imitates the accented rhyming endings of a nursery rhyme. An ironic move by Woodson, considering the weight of the poem's content, it also alludes to the poem's primary insight: the profound effect of racist attitudes upon children.

The penultimate haiku in the series, "how to listen #9," highlights the significance of solitude and writing for the speaker. This poem unites many topics utilized throughout the series, including isolation, contemplation, memory, and creativity: "Under the back porch/there's an alone place I go/writing all I've heard" (299). Place in this poem shifts closer to the natural world-in the first poems in the series, place is internal, soothing, and private, then moves to external, commercial, hostile, and public. In this poem, place becomes private, external, but also linked to the domestic space. "Under the back porch" is a liminal space between the yard and the house, a space that is open to and suggestive of the natural world. This poem likewise alludes back to "how to listen #6," which has the speaker sitting in nature under "the shade of [her] block's oak tree" (225). Under the porch and under the oak tree are both places of safety and "alone place[s]" (299) where Jackie is able to nurture her artistic gift. The speaker changes back to the subjective, this time to the first person singular; the focus on the self is emphasized by the repetition of "I" in the second and third lines. The final line of the poem emphasizes the importance of solitude and listening, as the speaker retreats to her secret space to write all that she has heard. It is also significant that the verb "writing" is progressive and active; writing is emphasized as a process. Much like the process of experience being converted into memory in the mind, writing is the external process of listening being transformed into art.

Overall, the haiku series connects across the book to form a narrative that emphasizes the budding writer's experience of the world around her, charting how painful events such as experiencing racist attitudes ("how to listen #2"), the illness of a loved one ("how to listen #3"), and bullying ("how to listen #4"), as well as joyful experiences such as friendships and sharing dreams ("how to listen #5") and self-discovery ("p.s. 106 haiku") are ingrained in the psyche of a child. As in the first haiku, the final five move from the description of experiences to the author's process of converting memories and embodied experiences into art, emphasizing the significance of place in the artist's coming of age.

Woodson's haiku in Brown Girl Dreaming bring the subjectivity of the poet/speaker to the forefront, reinterpreting and pushing back against the drive of the traditional haiku, while simultaneously, as evidenced by the titles, underscoring one of the tenets of classic haiku in their concern for silence and stillness. The haiku discussed above demonstrate the shift in Woodson's artist's coming-of-age narrative from the internal self-exploration to the external, public activism of her writing. Her haiku series operates through the slowing of the narrative pacing that encourages reader contemplation in poetic silence, as well as the emphasis on listening as the first step toward political advocacy. Through the layering and linking of fragments of experiences in a single poetic form intertwined across the narrative, Woodson draws out the political implications that undergird her collage techniques.

Confession: Autobiography and Naming

Just as the haiku works as collage through fragmentation, the first three lyric, free-verse poems in the collection and multiple elements of the paratext in Brown Girl Dreaming enact collage, cuing the reader to the autobiographical and confessional nature of Woodson's verse novel. Through a variety of techniques, these first three poems and the paratext blend together the fragments that ultimately make up the tapestry of explored self throughout the narrative. The first poem in the collection, "february 12, 1963," sets the stage in history, linking Woodson's narrative to the civil rights movement and through place, drawing the reader's attention to both Jackie's birthplace in Ohio and her second childhood home in South Carolina. Woodson's next poem uses fragments of document, history, and lyric voice to reemphasize the significance of place, the past, and language. The third poem then moves directly into the narrative of Jackie's family, highlighting their concerns and the tensions underlying their relationships.

From the first pages of the verse novel, in the section "i am born," readers are immersed in the personal experiences and origin story of the speaker. The first two poems, "february 12, 1963" and "second daughter's second day on earth," are directly focused on birth and history. Woodson begins "february 12, 1963" with the words "I am born on a Tuesday" and continues, "a country caught//between Black and White" (1). Immediately, the historical roots of her narrative take hold and firmly connect the self to place and history. The poem continues this focus on civil rights era history: "February 12, 1963/and every day from this moment on,/brown children like me can grow up/free" (2). The year of Jackie's birth is marked historically as the defining year of the civil rights movement; ultimately, February 12, 1963, marks Jackie's birth into a world on the brink of change, and particularly changes that drastically altered the quality of life for African Americans.

