In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Callaloo 23.4 (2000) 1163-1169



[Access article in PDF]
IMAGE LINK=
Photo by Roy Lewis

In Memoriam
Gwendolyn
Brooks
(1917-2000)


Who will herald the passage of a Poet among poets, but a myriad of poets singing with gifted tongues? Who will pick up pens and go against the swords and slay them in a kind kill as she did? Who will study war no more, but the blessings of the spirit evoked in the world as did Gwendolyn Brooks, whose word was poetry itself, and whose being was African and American and mighty?

Gwendolyn Brooks, poet, novelist, memoirist, Poet Laureate, was the author of more than 20 volumes of poetry, among these Blacks, In Birmingham, Annie Allen, A Street in Bronzeville, Selected Poems, The Near Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems; author of the novel Maud Martha, the memoirs, Reports from Part One and Two; children's books The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves, Aloneness and Children Coming Home. Brooks was the first African-American to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, in any literary genre; served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (then U.S. Poet Laureate) in 1985-1986, and as Illinois Poet Laureate from 1968-2000. In 1994 she was awarded the Medal of Art by President William Jefferson Clinton. She was the recipient of the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, and was awarded 90 honorary degrees.

Gwendolyn Brooks, born in Topeka, Kansas, was the devoted daughter of David and Keziah Brooks; the family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth. She was the loving wife of the late Henry Blakely, poet, and author of Windy Place, and mother of Henry and Nora Blakely, digital artist, and playwright and Founder and Director of Chocolate Chips Theater Company, respectively. [End Page 1163]

Were there no honors garlanding her name, Gwendolyn Brooks' work would remain as evidence of a gifted spirit, and a unique presence that amplified us all. And her work would ennoble us as it does now as we honor her still. Yet her rather early assumption into literary legend status, at the age of 32, as a result of the groundbreaking Pulitzer, did not cloister her from the injuries inflicted by racism, sexism, colorism, classism, or humankind's personal injuries. Nor save her from the foibles and faults of humanity as she herself cautioned in a salute to Lerone Bennett and Hoyt Fuller; elevating certain others to godhood must not be our way of alleviating ourselves of responsibility for ourselves and each other. She celebrated the wondrous complexity of humanity, and she exalted us.

Perhaps one of her sweetest poems, a lyric with a lovely lilt, the upturned cry in mid-poem sounding the spirituals, concludes Blacks.

Infirm

Everybody here
is infirm.

Everybody here is infirm.
Oh. Mend me. Mend me. Lord.

Today I
say to them

say to them
say to them, Lord:

look! I am beautiful, beautiful with
my wing that is wounded
my eye that is bonded
or my car not funded
or my walk all a wobble.
I'm enough to be beautiful.

You are
beautiful too.

The intense humanism of Gwendolyn Brooks' identity as poet and person is distilled into these few lines. Direct, graceful, and vivid in their depiction of a humanity of imperfection and blessedness.

The Chicago Sun-Times described Gwendolyn Brooks as opposed to force or agitation which may belie her militancy and support for African and African-American freedom and well-being, and undying support for full equality among Americans. She cared that the Mrs. Smalls, Malcolm Littles, Xs, Martin Luther Kings and "the children of the poor" all flourish in a land that learns to love its own [End Page 1164] diversity, its heterogeneity. Of racists and racism she said, "They do not love us." Her understatement, as often was the case, spoke volumes that could fill the Report of the Kerner Commission, the governor who first installed her as Poet Laureate of Illinois.

The veiled civility of some of her early work gave way to a stark simplicity that nevertheless lent to itself an air of mystery. Her work itself continued...

pdf

Share