Gwendolyn Brooks: October 18, 1975
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for her Annie Allen, as the first Black women ever to win the Prize. Annie Allen is about the life of black people living in urban areas, with Brooks trying to address political and social problems such as poverty and racism through the power of poetry. Brooks, who often wrote her poetry for young people, discussed many controversial issues in her poetry, such as abortion and suicide. She came to Plattsburgh on October 17, 1985.
She explained in a 1969 interview with George Stavros why poetry is important for her: "The poet deals in words with which everyone is familiar. We all handle words. And I think the poet, if he wants to speak to anyone, is constrained to do something with those words so that they will (I hate to use the word) mean something, will be something that a reader may touch." I think she wants to say the poetry can be inspiring to anybody, more so than speech. An example is her famous poem, “We Real Cool”:
The pool player.
Seven at the golden shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
The poems explains lives of black people and how they understand being cool in their life. She has said the pool players do not have pretensions to any glamor, as she says in the interview with Stavros: “They are probably dropouts, or at least in the poolroom when they should possibly be in school. … these are people who are essentially saying, ‘Kilroy is here. We are.’ But they're a little uncertain of the strength of their identity. The young black people in the poem respect themselves as a cool thing even if they left the school, and have some confidence and excitement in their actions. In addition, she wants readers to softly say the "We," because she also wants to examine their uncertainty, “which they do not bother to question every day.” Listening to the audio of her reciting the poem, I realized why she brought the ‘we’ at the end of each sentence. Other of Brooks’ poems tell about gender identity, racial stereotypes, and anxiousness of understanding both white and black society. In my opinion, society is still unequal and people continue to contest that; I agree with Brooks of a need to understand both white society and black society. We need to face the situation of society and should cooperate together for dealing with it.
--Yukari Namihira ‘19
A recording of Gwendolyn Brooks reading her poem "We Real Cool" in 1983; the entirety of her reading is available here, including her introduction discussing the moment that sparked the poem and the popularity of it.