AMERICAN POETS PROJECT
IS PUBLISHED WITH A GIFT IN MEMORY OF
James Merrill
AND SUPPORT FROM ITS FOUNDING PATRONS
Sidney J. Weinberg, Jr. Foundation
The Berkley Foundation
Richard B. Fisher and Jeanne Donovan Fisher
AMERICAN POETS PROJECT
THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
Introduction, volume compilation, and notes copyright © 2005 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.
Copyright © 1944, 1945, 1949, 1959, 1960, 1963, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1975, 1980, 1986, 1991 by Gwendolyn Brooks Blakely. Copyright © 2003 by Nora Brooks Blakely. For permissions, write to Brooks Permissions, P.O. Box 19355, Chicago, IL 60619.
Design by Chip Kidd and Mark Melnick.
Frontispiece: Gwendolyn Brooks, ca. 1972; © Bettmann/CORBIS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1917–2000.
[Poems. Selections]
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks ; Elizabeth Alexander, editor.
p. cm. — (American poets project ; 19)
ISBN 1–931082–87–1 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978–1–598–53324–8 (epub)
I. Alexander, Elizabeth, 1962– II. Title. III. Series.
PS3503.R7244A6 2005
Gwendolyn Brooks
CONTENTS
Introduction
from A Street in Bronzeville (1945)
from A Street in Bronzeville
kitchenette building
the mother
hunchback girl: she thinks of heaven
a song in the front yard
the ballad of chocolate Mabbie
the preacher: ruminates behind the sermon
Sadie and Maud
when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story
of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery
the vacant lot
The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith
Negro Hero
Ballad of Pearl May Lee
from Gay Chaps at the Bar
gay chaps at the bar
still do I keep my look, my identity . . .
my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
looking
mentors
the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men
love note / I: surely
the progress
from Annie Allen (1949)
Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood
the birth in a narrow room
Maxie Allen
the parents: people like our marriage Maxie and Andrew
Sunday chicken
old relative
downtown vaudeville
the ballad of late Annie
throwing out the flowers
“do not be afraid of no”
“pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps”
my own sweet good
The Anniad
The Anniad
Appendix to The Anniad
from The Womanhood
I the children of the poor
VI the rites for Cousin Vit
VII I love those little booths at Benvenuti’s
VIII Beverly Hills, Chicago
XI “One wants a Teller in a time like this”
XV “Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road”
from The Bean Eaters (1960)
Strong Men, Riding Horses
The Bean Eaters
We Real Cool
Old Mary
A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon
The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till
The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock
The Lovers of the Poor
The Crazy Woman
A Lovely Love
Bronzeville Woman in a Red Hat
Bessie of Bronzeville Visits Mary and Norman at a Beach-house in New Buffalo
The Ballad of Rudolph Reed
The Egg Boiler
from Selected Poems (1963)
A Catch of Shy Fish
from In the Mecca (1968)
from After Mecca
Boy Breaking Glass
Medgar Evers
Malcolm X
Two Dedications
The Chicago Picasso
The Wall
The Blackstone Rangers
The Sermon on the Warpland
The Second Sermon on the Warpland
from Riot (1969)
Riot
The Third Sermon on the Warpland
from Family Pictures (1970)
The Life of Lincoln West
from Young Heroes II
To Don at Salaam
Paul Robeson
from Beckonings (1975)
The Boy Died in My Alley
Steam Song
Elegy in a Rainbow
from Primer for Blacks (1980)
Primer for Blacks
To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals
from The Near-Johannesburg Boy (1986)
The Near-Johannesburg Boy
Shorthand Possible
Infirm
from Children Coming Home (1991)
The Coora Flower
Nineteen Cows in a Slow Line Walking
I Am A Black
Uncle Seagram
Abruptly
from In Montgomery and Other Poems (2003)
An Old Black Woman, Homeless, and Indistinct
Biographical Note
Note on the Texts
Notes
Index of Titles and First Lines
INTRODUCTION
Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago’s great South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks has been one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century. Her poems distill the very best aspects of Modernist style with the sounds and shapes of various African-American forms and idioms. Brooks is a consummate portraitist who found worlds in the community she wrote out of, and her innovations as a sonneteer remain an inspiration to more than one generation of poets who have come after her. Her career as a whole also offers an example of an artist who was willing to respond and evolve in the face of the dramatic historical, political, and aesthetic changes and challenges she lived through.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of Keziah Wims Brooks and David Anderson Brooks. Her father aspired to be a doctor and studied medicine for a year and a half at Fisk, but ended up working as a janitor. He was the son of a runaway slave. Her mother was a teacher before her marriage and then turned her full attention to homemaking, attending fiercely to the creative talent of young Gwendolyn from an early age. Her mother would tell her that she was going to be
“the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.” The family moved to Chicago shortly after Brooks’s birth, and she would spend the rest of her life on that city’s South Side—a great “Negro metropolis”—through years when the innovation, strength, struggle, and vision of its black residents gave her a backdrop and context for all that would interest her in her work.
