Thursday 1st October at 17.30 – We Real Cool – The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks
A portrait of African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, whose imagination, conscience and passion for words made her the first black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950.
We Real Cool – The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks details her life through the voices of friends and fellow poets – including Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti and Sharon Olds – and is narrated by her daughter Nora Brooks Blakely.
Gwendolyn Brooks published her first poem at the age of thirteen and by the time she was sixteen her work was published in local newspapers serving Chicago’s black population. Early critics welcomed Gwendolyn as a new voice; “a real poet writing poignant social documents.”
Her poems are portraits of the ordinary people she observed from day-to-day. She moulded them into memorable characters such as Annie Allen, Rudolph Reed and Satin Legs Smith. Her deepest compassion though was for young people, particularly struggling youth. Her most famous poem, We Real Cool, is about children skipping school. It’s still spoken aloud today by school children who learn it by heart.
Gwendolyn believed she had a social and political role as a poet and became one of the most visible articulators of the “black aesthetic” as the Black Arts Movement took off in the late 1960s. Her commitment to nurturing black literature led her to leave major publisher Harper & Row in favour of a fledgling black company. When she was appointed to the post of poet laureate of Illinois in 1968, she used her role to visit schools, prisons, and rehabilitation centres to help people “see the poetry in their lives.” She always claimed her greatest achievement was teaching people that poetry isn’t a formal activity but an art form within the reach of everybody.
(Produced by the BBC World Service)