Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks (7 June 1917 – 3 December 2000) was an American poet. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for her book of poems Annie Allen.

Quotes

It is brave to be involved
To be not fearful to be unresolved.
- "do not be afraid of no" from Annie Allen (1949)

Exhaust the little moment.
Soon it dies.
And be it gash or gold it will not come
Again in this identical guise.
- "exhaust the little moment" from Annie Allen (1949)

We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
- "We ReaI CooI" , The Bean Eaters (1960)
- The "We"—you're supposed to stop after the "We" and think about their validity, and of course there's no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic uncertainty, which they don't bother to question every day, of course.
  - "An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks", Contemporary Literature 11:1 (Winter 1970)
- The WEs in "We Real Cool" are tiny, wispy, weakly argumentative "Kilroy-is-here" announcements. The boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal importance. Say the "We" softly.
  - Report from Part One (1972)

Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home.
- "The Chicago Picasso" (1968)

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
- "An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks", Contemporary Literature 11:1 (Winter 1970)

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.
- Report From Part One (1972)

As you get older, you find that often the wheat, disentangling itself from the chaff, comes out to meet you.
- Report From Part One (1972)

Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
- Black Poetry Writing (1975)

Truth-tellers are not always palatable.
There is a preference for candy bars.
- Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988)

Be careful what you swallow. Chew!
- Advice to graduates, Buena Vista University Graduation (1995)

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
- My Soul Looks Back, 'Less I Forget (1995) by Dorothy Winbush Riley

I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.
- Quoted in her obituary in The Guardian (7 December 2000)

To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
- "To Be In Love"

He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is
overmuch.
Too much too bear.
- "To Be In Love"

I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.
- "The Crazy Woman"

And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."
- "The Crazy Woman"

I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
- "my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell"

Already you're on Page 8.
- "Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg"

consider the big fists breaking your little bones,
or consider the vague bureaucrats
stumbling, fumbling through Paper.
- "Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg"

Is earnest enough, may earnest attract or lead to light;
Is light enough, if hands in clumsy frenzy, flimsy whimsically, enlist;
Is light enough when this bewilderment crying against the dark shuts down the shades?
Dilute confusion. Find and explode our mist.
- "garbageman: the man with the orderly mind"

Say to them,
say to the down-keepers,
the sun-slappers,
the self-soilers,
the harmony-hushers,
"even if you are not ready for day
it cannot always be night."
You will be right.
- Speech to the Young : Speech to the Progress-Toward

The Mother (1945)

Published in A Street in Bronzeville (1945)

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

What shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

Winnie (1988)

I pass you my Poem.

A poem doesn’t do everything for you.
You are supposed to go on with your thinking.
You are supposed to enrich
the other person’s poem with your extensions,
your uniquely personal understandings,
thus making the poem serve you.
- "Song of Winnie"

I pass you my Poem! — to tell you
we are all vulnerable —
the midget, the Mighty,
the richest, the poor.
Men, women, children, and trees.
I am vulnerable.
- "Song of Winnie"

My Poem is life, and not finished.
It shall never be finished.
My Poem is life, and can grow.

Wherever life can grow, it will.
It will sprout out,
and do the best it can.
I give you what I have.
You don’t get all your questions answered in this world.
How many answers shall be found
in the developing world of my Poem?
I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem,
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can.
- "Song of Winnie"

The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Rudolph Reed was oaken.
His wife was oaken too.
And his two good girls and his good little man
Oakened as they grew.

Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
And his dark little children three.

The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.
(Though oaken as man could be.)
The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience arched to endure,
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.

He ran like a mad thing into the night
And the words in his mouth were stinking.
By the time he had hurt his first white man
He was no longer thinking.
By the time he had hurt his fourth white man
Rudolph Reed was dead.
His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.
"Nigger—" his neighbors said.

Small Mabel whimpered all night long,
For calling herself the cause.
Her oak-eyed mother did no thing
But change the bloody gauze.

The Good Man

The good man.
He is still enhancer, renouncer.
In the time of detachment,
in the time of the vivid heather and affectionate evil,
in the time of oral
grave grave legalities of hate - all real
walks our prime registered reproach and seal.
Our successful moral.
The good man.

Coherent
Counsel! Good man.
Require of us our terribly excluded blue.
Constrain, repair a ripped, revolted land.
Put hand in hand land over.
Reprove
the abler droughts and manias of the day
and a felicity entreat.
Love.
Complete
your pledges, reinforce your aides, renew
stance, testament.

A Sunset of the City

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.

Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it?? Somebody wanted to joke.

Paul Robeson

Published in Family Pictures (1971)

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other's
harvest:
we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.

Misattributed

"Corners on the Curving Sky"

Our earth is round, and, among other things
That means that you and I can hold completely different
Points of view and both be right.
The difference of our positions will show
Stars in your window I cannot even imagine.
Your sky may burn with light,
While mine, at the same moment,
Spreads beautiful to darkness.
- The above statements have been widely published in the above format as lines of verse attributed to Brooks, usually as a poem titled "Corners on the Curving Sky" — but one website indicated that she declared she did not write them. The words actually occur as an introduction to the "Corners on the Curving Sky" section of the book Soulscript (1970) compiled by June Jordan, in which other poems of Brooks were included, and thus is apparently the work of Jordan. It appears simply in paragraph form and reads thus:

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter. These poems speak to philosophy; they reveal the corners where we organize what we know.

Quotes about Gwendolyn Brooks

Until the publication of Brooks's Maud Martha, only Zora Neale Hurston had populated her fiction and folklore with ordinary people. Hurston's works, however, were southern and rural, and although they have been vastly important in the development of a literary self-portraiture of Afro-American women, it was Brooks's novel (and poetry) that launched a genre embedded in northern, urban, ghetto experience which encouraged the subsequent works of Paule Marshall, Ann Petry, and Alice Childress, among many others...For many Brooks's works in general, and Maud Martha in particular, were a touchstone, inscribing Black womanhood, as Paule Marshall once observed, "in all the wonder of her complexity." Maud Martha, published in 1953, presaged the literary outpouring by Black women since the early 1960s...The pioneering achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha was that it offered a mirror, inviting Black women to look at themselves and their urban, working-class community through the eyes of one of their own. In its emphasis on relationship, in its attention to community, in its relentless probing of the consequences of racism, in its conjuring of the intimate through interior dialogue and the interior space of Maud Martha's home, Brooks's novel expressed precisely both a female sensibility and the wisdom and insight drawn from everyday life.
- Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)

A black woman would have tremendous difficulties, like a black man, to go to the nitty gritty, to express what is really going on inside. Because what happens is that you are being treacherous. By telling the truth about myself I am telling the truth about my father, my mother and a whole lot of other people, too. You can get crucified for that…it's one of the things that happen when you live in a sick society. And some black women like Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall have gotten beyond that at whatever price, but they got beyond it.
- 1980 interview in Conversations with James Baldwin edited by Louis H. Pratt and Fred L. Standley (1989)

I did not read any Langston Hughes until I was an adult, but I remember being carried away by him and Gwendolyn Brooks.
- 1996 interview in Conversations with Octavia Butler (2009)

(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things.
- Sandra María Esteves interview (2001) in A Poet's Truth by Bruce Allen Dick

When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is...When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love...
- Clint Smith (writer), How the Word is Passed (2021)

External links

Wikipedia

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Gwendolyn Brooks

Commons

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Gwendolyn Brooks

Brooks at Modern American Poetry
- Brief biography
Brooks at The Academy of American Poets
Some poems by Brooks at the Circle Brotherhood Association
Tribute at VOA News