“What Welfare Does to You”: Personhood in Baltimore’s Chicory

Abstract

This essay explores how women and children writing lyric poetry about welfare in the 1960s and 1970s for a government-funded publication dismantled the white liberal imagination of what made poverty and what made poetry. The focus is the September 1968 issue of Chicory, a literary magazine founded through the Community Action Program of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and written by mostly Black residents in Baltimore. By using methodologies from lyric theory, the essay connects the work of Chicory to the suggestion of child liberation in Black Arts Movement politics and to scholarship about the role of welfare in the arts. Poems by June Booth and by a group of children both echo models of white cisheteronormativity and push against them within the same editorial and political containers. Using lyric technologies, the poems conceal and reveal multiple state institutions, political imaginaries, social stereotypes, and individual testimonies.