The poem ends with the image of stories running "like rivers/through my veins" (2), echoing Langston Hughes's poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," in which Hughes's speaker similarly invokes the metaphor of the river and its connection to the body: "I've known rivers:/Ancient, dusky rivers.//My soul has grown deep like the rivers" (80). Significantly, Walt Whitman was the model and inspiration for both Hughes and the confessional poets. As George Hutchinson notes, Hughes "early sensed the affinity between the inclusive 'I' of Whitman and the 'I' of the spirituals, whose fusion shaped one of his first published poems, 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers'" (415). Hutchinson goes on to argue that "even in this poem about the depth of the Negro's soul Hughes avoids racial essentialism while nonetheless stressing the existential, racialized conditions of black and modern identity" (415). I maintain that Woodson's first poem in Brown Girl Dreaming and her collection overall also strive to emulate Hughes's focus on the individualized and particularized identity as well as the cultural experience of living as a black child during the civil rights era. This is particularly evident in the poems "how to listen #2," which broadly identifies the cultural experience of racial discrimination, and "the fabric store," which comes just a few pages later and describes a particular phenomenon that Jackie's grandmother experiences in a store in downtown Greenville "where a woman is paid …/to follow colored people around in case they try to/steal something" (91).

Hughes himself was a collage artist, as Katharine Capshaw indicates in her Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks; this collage aesthetic is particularly evident in Hughes and Milton Meltzer's 1956 photobook A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, which highlights text/image interaction through "photographs that incorporate language within them, images of ripped headlines from newspapers, and portraits conjoined with quotations" (Capshaw 107). By weaving together her own childhood and growth with those of Hughes, whom she cites in the epigraph and refers to throughout Brown Girl Dreaming, Woodson is able to draw on the history of a writer who wrote about his own experience and struggle with racism and link it to her own. This collaging of personal and national history contributes significantly to the impact of Woodson's verse novel.

In "second daughter's second day on earth," Woodson again blends her personal history with national history, a technique that she uses throughout Brown Girl Dreaming. The poem begins, "My birth certificate says: Female Negro/Mother: Mary Anne Irby, 22, Negro/Father: Jack Austin Woodson, 25, Negro" (3). The repetition of the final word in each line, "Negro," emphasizes its significance as a marker, and these first three lines take on the feel of a collaged legal document within the poem.⁹ The poem mixes historical and documentary-style narrative, formatted with justified type and left-margin alignment, with stanzas rich in voice and lyric that are centered and italicized. After noting that in Birmingham Martin Luther King Jr. "is planning a march on Washington," and in Harlem Malcolm X "is standing on a soapbox/talking about a revolution," the poem moves into lyric: "Outside the window of University Hospital,/snow is slowly falling. So much already/covers this vast Ohio ground" (3; italics in original). The speaker then follows up with other images of Rosa Parks and Freedom Singers, quoting lyrics from the protest song "We Shall Overcome" The poem goes on to name not only King, Malcolm X, and Parks, but also James Baldwin and Ruby Bridges, as important figures on whom Jackie might model herself as she grows.

As the poem progresses, Woodson shifts back and forth between images of national and personal history. She alludes to being "named for this place" as "Another Buckeye!" (4; italics in original). The poem ends decisively on a dream or a hope: that whoever and whatever Jackie becomes, she will be "ready/to change the world" (5; italics in original). In "second daughter's second day on earth," the collection's use of collage begins to emerge; personal document, historical reference, civil rights protest song lyrics, and free verse blend to create the narrative that shapes Jackie and her location in history. These first two poems set the tone for the collection by situating the character historically and retrospectively in a world on the edge of the changes that will be brought about by the civil rights movement. These poems suggest Woodson's desire to locate her personal history within the history of those who, through their activism, transformed the world for brown children profoundly and forever.

