Gwendolyn Brooks

According to the Poetry Foundation, Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer prize. She was the poet Laureate for Illinois, though she was born in Kansas. As an activist, she worked to help African American poetry grow and take root. She was known for writing the culture of lower-class African Americans into her poetry, and later worked for the NAACP.

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917, moved as a child to Illinois, and died of breast cancer in Chicago in 2000. She published her first poem when she was 13.

While I've tried not to let this blog be a mirror of what we're doing in class, we read "A Song in the Front Yard," and I couldn't help but admire it. Much of her poetry is on the long side, but if you're looking for more, check her out on the Poetry Foundation (which boasts 35 of her poems) or on Academy of American Poets.

A Song in the Front Yard

I’ve stayed in the front yard all my life.

I want a peek at the back

Where it’s rough and untended and hungry weed grows.  

A girl gets sick of a rose.

I want to go in the back yard now  

And maybe down the alley,

To where the charity children play.  

I want a good time today.

They do some wonderful things.

They have some wonderful fun.

My mother sneers, but I say it’s fine

How they don’t have to go in at quarter to nine.  

My mother, she tells me that Johnnie Mae  

Will grow up to be a bad woman.

That George’ll be taken to Jail soon or late

(On account of last winter he sold our back gate).

But I say it’s fine. Honest, I do.

And I’d like to be a bad woman, too,

And wear the brave stockings of night-black lace  

And strut down the streets with paint on my face.

I was hoping to find a recording of her reading "We Real Cool," and I wasn't disappointed. Reading the letters on the page, I knew they must have a rhythm, but I wasn't sure I was doing it right. I really like her intro to this poem, by the way. "I would prefer it," she says, "if the text-book compilers and the anthologists would assume that I've written a few other poems." This one was banned in some places because of the use of the word "jazz" - it was too sexy. Her intro is in this video. The one below includes Morgan Freedman's reading.