A new play, “No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks,” stresses the poet’s radicalism. Photograph by Bettmann / Getty

In an interview with the rapper Kanye West from 2003, shortly before he released “The College Dropout,” West recounted the time he met the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, at a dinner held for students in Beverly Hills, Chicago, when he was in “fourth grade or sixth grade.” Brooks asked him if he had a poem to read, West recalled. “I said”—here, the interviewer writes, he put on a high-pitched boy’s voice—“ ‘No, but I can write one real quick.’ I went in the back, wrote a poem, and then read it for her and the 40 staff members.”

I thought of West’s anecdote last November, when I visited Chicago to see “No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks,” a shadow-box play written by the Chicago poets Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall and staged by the local theatre troupe Manual Cinema at the Cindy Pritzker Auditorium in the Harold Washington Library Center. In the national arena, Brooks—who was appointed the Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, and of the country in 1985, and who died in 2000, at the age of eighty-three—is regarded as a charmingly accessible stylist, a “race hero” who reported nobly from the trenches of the black poor. But in Chicago it is her social work—particularly as an educator and an advocate for schoolchildren—that is treasured and understood as a critical part of her artistic legacy. To Brooks, poetry was citizenship. In Chicago, her radicalism is at center stage.

“So many of the spaces that rappers in Chicago use to hone their skills and build their name are the same spaces where poets are doing the same, and so we’re in the same community—and oft times the same people,” Marshall told me recently. “I think a lot of the rappers are influenced by Brooks in their commitment to rendering their own communities with love and complexity.” The very idea of a city arts scene can seem antiquated—rendered unnecessary by the hyper-connectivity of the Internet. But Chicago, a city that was home to a literary renaissance in the early twentieth century, and to the nation’s first black-art gallery (the South Side Community Art Center), and was the birthplace of Poetry magazine, continues to produce cultural works of social realism. Ewing and Marshall are among dozens of celebrated artists—including Chance the Rapper, Mick Jenkins, Noname, Saba, and Jamila Woods—who attended the open-mic nights organized by Young Chicago Authors (an arts-education hub that “exposes young people to hip-hop realist portraiture,” according to its literature) when they were in school, and who went on to make art that is intensely local, rooted in the radical black vernacular. You can hear Brooksian turns of phrase in Chance’s “Sunday Candy,” or in “Holy,” from Woods’s 2016 album, “HEAVN,” (“The lover may leave / The winter may not”).

“There is a Midwestern cultural aspect to it—a cultural norm of sharing and abundance, rather than scarcity and competition,” Ewing told me, shortly before the last production of “No Blue Memories.” (Ewing recently told me that the play will be staged again in Chicago later this year.) We met in the library, under Jacob Lawrence’s mosaic “Events in the Life of Harold Washington,” which depicts the life of Chicago’s first black mayor. Ewing, striking and assertive, her hair dyed the multiple colors of dawn, took off her coat to reveal a marigold jersey that read, “We all we got.”

“When Langston Hughes came to Chicago, it was to work collaboratively, to work in a theatre company, not to hole up and write the Great American whatever,” Marshall, who is soft-spoken, tall, and bearded, said. He was wearing a shirt that read, “Nothing is the new black.” Ewing’s younger brother was a childhood friend of Marshall’s, and the two poets talk in the anticipatory rhythm of siblings. They wrote “No Blue Memories” together after forming a partnership that they named Crescendo Literary, after a line in Brooks’s poem “To the Diaspora.”

In Chicago, the boundaries between activism and art have a way of dissolving. Brooks, who lived in Bronzeville for most of her life, was an architect of that borderlessness. In “No Blue Memories,” Brooks, played by N. LaQuis Harkins, reads some of the letters she wrote to her admirers of all ages, including a character based on Etheridge Knight, a Black Arts Movement poet who wrote “Poems from Prison.” With “Annie Allen,’’ a poetry collection published in 1949, when she was just thirty-two, Brooks became the first black person to win the Pulitzer Prize. Brooks was aware that her involvement in New Black Poetry and that her more radical poems, which explode the conventions of verse, remain much less well known than her earlier work. “Sometimes I fear these anthologies prefer me presented as a minor detailist, principally interested in beans and daisies and summer eves,” she wrote to an editor at Norton, in 1992, referring to the title poem of her collection, “The Bean Eaters,” from 1960.

As an undergraduate, studying literature at the University of Chicago, Ewing wrote her thesis on Brooks’s consciousness shift. “I feel that the spirit of Miss Gwendolyn Brooks visited me when I was nineteen, in my dorm room, and compelled me to pursue a literary life,” she explained, aware that she might sound credulous. We were sitting in the holding room adjacent to the Pritzker Auditorium. “I took this black-women-writers course, and it was the first time I read her complete anthology ‘Blacks,’ and I realized what a slim and non-representative image of her work I had been given,” she continued. Ewing went on to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she received a doctorate. She is developing her thesis, “Shuttered Schools in the Black Metropolis: Race, History, and Discourse on Chicago’s South Side,” into a book. Her experiences teaching—in the Chicago public-school system, and now at Stateville maximum-security prison—make their way into her short fiction and poetry, much of which explores the interior urges of her giddy, curious, black-girl speakers. “I mean I’m here / to eat up all the ocean you thought was yours,” the poet writes, in “what I mean when I say I’m sharpening my oyster knife,” a poem from her energetic new collection, “Electric Arches,” which also draws from Zora Neale Hurston.

It was important to Marshall and Ewing, who tested the play on an audience at Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, on the South Side, that Brooks’s political awakening formed the arc of their narrative. In one scene, we watch a middle-aged Brooks enter the second Black Writers’ Conference, at Fisk University, in 1967, where she was moved by the revolutionary principles of a playwright named LeRoi Jones, who would later rename himself Amiri Baraka.

“No Blue Memories” was just one of the many tributes devoted to Brooks on the year of her centennial—others included a monumental mural, painted by the artist Kerry James Marshall, on the façade of the city’s Cultural Center, and a book, “The Golden Shovel Anthology,” featuring more than a hundred contributors, such as Nikki Giovanni and Tracy K. Smith. (A “golden shovel,” a form that the poet Terrance Hayes created in honor of Brooks, is a kind of poem in which the final words of each line come from another, source poem; it is also the name of the Chicago pool hall where Brooks observed the truant young men she would write about in “We Real Cool,” a poem that sounds like jazz: “We / Sing sin. We / Thin gin. We / Jazz June. We / Die soon.”)

“There’s a question of What Would Miss Brooks Do?” Marshall told me, when I asked him about Brooks’s influence on his work. He is a professor at Northwestern University, the director of the Young Chicago Authors’ National Programs, a rapper, and an acclaimed poet of “bewildering fluency,” as Roger Ebert put it. As an eighth-grader, he won the Young Poetry Award that Brooks established, judged, and, for a time, helped fund. Like Brooks, Marshall named his first book, “Wild Hundreds,” after a Chicago neighborhood, and the fluttering, associative spirals of language in poems such as “hoodwood” drop you right in the psyche of a child, learning about the dangers and the wonders of his surroundings: “We heard our mothers best / white voices rattle alarm into our telephones. / every kid & old folk perched on porches.”