Earlier this week, a group of poets and scholars assembled at New York University to pay tribute to poet Gwendolyn Brooks. It was the latest show of appreciation for a writer who provided readers with a vivid picture of black culture over a seven-decade career.
As a teenager, Brooks submitted poems about her family to several black newspapers in Chicago, Illinois. And she was only in her twenties when she published her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945. Her second book of poetry, Annie Allen, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949.
Elizabeth Alexander, a poet who teaches African American Studies at Yale, says that Brooks' local community provided her with inspiration.
"She was living at the time, as she did for years and years and years, on the South Side of Chicago. And she wrote about regular folks who lived in the 'kitchenette apartments' as they were called then of Chicago's great South Side."
Poet Quarysh Ali Lansana studied with Brooks in Chicago. He says that her poetry offered windows through which most Americans had not looked. "She opened up a path into the insides of ordinary black life," Lansana explains. "I think that she really went into the day-to-day, the tiny struggles, the issues of the people she called the 'littles.' These were the folks who were trying to get to the next meal, trying to make it to work the next day, trying to raise healthy children."
Alexander and Lansana discuss the breakthroughs Brooks made in her early poetry. (Requires QuickTime.
The first stanza of Brooks' poem "The Bean Eaters," from the 1960 collection of the same name, captures the mix of daily routine and struggle:
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Reprinted by Permission of the
Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks)
What does the line "Dinner is a casual affair" suggest to you?
Which words best convey the living conditions of the couple in this poem?
What is the effect of describing them as "yellow"?
Poet Elizabeth Alexander reads and explains parts of "The Bean Eaters."
Poet Quarysh Ali Lansana reads portions from "A Song in the Front Yard," a well-known Gwendolyn Brooks poem that explores urban life.