Brooks, Gwendolyn

By: Kathleen Thompson

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Brooks, Gwendolyn

Sex:  Female

Born:  Topeka, Kansas, United States
7 June 1917

Died:  Chicago, Illinois, United States
3 December 2000

Activity/Profession:  Poet, Fiction Writer

(b. 7 June 1917; d. 3 December 2000),
poet.

When minority poets write about injustice and oppression, the literary establishment sometimes finds it all too easy to dismiss them or to praise them in words tinged with condescension. In the case of Gwendolyn Brooks, that was never a plausible approach. She was, quite simply, one of twentieth-century America's finest poets. Her sensibility and poetic technique were often in the service of, but never mastered by, her sorrow and outrage at the treatment of African Americans.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, to David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks. Her mother's family lived in Topeka, and her mother returned there for a few weeks to give birth, but Brooks grew up in Chicago. As a child, she went to Chicago schools and played in Chicago streets. She began composing poetry when she was seven and recording it in notebooks when she was eleven, nurtured by loving parents who imbued her with a love of songs, stories, and learning. Her first published poem appeared in the magazine American Childhood when she was thirteen. She went to Hyde Park High School, a white school with a formidable reputation for excellence, and then transferred to all-black Wendell Phillips High school. Finally, she attended integrated Englewood High School.

During her otherwise isolated adolescence, Brooks formed connections with other poets through their work. She wrote to James Weldon Johnson, who suggested that she read modern poetry. She immersed herself in the work of T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, and other great modern masters of the art. At sixteen, she met Langston Hughes, who read her poetry and encouraged her. His enthusiasm for her work was of tremendous importance to the young poet. After graduating from high school, Brooks went to Woodrow Wilson Junior College for two years. Two years after that, she met Henry Lowington Blakely II. They married not long after and remained married until his death, though they separated from 1969 to 1973.

In 1941, Brooks's development as a poet received another boost when Inez Cunningham Stark presented a class on modern poetry at the South Side Community Art Center. Brooks experienced the stimulation of talk and criticism and sharing with other writers, including Margaret Burroughs and Margaret Danner. Two years later, she received an award at the Midwestern Writers' Conference. That award led indirectly to the publication of her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). The reviews were highly favorable, and the book brought Brooks to the attention of other black writers. She received considerable encouragement from such prominent poets as Claude McKay and Countee Cullen. She also received Guggenheim fellowships in 1946 and 1947 and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1946.

Brooks clearly stood in a tradition that stretched back to sixteenth-century England. Just as clearly, her work partook of the simplicity of Emily Dickinson and the populist rhythms of Walt Whitman. Her immediate forebears were black poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, and Gwendolyn Bennett. Her context was the Chicago School. Despite these influences, Brooks was quickly recognized as an original voice. Her next book, Annie Allen, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1950. Brooks was the first African American, man or woman, to receive the award in any category. The next year, she had a daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely. She later had a son, Henry Blakely III.

Brooks's autobiographical novel, Maud Martha, was published in 1953. In 1956, when her daughter was five, Brooks's first book of children's poetry, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, appeared.

The Bean Eaters, a collection of poetry published in 1960, speaks in powerful, moving, and sometimes bitterly ironic language of the lives of black people. Its poems, including possibly her most famous, “We Real Cool,” and the title poem, “The Bean Eaters,” are often anthologized in high school and college literature texts and are among the classics of American poetry. Some have seen this collection as a kind of climax in her style. Having developed her skills and techniques to their fullest, Brooks was able to relinquish her hold on them and let them form a foundation for a new and radical simplicity of language. She began to write in a sharp, colloquial style in which the language of the streets, as well as that of other segments of the black community, was honed to a spare elegance. This style served her professed desire for her work to speak to, as well as for, African Americans of all classes.

In 1968, Brooks was named poet laureate of Illinois, succeeding Carl Sandburg. She began conducting poetry contests for young people with prize money she often provided herself, and poetry workshops, including at least one for the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago street gang. She also toured extensively, reading her poetry at schools and prisons, libraries, and bookstores.

As black consciousness changed in the late 1960s, Brooks let it carry her farther along her poetic path. Her 1968 book, In the Mecca, began as a novel and ended, after numerous revisions, as a collection of poems. It begins with a long narrative poem, interrupted by ballads and ballad-like interpolations. Set in the old Mecca Building in Chicago, it details a mother's search for a lost child among the crowded, violent building's inhabitants, who are filled with hate and anger. In the second part of the book are poems dealing with Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. Seldom has such a strong, elegant, remorseless talent been turned to describing the horrors of the race-defined urban environment. Hortense Spillers called the Brooks who wrote In the Mecca “Gwendolyn the terrible.” The book was nominated for the National Book Award.

With Riot, in 1969, Brooks began publishing exclusively with black presses in a declaration of loyalty to her community. She also continued to, as she put it, “clarify my language. I want these poems to be free. I want them to be direct without sacrificing the kinds of music, the picture making I've always been interested in.”

In 1976, Brooks became the first African American to be appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She also received, over the years, the National Endowment for the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award and more than fifty honorary doctorates. Despite the harshness of her criticism of racism, with its economic and social consequences, she began to inspire the kind of affection and respect that Americans give to poets such as Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, and Robert Frost—poets who bother to speak to all of us. She was writing verse that, in the words of the poet Rita Dove, “nourish like meat, not frosting.” Brooks's focus on clarity and simplification helped her reach out to a growing audience of black readers. In 1979, Brooks said in an interview for Artful Dodge magazine that she was trying to develop a kind of poem that would be immediately accessible and interesting to all African Americans. That kind of poem, she declared, would be “songlike.”

Brooks, in the last decades of her life, continued to reach out. She served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress. In 1990, she became a professor of English at Chicago State University. She finished her last book of poems in the summer of 2000, when she was eighty-three. Until she died, she remained active on behalf of poetry for the widest possible audience. Her readings and workshops, her classes and contests for children all showed her belief in the power of her art and the voice of her people.

See also Poetry.

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