The Chicago of Brooks’s formative years bustled with creative and political energy. Black Southern migrants from the second wave of the Great Migration flocked to the city in large numbers. In 1936, Harlem was the only neighborhood in the United States with a larger black population than Chicago’s South Side. For many of the Chicago characters in Brooks’s poems, as well as its real-life residents, the rural South was close at hand in memory and ways even as people navigated the rough and ready wind-whipped city. The South represented the beauty of home ways, but it was also the economically, spiritually, and physically violent home of white supremacy.
In 1935, the WPA Federal Writers’ Project began, and Chicago was a hive of subsidized artistic activity that often dovetailed with progressive interracial (if problematically so) political movements. More artists participated in the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago than in any other city in the United States. In 1936, the novelist Richard Wright formed the South Side Writers group that included poets Frank Marshall Davis and Margaret Walker, playwright Theodore Ward, and the admired poet-critic Edward Bland, who died in World War II and whom Brooks memorialized in a poem. In the flourishing years from 1935 to the end of World War II, Chicago was home at various times to a collection of creative people that rivaled the Harlem Renaissance. There were artists such as Charles Sebree, Eldzier Cortor, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Gordon Parks, Hughie Lee-Smith, Archibald Motley, and writers such as Wright, Walker, Davis, Fenton Johnson, Margaret Cunningham Danner, Margaret Burroughs, Bernard Goss, Arna Bontemps, Frank Yerby, Marita Bonner, and Willard Motley. Dancer Katherine Dunham was finishing her studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes would frequently pass through and connect with that crowd. Claude McKay attended the publication party for Brooks’s first book. In the first installment of her autobiography, Report From Part One, Brooks describes the exciting social life that she and her husband, Henry, enjoyed in the early 1940s:
My husband and I knew writers, knew painters, knew pianists and dancers and actresses, knew photographers galore. There were always weekend parties to be attended where we merry Bronzevillians could find each other and earnestly philosophize sometimes on into the dawn, over martinis and Scotch and coffee and an ample buffet. Great social decisions were reached. Great solutions for great problems were provided. . . . Of course, in that time, it was believed, still, that the society could be prettied, quieted, cradled, sweetened, if only people talked enough, glared at each other yearningly enough, waited enough.
The black press was also a powerful force. John Sengstacke was building the Chicago Defender into the most noted black paper in the country, where one could regularly read cutting-edge political news, poetry, and the column by Langston Hughes which began in 1942. John Johnson, who went on to found and publish Jet, Ebony, Sepia, and Negro Digest/Black World, under the aegis of his Johnson Publications, was in a writers’ group with Brooks.
Brooks attended junior college, began working, and soon married Henry Blakely, who was also a poet. They were both intensely devoted to their work, though like most poets they did other work for money. Their first child, Henry Jr., was born in 1940. In 1941, Brooks joined a poetry workshop organized by a wealthy white woman, Inez Cunningham Stark, who had been the president of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and had helped bring the likes of Leger, Prokofiev, and Le Corbusier to the city. Stark also had a long affiliation with Poetry, one of the most influential literary magazines of its time. In Stark’s all-black workshop, held in the South Shore Community Center, writers studied Modernist poets and rigorously critiqued one another’s work. In Brooks’s teenage correspondence with James Weldon Johnson (whose 1922 and 1931 editions of the Book of American Negro Poetry would undoubtedly have brought the best of the African-American tradition to the young poet), Johnson had urged her to read Eliot, Pound, and Cummings; she was well-read on her own, and so already familiar with the Modernists. But the intensive group study and conversation in the Stark workshop was galvanizing. They studied Poetry magazine (which Brooks continued to support by creating prizes for the magazine over the years) and moved forward in intent and focus with their poems and ambitions. Though Brooks had first published poems when she was a teenager, during this period she began to see publication in serious journals and to win prizes.
Brooks’s first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, was published by Harper & Brothers in 1945. The poet Paul Engle wrote the book’s first review, in the Chicago Tribune book section: “The publication of A Street in Bronzeville is an exceptional event in the literary life of Chicago, for it is the first book of a solidly Chicago person.” He called her a “young but permanent talent.”
