A Thousand “We Real Cools”: New Forms in Recent African American Poetry

Nearly ten years after Gwendolyn Brooks aligned with the Blacks Arts Movement and changed her aesthetic approach, Gloria Hull asked her to assess her new direction so far in a 1977 interview. Brooks admitted that her new agenda was challenging: writing this way, she explained, is “a very difficult task” (Brooks, Conversations 85). But she pointed to one poem she had written that was largely successful: “We Real Cool,” first published in Poetry in 1959, and already by then one of Brooks’s most famous works. The poem speaks in the voices of seven pool players, who are at a pool hall called The Golden Shovel, reflecting on the perils and thrills of being young and Black in urban Chicago at mid-century. Songlike and brief, the poem avoids clichés and uses vernacular speech and loose rhythm; Brooks pointed to these parameters as key for her new aesthetic agenda.¹ Crafting with these principles in mind, she felt, was the way to get her poetry to speak to all Black people, “not just the blacks who go to college but also those who have their customary habitat in taverns and the street—people who have grown up feeling that poetry was not for them” (Conversations 85). By the time she spoke with Hull, there was an additional important guideline that Brooks had already explained elsewhere. In 1975, she collaborated with a group of poets to create a poetry-writing handbook, A Capsule Course on Black Poetry Writing, designed to encourage the voices of emerging Black poets. There she described another task of her new agenda: to “chase out Western measures, rules, and models,” like sonnets and villanelles, because they were so closely aligned with whiteness (5). Given all these parameters, “We Real Cool” was the ideal poem. But it was only one poem, and it was the only poem Brooks could point to with any satisfaction. Ultimately, Brooks told Hull, “I can’t write a thousand ‘We Real Cool’ ‘s” [sic] (85).

Why could Brooks not write a thousand “We Real Cools”—or even just two or three more? Indeed, before her aesthetic realignment, Brooks regularly wrote from poetic patterns; she was virtuosically good at it. Her ballads and sonnets are obvious examples: her collected poetry volume Blacks (1987) includes upward of twenty sonnets and fifty ballads, poems held up as exemplars of their genres. Granted, after her radicalization, sonnets and ballads were under interdiction as “Western measures,” and Brooks avoided these fixed forms. But it seems that after Brooks was radicalized, she resisted not just Western measures, rules, and models but also the very idea of measures, rules, and models. “We Real Cool” was simultaneously prototypical and a type that she would never think to reproduce. Indeed, despite its success and the fact that she herself identified it as a kind of model, she never wrote another poem even a little like “We Real Cool.”

When the poets of the Black Arts Movement rejected Western models, they ushered in a vibrant tradition of antiracist poetry that foregrounded suspicion of convention itself. This tradition has remained a guiding light today for many poets writing to dismantle racial hierarchies. After all, what is a political radical if not a nonconformist? Correlating craft nonconformities and ideological ones has been a crucial way of pointing out poetry that is not just—or maybe not even—antiracist in its thematics but structurally so in its syntax, sound, and typography. But the close association between radical politics and a poetics of nonconformity has led some to distrust “conformist” formal poetry—poems that follow a set of guidelines or procedures to find their shape.

This article explores the political potential of procedural forms within a Black radical tradition, arguing that recent poetry uses formal conformity not just as an aesthetic tool but also as a means for imagining and enacting new progressive coalitions. The radical rule-makers of the post–Black Arts Movement use their newly invented forms to connect a changing people to their histories, disseminate modes of thinking, and encourage community growth shaped by new parameters. For the writers considered here, to design a poetic form...