OPEN STACKS | #54: 101 - A Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks

This week on Open Stacks, we're celebrating Chicago's own legendary Gwendolyn Brooks on her 101st birthday.  Reginald Gibbons, Angela Jackson, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Georgia Popoff, Troy Harden, and Cheryl Clarke join us for conversations and readings about her life and legacy.

In 1944 an editor at Harper & Brothers contacted Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, to ask his opinion of poems submitted for publication by a Chicago woman named Gwendolyn Brooks. Wright responded:

“They are hard and real, right out of the central core of Black Belt Negro life in urban areas. ... There is no self-pity here, not a striving for effect. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully. There is not so much an exhibiting of Negro life to whites in these poems as there is an honest human reaction to the pain that lurks so colorfully in the Black Belt. ... She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny incidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor, and the problem of color prejudice among Negroes. ... Only one who has actually lived and suffered in a kitchenette could render the feeling of lonely frustration as well as she does: — of how dreams are drowned out by the noises, smells, and the frantic desire to grab one’s chance to get a bath when the bathroom is empty. Miss Brooks is real and so are her poems.”

 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.

For more audio recordings of Gwendolyn Brooks reading her own work, you can check out the collection at the Library of Congress:

Daystar, by Gwendolyn Brooks

She wanted a little room for thinking: 
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind the garage 
to sit out the children’s naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch: 
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days 
she stared until she was assured 
when she closed her eyes
she’d see only her vivid own blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared 
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing 
out back with the field mice? Why, 
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and 
lurched into her, she would open her eyes 
and think of the place that was hers 
for an hour — where 
she was nothing, 
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.