The third poem in the verse novel, "a girl named jack," moves away from historical situation to personal narrative. The poem is made up of a dialogue between Jackie's mother, father, and aunts about choosing her name. Her father suggests that she be named after him, but the women are wary of naming a girl "Jack." Each of these adults anticipates what her name will do for her, to her, and to them. Her father suggests that if she is named Jack she "can't help but/grow up strong" "people will look at her twice" and "she'll make that name her own" (6-7; italics in original). Her father ultimately leaves angry, and her mother decides to name her Jackie, short for Jacqueline, "just in case/I grew up and wanted something a little bit longer/and further away from/Jack" (7). This poem sets up the tensions that will play out between Jackie's father and mother, and also emphasizes the intimate connection of adult anxieties, values, and hopes to the act of naming a child. Additionally, this moment draws attention to the ways in which personal, family, and national history collide in the intimate act of naming, as well as the way in which power dynamics play out between adults and children.

Each of the paratextual elements (family tree, scrapbooked photo pages, and author's note) further invites the reader to examine the verse novel not only as a fictive or poetic work, but also as a window into Woodson's personal history. Moreover, each of these accompaniments romanticizes the way in which memory and childhood are portrayed-the pages of photographs and the prefatory family tree create the feeling of opening an actual, material scrapbook. Again, these collage aspects of the verse novel create a sense of intimacy between the reader and the text and underscore the created aspects of the verse novel as an artifact.

The most significant of these elements is the three-page author's note. These pages include Woodson's meditation on memory, childhood, place, personal history, and family connections, as well as how each of these elements helped her to make sense of herself as a writer. In the confessional mode, the reader experiences a familiarity with and is made privy to the secrets of the author and the speaker of the narrative. The section begins, "Memory is strange" (323), and Woodson goes on to thank the family members who helped her to achieve a more complete understanding of her past. Ultimately, though, Woodson concludes that her writing was about personal discovery: "But at the end of the day, I was alone with Brown Girl Dreaming-walking through these memories and making sense out of myself as a writer in a way I had never done before" (325).

In reference to the difficult aspects of her past that she writes about (being separated from both her father and mother, her brother's illness, her experience with racist attitudes, her experience of the death of family members), Woodson clarifies, "I think my life was very complicated and very rich. … I was lucky enough to be born during a time when the world was changing like crazy-and … I was part of that change" (325). Throughout her collection, Woodson uses the confessional mode to speak the particular secret of her own desire to be a writer, and how this desire was coupled with her experiences of family turmoil, loss, and racism. In this section, as in the haiku series throughout the narrative, Woodson emphasizes the importance of solitude, contemplation, memory, and crisis as central to her writing process while at the same time acknowledging the fragmentary nature of her experiences and remembrances. The first three poems and the paratext act as a kind of personal myth for the author and her readers-an origin story that makes visible the interwoven nature of Woodson's childhood and the civil rights era, as well as her role as archivist on a personal, ancestral, and national scale.¹⁰

