The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks

by Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Alexander (Editor)

Overview

"If you wanted a poem," wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, "you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing." From the life of Chicago's South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.

"Her formal range," writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, "is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso." That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry retains its power to move and surprise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931082877
Publisher:	Library of America
Publication date:	11/17/2005
Series:	American Poets Project
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	102,186
Product dimensions:	4.75(w) x 7.79(h) x 0.57(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Alexander, editor of this volume, is the author of four books of poems, including American Sublime, and the essay collection The Black Interior. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks. She is a professor at Yale University.

Read an Excerpt

A Street in Bronzeville

to David and Keziab Brooks

kitchenette building

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. "Dream" makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like "rent," "feeding a wife," "satisfying a man."

But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

Table of Contents

	Kitchenette building	1
	The mother	2
	Hunchback girl : she thinks of heaven	3
	A song in the front yard	4
	The ballad of chocolate Mabbie	5
	The preacher : ruminates behind the sermon	6
	Sadie and Maud	6
	When you have forgotten Sunday : the love story of De Witt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery	9
	The vacant lot	10
	The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith	10
	Negro hero	16
	Ballad of Pearl May Lee	18
	Gay chaps at the bar	23
	Still do I keep my look, my identity ...	23
	My dreams, my works, must wait till after hell	24
	Looking	25
	Mentors	25
	The white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men	26
	Love note / I : surely	26
	The progress	27
	The birth in a narrow room	28
	Maxie Allen	29
	The parents : people like our marriage : Maxie and Andrew	30
	Sunday chicken	30
	Old relative	31
	Downtown vaudeville	32
	The ballad of late Annie	32
	Throwing out the flowers	33
	"Do not be afraid of no"	34
	"Pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps"	35
	My own sweet good	35
	The Anniad	36
	Appendix to The Anniad	47
I	The children of the poor	49
VI	The rites for cousin Vit	52
VII	I love those little booths at Benvenuti's	52
VIII	Beverly Hills, Chicago	54
XI	"One wants a teller in a time like this"	56
XV	"Men of careful turns, haters of forks in the road"	57
	Strong men, riding horses	59
	The bean eaters	60
	We real cool	60
	Old Mary	61
	A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi : meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon	61
	The last quatrain of the ballad of Emmett Till	68
	The Chicago Defender sends a man to Little Rock	68
	The lovers of the poor	71
	The crazy woman	74
	A lovely love	75
	Bronzeville woman in a red hat	75
	Bessie of Bronzeville visits Mary and Norman at a beach-house in New Buffalo	78
	The ballad of Rudolph Reed	79
	The egg boiler	82
	A catch of shy fish	83
	Boy breaking glass	88
	Medgar Evers	89
	Malcom X	90
	The Chicago Picasso	91
	The wall	92
	The Blackstone rangers	94
	The sermon on the warpland	97
	The second sermon on the warpland	98
	Riot	100
	The third sermon on the warpland	101
	The life of Lincoln West	106
	To Don at Salaam	112
	Paul Robeson	113
	The boy died in my alley	114
	Steam song	116
	Elegy in a rainbow	117
	Primer for blacks	118
	To those of my sisters who kept their naturals	120
	The near-Johannesburg boy	122
	Shorthand possible	124
	Infirm	125
	The Coora flower	126
	Nineteen cows in a slow line walking	127
	I am a black	128
	Uncle Seagram	129
	Abruptly	131
	An old black woman, homeless, and indistinct	132

What People are Saying About This

Paul Engle

"Miss Brooks has a very fine talent...a faculty which is becoming rare in contemporary poetry: an interest not merely in her own responses, but in other people as well."

Harvey Curtis Webster

"She is a very good poet, the only superlative I dare use in our time of misusage; compared...to the best of modern poets, she ranks high."

Editorial Reviews

When Miss Brooks...writes out of her heart, out of her rich and living background, out of her very real talent, then she induces almost unbearable excitement.

New York Times

From her poet's craft bursts a whole gallery of wholly alive persons...Many a novelist cannot do so well in ten times the space.

Christian Science Monitor