The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Gwendolyn Brooks

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 2: Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

I’ve moved on from the “Modern” volume, and am now in the “Contemporary” volume.

I think I first encountered Gwendolyn Brooks’s stuff in Humanities in high school (her most famous is, perhaps, “We Real Cool”).

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.

Born in 1917, she died in 2000 – so the woman saw a lot. She was the descendant of a runaway slave, and her parents instilled in her a ferocity in terms of getting an education. She started writing poetry very early on, and was publishing stuff regularly as a teenager. She clearly meant business. She had gone to both white and black high schools, giving her an entryway into the white world, which, in turn, gave her a very interesting perspective on the racial divide in Chicago. Her father encouraged her, wanting her to push on in her dream to be a writer.

The Harlem Renaissance poets were very important to her, as well as to her parents. In the Anthology, the editors write, of Brooks’s influences:

Brooks learned the hard discipline of compression from two sources. The modernists famously demanded that superfluities be eliminated, that every word be made to count (le mot juste), and this seems to have been the guiding principle of the Chicago poetry workshop she attended in the early 1940s, in which she read T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and E.E. Cummings. Brooks also learned this lesson from the spare, hard, stripped-down idiom of the blues, which Langston Hughes urged her to study. Like the authors of the blues, she uses insistent rhymes and terse simplicity, and she can be at once understated and robust. Despite Brooks’s reputation for directness, her poetry, like the blues and other African American oral traditions, evinces a sly and ironic indirection.

Brooks often wrote in common everyday vernacular. Her world was the inner city. Although her family was upwardly mobile (her parents made sure of that: her father built her bookshelves and a desk early on when she was a child, a strong message: “This is where you are going to spend most of your time”), she saw what was going on. How could she not? She wrote a devastating poem called “The Boy Died In My Alley” which shows Gwendolyn Brooks’s strength and individual voice. She observes. But not from afar. She is a neighbor.

The Boy Died In My Alley
The Boy died in my alley
without my Having Known.
Policeman said, next morning,
“Apparently died Alone.”

“You heard a shot?” Policeman said.
Shots I hear and Shots I hear.
I never see the Dead.

The Shot that killed him yes I heard
as I heard the Thousand shots before;
careening tinnily down the nights
across my years and arteries.

Policeman pounded on my door.
“Who is it?” “POLICE!” Policeman yelled.
“A Boy was dying in your alley.
A Boy is dead, and in your alley.
And have you known this Boy before?”

I have known this Boy before.
I have known this boy before, who ornaments my alley.
I never saw his face at all.
I never saw his futurefall.
But I have known this Boy.

I have always heard him deal with death.
I have always heard the shout, the volley.
I have closed my heart-ears late and early.
And I have killed him ever.

I joined the Wild and killed him
with knowledgeable unknowing.
I saw where he was going.
I saw him Crossed. And seeing,
I did not take him down.

He cried not only “Father!”
but “Mother!
Sister!
Brother.”
The cry climbed up the alley.
It went up to the wind.
It hung upon the heaven
for a long
stretch-strain of Moment.

The red floor of my alley
is a special speech to me.

Brooks climbed to the greatest heights a poet can climb to, being appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1985 (the first black woman to be so honored), and Chicago is full of streets dedicated to her, and there’s a junior high school named after her in Harvey, Illinois.

Her work is subtle. The poems work ON you. She does not insist on your involvement. But that’s one of the reasons why I find myself so involved. She had an epiphany later in life. In the late 1960s, she went to a black writer’s conference and by this point she was in her 50s, a published poet, an established voice. But she met and talked with the younger poets coming up, many of them black nationalists, far more politicized than she was, and while she said she found it “uncomfortable”, she also felt that she “woke up”.

“Until 1967, my own blackness did not confront me with a shrill spelling of itself.”

Brooks could not turn back. She organized a poetry workshop for young black kids, and invited the members of a neighborhood gang to join. The gang was called the Blackstone Rangers (she wrote a lengthy poem about them).

The Blackstone Rangers

I
AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES

There they are.
Thirty at the corner.
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
that do not want to heal.

II
THE LEADERS

Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop.
They cancel, cure and curry.
Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing
the cold bonbon,
the rhinestone thing. And hardly
in a hurry.
Hardly Belafonte, King,
Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap.
Bungled trophies.
Their country is a Nation on no map.

Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop
in the passionate noon,
in bewitching night
are the detailed men, the copious men.
They curry, cure,
they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts
are not divine, vivacious; the different tins
are intense last entries; pagan argument;
translations of the night.

The Blackstone bitter bureaus
(bureaucracy is footloose) edit, fuse
unfashionable damnations and descent;
and exulting, monstrous hand on monstrous hand,
construct, strangely, a monstrous pearl or grace.

III
GANG GIRLS

A Rangerette

Gang Girls are sweet exotics.
Mary Ann
uses the nutrients of her orient,
but sometimes sighs for Cities of blue and jewel
beyond her Ranger rim of Cottage Grove.
(Bowery Boys, Disciples, Whip-Birds will
dissolve no margins, stop no savory sanctities.)

Mary is
a rose in a whiskey glass.

Mary’s
Februaries shudder and are gone. Aprils
fret frankly, lilac hurries on.
Summer is a hard irregular ridge.
October looks away.
And that’s the Year!
Save for her bugle-love.
Save for the bleat of not-obese devotion.
Save for Somebody Terribly Dying, under
the philanthropy of robins. Save for her Ranger
bringing
an amount of rainbow in a string-drawn bag.
“Where did you get the diamond?” Do not ask:
but swallow, straight, the spirals of his flask
and assist him at your zipper; pet his lips
and help him clutch you.

Love’s another departure.
Will there be any arrivals, confirmations?
Will there be gleaning?

Mary, the Shakedancer’s child
from the rooming-flat, pants carefully, peers at
her laboring lover ….
Mary! Mary Ann!
Settle for sandwiches! settle for stocking caps!
for sudden blood, aborted carnival,
the props and niceties of non-loneliness—
the rhymes of Leaning.

“We Real Cool” may be her most famous, and I love her short stark poem for Emmett Till.

The Last Quatrain Of the Ballad of Emmett Till

Emmett’s mother is a pretty-faced thing;
the tint of pulled taffy.
She sits in a red room,
drinking black coffee.
She kisses her killed boy.
And she is sorry.
Chaos in windy grays
through a red prairie.

Look at how she uses the exact right amount of words. No more, no less. Brooks rarely goes for the big gestures, the obvious sucker-punch. She dazzles, but not by being ostentatious or a show-off. The editors at the Norton Anthology compare her to Edgar Lee Masters (my excerpt of him here), and I love that. It may not be obvious on the face of it, but she wrote of one community, in all of their voices, sticking to what she knew, and her poems – like “The Bean Eaters”, my favorite one of hers – have this way of cracking open an entire life in a couple of short lines, just like Masters did in Spoon River Anthology.

The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.