There is not a single moment where I remember engaging with Gwendolyn Brooks the same way I remember many of the poets I have covered thus far. She was, while I lived in Chicago, ubiquitous — alive on street corners, bus stops, in every passing car. There was the school they named for her who competed in Louder Than a Bomb, a teen poetry slam I organized when I still had my YCA job. There were the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic awards in which I never participated, but some of my friends won. But a genesis moment of my relationship to Brooks, dear reader, I cannot think of one.

I suppose that is part of what I love about Brooks. The rhythm of her words and the way her story finds, within such ordinariness, complexity in rhymes. She gave us A Street in Bronzeville, but we wanted the whole city. She reopened the run-down salons of our dreams, melding form and content in ways that challenged what we believed to be true about them: that perhaps is more important than the other when defining poetry.

Underrated is the word I hear attributed to her. By profs and crits and poetry heads, and lovers of spoken word. But what I can’t devise, what I’ll never figure out, is why not rate her higher. I know that among certain circles she is considered to the be the matriarch, but I still have the nagging feeling that she doesn’t garner the respect she should by the academy or the anti-academy or by anyone. I have a feeling that in fifty years, some light bulb will go off and people will clear some of the Frost books from the shelf and replace them with her. (Yeah, that was a Frost dig. Whatcha gonna do about it, Bob?)

This, to me speaks to another aspect of poetry in the U.S.: a sense of pastoral, provincial, myth-building colonial allegiance that values snowy cabins in Maine to anyplace in the Midwest. I don’t have the pepper to get into it now, but I will revisit it at some point. But I wonder if Brooks is overlooked in this way.

Egal. Today in Chicago is the 21st Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Writing Conference at Chicago State. It started three hours ago, so I will never make it. But I figured it was a good hint to use the blog today to post this poem, one of my favorites by her:



the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men

They had supposed their formula was fixed.

They had obeyed instructions to devise

A type of cold, a type of hooded gaze.

But when the Negroes came they were perplexed.

These Negroes looked like men. Besides, it taxed

Time and the temper to remember those

Congenital iniquities that cause

Disfavor of the darkness. Such as boxed

Their feelings properly, complete to tags-

A box for dark men and a box for Other-

Would often find the contents had been scrambled.

Or even switched. Who really gave two figs?

Neither the earth nor heaven ever trembled.

And there was nothing startling in the weather.