Crisis: The Cultural Trauma of Racism and the Problem Novel as Collage

The collaging of experience and the layering of personal and national history throughout Woodson's narrative likewise contribute to the impact of her verse novel. Much of Woodson's writing can be categorized under the umbrella of the problem novel. In his recent discussion of her oeuvre, Peter Kunze suggests that "Woodson maintains a realistic aesthetic, continuing the rich tradition of the problem novel to explore teen pregnancy, drug use, classism, racism, homophobia, and sexual abuse," further noting that "her body of work has made her one of the most well-regarded and highly awarded authors in contemporary children's and young adult literature" (73). In The Pleasures of Children's Literature, Perry Nodelman notes that problem novels are designed so that the ideologies about the issues with which the character struggles might be internalized within the young reader on her own journey toward identity formation. In a 2002 interview with Woodson, Jennifer Brown accounts for the author's awareness of the categorization of her books as problem novels: "Although Woodson says people pigeonhole her writing as 'issue-related' or 'edgy,' for her the books address universal questions" (157). As Woodson explains, "The questions that arise in the text were questions that arose for me [as a young person]. Why is there this fear of the other? What is this lesson my parents are trying to teach me about stay with your own, or don't stay with your own?" She continues, "So race and economic class and sexuality-these were always issues that were a part of my life. The idea of writing stories that didn't deal with them just seemed so unrealistic and not true" (157). Thus, for Woodson, the connection between her writing and the tradition of the problem novel addresses an underlying truth that constitutes the core of writing for young people. The idea that her works speak directly to the lives of actual young people and their experiences is valuable to her as a writer, but I would suggest that this is also true for the problem novel in general.

The problem novel for young people is complex in its approach to didacticism. By focusing on taboo subjects and difficulties experienced by teenagers, the texts issue a call to implied readers to reassess their values and attitudes about particular issues. Woodson has noted that her verse novel is not just for "brown girls," explaining that "there was something about 'brown' that felt more universal, and it was speaking to more people than myself" (Chow). Nevertheless, Brown Girl Dreaming deals with a myriad of issues experienced by an actual person growing up during the civil rights era. The crisis and the central problem that Woodson addresses in her poetry is the cultural trauma of racism and its real impact on young people. Despite the fact that her work can be considered an example of historical writing, the struggles experienced by young African Americans in her verse novel speak directly to the young people who continue to endure institutionalized racism today. In Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, Robin Bernstein writes about the influence of the US Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which legally desegregated schools in 1954 and was one of the earliest major victories of the civil rights movement. Bernstein argues that this ruling "acknowledged that children's daily lives are political" (241). Likewise, Woodson's choice to utilize the verse novel for young readers as a vehicle for her narrative of the first ten years of her life similarly argues for the significance of the experience of the child, especially during politically fraught eras. Although Woodson's narrative speaks specifically to her experiences in the late 1960s and early '70s, her writing echoes across history and into the present moment, shedding light on the ongoing issues surrounding race in contemporary US culture.

In this sense, Woodson's poetry underscores the cultural labor performed by the confessional mode. Again, just as the first three poems in her collection draw connections between her life and the historical figures who emerged as role models, throughout the verse novel Woodson knits her own personal history to those who influenced her as a writer, a dreamer, and a brown girl; this is evident from the earliest pages of Brown Girl Dreaming. For instance, the epigraph, taken from Hughes's poem "Dreams"-originally published in his 1932 collection The Dream Keeper and Other Poems, his most celebrated volume of poetry written for young readers-urges the addressee to "hold fast to dreams" and to hope in times of trial. Dreams and the hope that they inspired were immensely significant in Woodson's coming of age as a writer. As Woodson has noted in interviews, she "couldn't be a writer without hope," since "having hope allows us to move through it all" (Lodge). Woodson's choice of Hughes as a model throughout her collection further underscores her place in a long tradition of African American poets writing to encourage hope and dreaming for brown children in the midst of personal and cultural traumas.

Woodson's participation in the problem novel and the Künstlerroman tradition is further evidenced by the multiple poems in Brown Girl Dreaming that focus on writing; Jackie's development as a writer is the driving force behind the collection as a whole. The construction of her identity and development is first and foremost that of a storyteller and a writer. Once again, Woodson draws on Hughes as inspiration for her speaker's developing poetic sensibilities, citing him directly in her influence poem "learning from langston" (245). Here Woodson quotes Hughes's "Poem" from The Dream Keeper, which begins and ends with the line "I loved my friend." As Dianne Johnson points out in her introduction to Hughes's collected works, although the poems in The Dream Keeper "are positive and forward-looking, on the whole the collection represents a balancing act between exploration of harsh realities and celebration of the little joys of living … African American writers for young audiences have not had the luxury of indulging in the happy-ever-after fantasy. In many cases, the closest they come is writing that might be described as bittersweet" (5). Woodson's child speaker uses Hughes's poem as a model for her own poem in the same way that many beginning and experienced writers imitate and draw from poets whom they find inspiring.

Unlike the other poems from The Dream Keeper that Woodson references ("Dreams" and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"), "Poem" is a quieter, more internally focused piece emphasizing the significance of relationships, connections, and loss for the speaker. Woodson's speaker attempts to transform the feelings of loss communicated in Hughes's poem into a vision of hope in the present and for the future. While Hughes's poem focuses on the past tense ("I loved my friend" and "He went away from me"), Jackie's poem is rooted in the present tense and conveys a sense of optimism and happiness ("I love my friend/and still do/… we laugh. I hope she never goes away from me") (245; all italics in original). Mirroring Hughes's work, in Brown Girl Dreaming this hope and joy are juxtaposed with the bittersweet quality evident in poems such as "how to listen #2" and "second daughter's second day on earth," among others, which emphasize the harsh realities of the ongoing traumas of institutionalized racism that the young Jackie encounters on a daily basis.

The connection between the cultural trauma of racism and the depiction of Jackie's growth as an artist is unmistakable when one looks closely at the controversy surrounding Woodson's experience at the National Book Award ceremony in late 2014. After she won the top honor for Brown Girl Dreaming and gave her acceptance speech, the master of ceremonies, fellow children's author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), directed an offensive joke toward Woodson and the audience. He said, "Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your minds." While Handler subsequently apologized and pledged to raise funds for We Need Diverse Books, a grassroots movement to help diversify children's literature, his racially insensitive comments made at the exact moment that Woodson's artistic achievements were being celebrated served to remind her (and the audience), as Woodson herself puts it, "where I came from" ("The Pain"). Woodson penned a piece for the New York Times entitled "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke," in which she pointed out the connections between her coming of age, her writing, and Handler's comment, observing that "by making light of that deep and troubled history, [Handler] showed that he believed we were at a point where we could laugh about it all. His historical context, unlike my own, came from a place of ignorance." In describing her writing and its role in confronting the "deep and troubled history" of racism in America, Woodson highlights the connections among her development as a writer, the fractured experience of growing up as a "brown girl dreaming" (both yesterday and today), and the persistence of racism.

Woodson's verse novel is groundbreaking because it draws upon various traditions in order to illuminate contemporary issues surrounding racism and artistic expression. Brown Girl Dreaming creates collage through poetry, history, and self-exploration. Through the use of the verse novel-an emerging form drawing on multiple poetic traditions including the lyric and the haiku-the exploration of the personal and cultural history of racism, and the articulation of memory in the mode of confessional poetry, Woodson knits together the fragmented experience of being a young person of color during a time of change. Memory, history, voice, and confession are fractured because they are each bound to remembering and reconstructing the past, as well as to constructing and presenting the self to a larger audience. For Woodson (and for many other verse novelists), it is only through poetry and collage aesthetics that the complexities of these issues can be expressed. Her narrative puts into practice the discourse of collage as a way to use her own memories and childhood experiences to express the hybridity of African American cultural identity and the experience of the African American artist. In poem after poem, Woodson draws on the confessional, and, through the collage effect, demonstrates her speaker's progression as a writer from private, personal remembrances of her childhood to the public activism of confessional poetry.

Krystal Howard

Krystal Howard is an assistant professor of liberal studies at California State University, Northridge, where she teaches children's and adolescent literature, integrated teacher education, and comics. Her research focuses on form and cultural studies in literature for young readers; for more information, please visit <www.krystalhoward.com

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Notes

1. While I use "archivist" here to describe Woodson's practice, the terms "collagist" or "bricoleur" would also be appropriate. Claude Lévi-Strauss's conceptions of bricolage (construction from the linking together of bits and pieces out of whatever is at hand) and the bricoleur (the Do-It-Yourselfer) are instructive in understanding the significance of literary collage (17). Jacques Derrida further explains that the bricoleur uses "the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous" (285).

