Gwendolyn Brooks - She Real Cool

Gwendolyn Brooks was an American poet, born in 1917. Although born in Kansas, she grew up in Chicago, Illinois, during the 1920s and 30s. Much of her poetry reflects her experiences as an African American during those racially turbulent times. She attended white, black, and integrated schools, which biographers believe gave her unique insights into realities of race and varying levels of equality to be found in each.

Even as a teenager, Brooks was an accomplished poet, publishing her pieces in local newspaper poetry columns and various magazines. Unlike some poets who stick to a certain style, Brooks wrote in a wide variety of poetic styles, including ballad, sonnet, and free verse. After graduating college, she worked as a typist, and attended several poetry workshops, which helped to encourage and improve her writing.

Brooks' first published book of poetry was titled A Street in Bronzeville, and came out in 1945. It was followed in 1959 by Annie Allen, which won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, making Brooks the first African American woman to receive that honor. Throughout her lifetime, Brooks garnered an impressive amount of awards and honors, including being named Poet Laureate of Illinois (1968), the Poet Consultant to the Library of Congress (1985), inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame (1988), named the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecturer (1994), and many many more. In fact, Brooks is a perfect example of a poet recognized and truly successful during her own time.

One of Brooks' most famous poems is entitled “We Real Cool.” Hundreds of textbooks and thousands of classrooms across the country teach this text to burgeoning poets and English students. Brooks herself said, “Most young people know me only by that poem,” adding comically, “I don't mean that I dislike it, but I would prefer it if the textbook compilers and the anthologists would assume that I'd written a few other poems!”

To those unfamiliar with the poem, “We Real Cool” speaks in the voice of seven young pool players who seem to be bragging, saying not only the titular “We real cool” but that they've “left school”, and are busy singing, sinning, drinking, jazzing, etc. The real punch of the poem comes at the end, the final line, in which, after all this bragging of the supposed 'cool' things they've been doing, they add “We / Die soon.” Not only does this significantly contrast with the fun, edgy activities earlier, but it brings an abrupt end to the poem, the list, and the speakers themselves. The silence that stretches after “die soon”, whether from reading aloud or reading to oneself, adds to the strength of this final line.

When reading the poem, Brooks has said she meant the recurring “we” (found at the end of each line) to be spoken softly. A brilliant recording of Brooks herself reading it aloud (found online at poets.org) shows exactly what she means. She pronounces each “we” with a soft breathy beat, then moves on to the rhythm of the other lines. The poem swings easily and contagiously, like a jazz song. One only wishes it wasn't so short, and would go on longer (though, undoubtedly, this is also a lesson the poet was trying to teach us about life).

About her inspiration for this poem, Brooks said, “I wrote it because I was passing by a pool hall in my community one afternoon during school time, and I saw therein a bunch of boys, I say here in this poem seven, and they were shooting pool. But instead of asking myself 'Why aren't they in school?' I asked myself, 'I wonder how they feel about themselves?'” This is a fantastic glimpse into the working mind of a poet, who always observes the world around them and asks questions about it, though not necessarily the questions that they 'should' be asking (aka those that everyone else might ask), but other more unusual, perhaps more enlightening, questions, and then exploring these questions and answers through poetry.

More comments and insights from Brooks about this poem can be found at the website Poets.org, which also offers some amazing recordings of Brooks reading her own poems. Though Brooks passed away in December 2000, one can still experience the poems in the poet's own voice, which lends even further layers onto already beautiful and complex (and yet, somehow, beautifully simple) poetry. I highly recommend following this link and checking it out for yourself:
We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks