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The Legendary Gwendolyn Brooks and “We Real Cool”
The first African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize for her book, Annie Allen, and to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote stirring poems over four decades, from the 1940’s through the 1970’s, about the Black poor and social and political inequities.
She was a writer of the syntactic poetic line. She directed our attention to her choice words by where she placed each one within her poems. Below is “We Real Cool,” her famous poem I remember reading in school.
As you read this poem, notice the strength of her one syllable words, short sentences, her rhymes, and the couplet form. Why does she end most of her lines with the word We and continue the sentence on the next line or in the next stanza? Click into the link for the poem, and, once on the Poetry Foundation poem page, listen to Brooks read her poem.
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We Real Cool The Pool Players. 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. -Gwendolyn Brooks, from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Taken from the Poetry Foundation website. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks. Source: Poetry (September 1959)
What do you think of “We Real Cool?”
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The Proud but Questioning We in “We So Cool”
Brooks creates her own brand of cool with this brief, powerful poem. It sings with well-chosen verbs like lurk, strike, thin, and jazz and the rhymes within each couplet.
Why do you think she chooses to enjamb her lines, ending most with “We” and continuing the rest of her thought on the next line?
Perhaps she is emphasizing the pride felt by this group of cool young men. Read this poem aloud, and you’ll find that you must emphasize the word we because it is a stressed one-syllable word. Notice the dramatically long pause you are forced to take before the sentence continues in the next line. Enjambment—continuing the thought into the next line—creates this strong effect. However, enjambment can have the opposite effect of speeding us onward as we are curious to see what the rest of the poet’s thought will be.
Brooks clarified that “the ‘we’ marking the end of each line in the 24-word poem is meant to be recited softly and swiftly, as if the boys shooting pool at the Golden Shovel are questioning their place in the world.” (Anne Holmes, Library of Congress Blogs, “Gwendolyn Brooks: We Real Cool, Two Ways”)
Brooks’ intention with “we” renders her poem poignant. The boys’ rebellious pride is an appearance they wear, an appearance full of irony.
By keeping this poem in a traditional couplet form, Brooks draws our attention to her choice images and the persona of this group of rebels.
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Try Enjambment
Poetry always wins as my favorite kind of literature to read and write due in part to the inventiveness of the poetic line. It’s creative fun to play with where we decide to arrange words on a page! This kind of play changes how we read and hear the poem and what words are emphasized.
Take an end-stopped poem of your own or alternately, a poem by someone else and try changing the emphasis by enjambing a few of the lines:
Start a new sentence at the end of a line and carry it through the line break and into the next line OR continue a long sentence into the next line.
Refer back to the enjambed lines of “We Real Cool” as an example. For more about enjambment and the example of Lucille Clifton’s poem, “daughters,” watch “What is Enjambment?” a brief video featuring Jennifer Richter, an Oregon State University professor of English and Creative Writing.
Once you enjamb your poem, read it aloud to hear the difference in emphasis and possibly meaning too. How does enjambment change the poem? Which style do you prefer?
Share your enjambed verse in Comments! Next time, I will share an end-stopped poem or two which I enjambed, and I’ll show how the use of enjambment changes the emphasis of my poems.
What’s Coming
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Three Fiercely Talented Poets To Hear This Sunday!
The final reading for Poetry on Tap will feature JOE MILLS, BETH COPELAND, and JOHN HOPPENTHALER followed by an open mic! This reading will be held ONLINE via Zoom and registration is required to receive the meeting link. Register for this meeting by clicking into this link, Poetry on Tap Reading. Join us! If you’d like to read one of your poems, sign up for the Open Mic once the Zoom meeting begins.
Here’s a bit about each poet:
A faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, JOSEPH MILLS has published eight volumes of poetry, most recently Bodies in Motion: Poems about Dance. His collection This Miraculous Turning was awarded the North Carolina Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry for its exploration of race and family. He also has published a collection of fiction, Bleachers, which consists of fifty-four linked pieces that take place during a youth soccer game. More information about his work is available at www.josephrobertmills.com.
BETH COPELAND is the author of Shibori Blue: Thirty-six Views of The Peak (Redhawk Publications, 2024); Selfie with Cherry (Glass Lyre Press, 2022); Blue Honey, 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize winner; Transcendental Telemarketer (BlazeVOX, 2012); and Traveling through Glass, 1999 Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Award winner. Beth lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
To find out more about SHIBORI BLUE:
https://redhawkpublications.com/Shibori-Blue-Thirty-six...
https://www.amazon.com/Shibori-Blue-Thirty.../dp/1959346458/
JOHN HOPPENTHALER’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P). His poetry and essays appear in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Southeast Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks. Former Personal Assistant to Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison, he is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University.
To find out more about NIGHT WING OVER METROPOLITAN AREA:
https://press.uchicago.edu/.../distrib.../N/bo207623652.html
https://www.amazon.com/Metropolitan.../dp/0887486924/
Di, I enjoyed "We Real Cool." It reminds me of the Lil Duval song "Smile (Living My Best Life)," which I thoroughly enjoy. I never really thought of pool as being cool, but what do I know about that? 😊