2. Woodson's message to the reader in her author's note reflects a developing trend within the form toward the confessional mode. Similarly, Thanhha Lai closes her 2011 verse novel with a letter addressed to the reader that begins: "Much of what happened to Hà, the main character in Inside Out and Back Again, also happened to me" (261), and Ellen Hopkins reveals in Crank (2004) that "while this is a work of fiction, it is loosely based on a very true story-my daughter's" (front matter). Marilyn Nelson also ends How I Discovered Poetry (2014) with an author's note that reads: "This book is a late-career retrospective, a personal memoir, a 'portrait of the artist as a young American Negro Girl'" (101).

3. Collage can be deployed in a myriad of ways within a single text: for example, on a micro-level, in which words, lines, and phrases are fragmented in poetry and then grouped together in a stanza, single poem, or series of poems; or on a macro-level, through the mingling of visual image and text or linguistic styles (lyric and documentary) throughout an entire work.

4. Among the notable award-winning verse novels are Wolff's True Believer (2001), which was the first verse novel to win the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and (in 2002) to be named a Printz Honor Book. Hesse's Out of the Dust (1997) was the first verse novel to win the Newbery Medal. In addition to winning the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, Lai's Inside Out and Back Again (2011) was a Newbery Honor Book.

5. Nikki Grimes's Dark Sons (2005) and Words with Wings (2013) were Coretta Scott King Honor Books, and Walter Dean Myers's Street Love (2006) was named a 2007 honor book for the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. Weatherford's Becoming Billie Holiday (2008) was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Woodson's first verse novel, Locomotion (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People and designated a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Her Brown Girl Dreaming won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the Coretta Scott King Award in 2014 and was named a Newbery Honor Book in 2015. Alexander's The Crossover won the Newbery Medal and was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry (2014) was also a Coretta Scott King Honor Book in 2015 and was named a 2015 honor book for the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry.

6. Anna Seward's Louisa: A Poetical Novel (1784) and Adelaide O'Keeffe's A Trip to the Coast; or, Poems Descriptive of Various Interesting Objects on the Sea-Shore (1819) are among the earliest examples. See Catherine Addison's "The Verse Novel as Genre: Contradiction or Hybrid?" for a discussion of Louisa and of the emergence of the verse novel phenomenon in adult literature. Donelle Ruwe's "Dramatic Monologues and the Novel-in-Verse: Adelaide O'Keeffe and the Development of Theatrical Children's Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century" discusses O'Keeffe's pioneering work in the verse novel for young readers.

7. As scholars such as Glenn Freeman, Diane Wood Middlebrook, and Robert Pinsky have noted, the term "confession" has multiple meanings. A confession might involve the admission of sin or guilt to one's community, or it could be a public testimony of personal beliefs or views. Both definitions involve the public revelation of something hidden or private through the use of the first-person point of view.

8. Woodson's work with the haiku follows in the footsteps of Sonia Sanchez, a poet and activist strongly associated with the Black Arts Movement of the mid-1960s (along with Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka), and of Richard Wright, author of Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945). Sanchez's I've Been a Woman and Like Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems, among other volumes, include haiku focused on bodily experiences and aurality in order to draw attention to politics. Late in his life, Wright became fascinated by the haiku, writing four thousand of them during a period of illness; a selection of these poems was eventually published posthumously as This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner (1998).

9. In their annual assessment of recently published children's poetry, the judges of the 2015 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry note that "there is much to admire" in this poem, citing "its forceful repetition of 'Negro'; the anaphoric repetition of 'In …' throughout; and the artful blending of music with an almost reporterly register" (Paul, Pendlebury, and Svonkin 340).

10. In many ways, Brown Girl Dreaming is a continuation of the personal, familial, and national archival work that Woodson began in her 2005 Show Way, a picture book based on her family history that examines how quilts have served as secret maps for girls and women across generations.

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