Children Coming Home: The Anticipatory Present in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Poems of Childhood

It is a courageous and audacious act to build, as Gwendolyn Brooks does in Children Coming Home, a collection of poems for adults that hews unrelentingly to the perspectives of children, and thus prods and provokes adult readers to contemplate and inhabit the complex daily lives of young people. While critics such as B. J. Bolden, Joanne Gabbin, and D. H. Melhem have noted the skillful ways that Brooks weaves social and political purpose through her poems, fewer critics—Richard Flynn and Gary Smith among them—have focused specifically on Brooks’s poetry of childhood. Brooks’s crafting of poems about young people is an important current of the “political” aspects of her poems across her career, in the “exhaustive” sense of the term as she herself advocated (Tate 106). In the case of Children Coming Home, we gain a greater sense of this political purpose by considering the book as a whole, which was initially published as a slender volume in 1991 by Brooks’s own Chicago imprint The David Company and was thus presumably intentional in all aspects of its design. Indeed, John Young has identified the book’s “unique bibliographic format” and its local production and distribution as important aspects of Brooks’s “giv[ing] voice to a community that is often otherwise silent” (113). I further suggest that Children Coming Home gains power and depth through interaction between the convincing specificity and richness of Brooks’s characterizations of youth within the poems, and her nuanced and multi-faceted use of the age-determined social category “children.”¹

The cover of Children Coming Home is in the form of the black and white mottled design of a composition notebook, which suggests the institutionalized forms within which children are taught, or childhood itself as a social institution.

Brooks sets herself the challenge of crafting poems in the first-person voices of twenty imagined young characters against the “cover” of the social institutions of childhood and school that help shape and constrain adults’ views of young people. Brooks’s name appears on the cover of the composition notebook where a child’s name would be, which suggests that she will use her voice to convey the perspectives of young people.² Interestingly, when the poems were reprinted within their own section in Brooks’s posthumous collection In Montgomery, in place of the composition book cover is a page with the title printed as “Children Coming Home” (77), which recalls a fill-in-the-blank school assignment that also invokes the institutionalization of childhood. In Children Coming Home, Brooks works with and against the category “children” by challenging ideas of her adult readers through a prefatory poem, by imagining the voices of twenty young speakers, and by masterfully employing temporality, which provides an important perspective on poetry of childhood since the dimension of time is integral to conceptions of childhood.³

Cover of Children Coming Home by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.

Childhood is temporary, time-limited, and inflected with adults’ time-related cultural valuations which, in twentieth-century Western contexts, as sociologists Allison James and Alan Prout have discussed, typically involve valuing childhood for the past (as personal or cultural memory, as nostalgia) or the future (as the adulthood of the future, as hope, as futurity itself) rather than for the present of children’s experiences. In their concluding essay in the seminal collection Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, first published in 1990, James and Prout advance “a theoretical perspective which can grasp childhood as a continually experienced and created social phenomenon which has significance for its present, as well as the past and future” and argue for a focus on “children as beings-in-the-present” (245). Even earlier, Myra Bluebond-Langner used her pioneering anthropological study of terminally ill children, published in 1978, to elucidate the power of children’s active living in the present—which involved children’s striving to understand their impending death, despite adults’ denial of the children’s knowledge—as an alternative to the scholarly...