The poems of A Street in Bronzeville incorporate many aspects of poetic tradition and conversation. Brooks is attuned to the sounds heard and spoken in various spaces on Chicago’s South Side. “If you wanted a poem,” she wrote in her autobiography, “you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.” She writes of the front and back yards, beauty shops, vacant lots, and bars. Her formal range is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso. Her incisive, distilled portraits of individuals taken together give us a collage of a very specific community, in the fashion of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology and Jean Toomer’s Cane. And in that keen and satisfying specificity are universal questions: How do people tend their dreams in the face of day-to-day struggle? How do people constitute community? How do communities respond when their young are sent off to a war full of ironies and contradictions? How do black communities grapple with the problems of materialism, racism, and blind religiosity? Brooks took especially seriously the inner lives of young black women: their hopes, dreams, aspirations, disappointments. How do they make their analytical voices heard in their communities? She continued to explore these themes in her second book, Annie Allen.
In the first half of the twentieth century, black writers were still confronted with the pressure, as had Phillis Wheatley, to effectively “prove” their literacy—and, thus, their humanity—through mastery of European forms. Paul Laurence Dunbar, for example, was a soul tormented by many demons, and he lamented the constraints white audiences placed on his work. According to James Weldon Johnson, Dunbar often said, “I’ve got to write dialect poetry; it’s the only way I can get them to listen to me,” and toward the end of his brief life he confessed to Johnson, “I have not grown. I am writing the same things I wrote ten years ago, and I am writing them no better.” Countee Cullen knew that many saw him as representative and the future of the race and its prime ambassador on the cultural front. So writing expertly within prescribed European forms was a particular, if implicit, pressure on both these relatively successful black poets, Brooks’s generational predecessors whom we know she read and studied and who, like her, favored the sonnet. This form suited Dunbar and Cullen and they spread their wings elegantly within it, but they also labored under the expectation that certain rules must be followed in order to assure one’s place within the mainstream canon. Brooks, on the other hand, worked with expert subtlety to make the sonnet her own.
In A Street in Bronzeville, she concludes with a series of off-rhyme sonnets on black soldiers in World War II, “Gay Chaps at the Bar.” Brooks grasped the profound contradictions these soldiers faced, fighting for their country but knowing all along that they would remain second-class citizens—think, for example, of black soldiers who liberated concentration camps being forced to ride in the back cars of mili
tary trains upon their return while German prisoners of war rode in the front. Brooks said that the sonnets of “Gay Chaps at the Bar” are off-rhyme because “I felt it was an off-rhyme situation.” Within conventional form, Brooks made subtle breaks so that her poetics underscore and enact what she speaks of. In so doing, she makes the form do something unexpected and makes an argument for the absolute rightness and necessity of innovating from within that form to make poetry that speaks powerfully to and out of its black reality.
“The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith” is the longest poem in A Street. Brooks wrote it after Richard Wright evaluated an early version of the book’s manuscript for Harpers and observed that most successful volumes of poems had a long centerpiece poem around which the book coalesced. “Sundays” is a tour de force that showcases much Brooksian strength: language that is as “rich” and “elaborate” as Satin-Legs himself but that at the same time displays awareness of its own decoration as well as of the shortcomings of decoration. Satin-Legs is a dandy whose self-image is expressed in his rococo dress and way with the ladies. “He sheds, with his pajamas, shabby days,” Brooks writes, and in that shedding and subsequent ornamentation always leaves behind “his desertedness, his intricate fear, the postponed resentments and the prim precautions.” He is in many ways a pitiable character. Brooks shows us the hysterical pitch of his wish for life’s beauty (“life must be aromatic. / There must be scent, somehow there must be some.”) and yet his wish for and will to beauty is powerful, true, and beautiful unto itself. He loves artifice but also has a “heritage of cabbage and pigtails, / Old intimacy with alleys, garbage pails, / Down in the deep (but always beautiful) South / Where roses blush their blithest (it is said) / And sweet magnolias put Chanel to shame.” Brooks also never lets us forget, in the subtlest way, that Satin-Legs’ life is set against a backdrop of economic and racial challenge.
The poem is at its mock-heroic best when Brooks takes the reader through Satin-Legs’ closet: “Let us proceed. Let us inspect, together / With his meticulous and serious love, / The innards of this closet.” Here she echoes Eliot’s Prufrock—“Let us go then, you and I”—another sad character in a similarly ironic “love song” whose love of language and beauty walks a path toward spiritual and emotional drowning. She takes great poetic pleasure in describing Satin-Legs’ “wonder-suits in yellow and in wine, / Sarcastic green and zebra-striped cobalt,” and yet her empathy forces her to note, without condescension, “People are so in need, in need of help. / People want so much that they do not know.” The poem is mock-heroic, lament, and ballad all at once. Brooks goes beneath the masks of thwarted masculinity to show us “men estranged / From music and from wonder and from joy / But far familiar with the guiding awe / Of foodlessness.”
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks Page 1