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Ø Gwendolyn Brooks 106 * * * Drift on, on, into nothing. Then someone screams A scream like an old knife sharpened into nothing. It is only a nightmare. No one wakes up, nothing happens, Except there is gooseflesh over my whole body— And that too, after a little while, is gone. I lie here like a cut-off limb, the stump the limb has left . . . Here at the bottom of the world, what was before the world And will be after, holds me to its black Breasts and rocks me: the oven is cold, the cage is empty, In the House in the Wood, the witch and her child sleep. 1964 GWENDOLYN BROOKS 1917–2000 Gwendolyn brooks created a remarkable verbal world and social vision. Her work is a landmark of twentieth-century American poetry. She brought the urban life of working-class African Americans vividly into poetic history. Exploring her characters’ particularities and circumstances with a keen eye and ready sympathy, she created a human world on the page, producing some of American poetry’s most moving portraits of human beings in relation to one another. Brooks had a delight in, and reverence for, the ordinary life of city dwellers. Her poetry includes her characters’ speech, and it respects their dignity, despite whatever hard times have befallen them. Brooks provides a resonant social world through an art of implication. Her language is often spare and simple, but it is always ready to throw you for a spin. In “Boy Breaking Glass,” for example, the title character “is raw: is sonic: is oldeyed première.” Each of those modifiers is surprising. Each pushes the reader into thought. The modifiers tell us that this young man is different from—and more than—what we might have thought, and that the speaker’s perspective on him is different, too. The poem is candid about the title character, yet it moves us to identify with him. The language depicting him does its job of accurate 107 Gwendolyn Brooks Ø reporting while also going way beyond that job, placing him in unexpected contexts and stretching poetic language to do things it has never done before. Brooks’s poems operate by indirection and highly wrought figuration as much as they do by clarity. Brooks’s poems are at once social and verbal journeys. They take us into the heart of their depicted characters, and they perform a stunning dance that draws equally upon familiar and revolutionary word usages. Brooks’s work occupies the cultural margins, exploring the humanity of people often overlooked in her time: people of color, people who are poor, young people, women, people who are ordinary. She obliterates stereotypes. In “Sadie and Maud,” two sisters live radically different lives, and the poem suggests that our conventional idea of which of them “succeeded” may be upside down. In “The Life of Lincoln West,” the little boy who seems valueless to the racist eye proves to have remarkable talents and an extraordinary power to comfort himself . Brooks reconnects poetry to everyday speech and events, but she also has a social agenda: to give her neglected characters the close, approving attention they deserve. In that sense, her poetry is closely connected to the black rights and women’s liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s. In its cultural decentering, its focus on the social margins, and its use of other people’s voices (such as the young woman’s in “a song in the front yard” and the young man’s in “Boy Breaking Glass”), Brooks’s poetry can also be seen moving toward postmodernism. It establishes a style derived from multiple discourses, from the random encounters with otherness that mark urban living, and from the unresolved perplexities of contemporary existence. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this poetry is its magnificent goodwill—its care for, and faith in, the people it depicts with such realism and imagination. Brooks grew up with her parents and younger brother on the south side of Chicago, in a neighborhood called Bronzeville. She began to write poetry at the age of seven, and as a teenager she read Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. While still a teenager, she met the great Harlem poet Langston Hughes, who read some of her poems on the spot (her mother had conveniently brought them to Hughes’s lecture) and told her that she was “talented and must go on writing.” Hughes became her most important mentor and inspiration. After high school, Brooks...

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