Gwendolyn Brooks’ Power of Poetry

Gwendolyn Brooks was the author of the poem about Emmet Till in the Literary Nook earlier this week in the Saipan Tribune. She was the first black woman to hold the role of “Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress,” a position now referred to as the Poetry Laureate Consultant in Poetry. In her 1960 collection of poems titled The Bean Eaters was a poem called “We Real Cool.” It has been put in many poetry anthologies since then, including one I used on Tinian when I taught there in the last two decades of the 20th century. It is mentioned here because a recitation of it ultimately led me to come out here in 1984. I’ll print its entirety after this flashback. Now here is a narrative on the influential power of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry.

I have two older brothers and two younger sisters. When I was attending a Catholic high school in Elmira, NY, I went through years of teenage rebellion. During my sophomore year I began skipping school, hanging out in a pool hall and smoking cigars in the City of Elmira. I quit college after two years and acting scholarship, hitchhiked up to the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival and proceeded on a sojourn to adulthood. I met a friend of my younger sisters who was attending a local community college with them. One day she recited “We Real Cool” from memory while we were all hanging out. To say I was flabbergasted that she knew it and had memorized it would be an understatement. It had become sort of a personal anthem of mine since first encountering the poem in Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Bean Eaters.

To cut to the quick, she was also a beautiful blonde Irish girl. We subsequently went up to SE Alaska. Got married in Ketchikan, AK and lived on a small island in the 14-million acre South Tongass National Forest. The island population, around 12, had no roads, no electricity, no inside plumbing, water from a pipe pounded into a rock ledge. It did have plenty of water, 15 feet of rain a year and plenty of fish in the ocean surrounding it.

After a few years we moved to Oregon to finish degrees, her in Fisheries Science at OSU Corvallis and me in Education at nearby Monmouth, now called Western.

She came home one day to tell me of a fellow student in her fisheries classes from a Pacific island called Saipan. I met him at a grilled fish BBQ. He was from Saipan, taotao Tanapag, and there were plenty others there from Saipan and other parts of Micronesia: Ponape, Truk, Kosrae, Yap, the Marshalls and we have been friends for over 40 years. I came to visit him a few years later while teaching in NOLA at a mental hospital and needing a break. Here is the poem “We Real Cool”:

We Real Cool

The Pool Players 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 poem was actually banned in places for using the word “jazz.”

You can listen to Brooks’ comments on the poem and reading it on YouTube. Readers may find many other Black poets and their poems at Black Arts Movement online. Next week’s focus is Lucille Clifton.

Black History Month