The Poet's Craft

"If there was ever a born poet," Alice Walker once said in an interview, "I think it is Brooks." A passionate sense of language and an often daring use of formal structures are hallmarks of Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry. Hers is a career characterized by dramatic evolution that links two very different generations of African-American poets. "Until 1967," Brooks has said, "my own Blackness did not confront me with a shrill spelling of itself." That awakening happened at the second Black Writer's Conference at Fisk University, where she met a number of black poets who persuaded her that "black poets should write as blacks, about blacks, and address themselves to blacks." Before 1967, Brooks had followed the example of the older writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen (1903-1946) among them, who honored the ideal of an integrated society. In that period her work had received support largely from white audiences. Brooks, however, has never been a poet without political awareness, and in remarkably versatile poems, both early and late, she has written powerfully about black experience and black rage, with a particular awareness of the complex lives of black women.

In her early poetry, Brooks concentrated on portraits of what Langston Hughes called "the ordinary aspects of black life." She stressed, via character sketches, the vitality and often subversive morality of ghetto figures: good girls who want to be bad, the boredom of the children of hardworking pious mothers, the laments of black mothers and women abandoned by their men. Brooks's diction was a combination of the florid biblical speech of black Protestant preachers, street talk, and the main speech patterns of English and American verse. She wrote vigorous, strongly accented, and strongly rhymed lines with a great deal of alliteration; and cultivated traditional lyric forms; she was, for example, one of the few modern poets to write extensively in the sonnet form.

Brooks drew closer to militant political groups and simultaneously sought to "clarify  language" so that she could reach out to wider audiences, specifically "to all manner of blacks." She conducted poetry workshops for members of the Blackstone Rangers, a teenage gang in Chicago, and in autobiographical writings such as her prose Report from Part One,  became conscious of her potential role as a leader of African-American feminists. She also left her New York publisher to have her work printed by African-American publishers, especially the Broadside Press.

Brooks's poetry changed as she did, both in its focus and in its technique. Her subjects became more explicitly political and dealt with questions of revolutionary violence and issues of African-American identity. Stylistically, her work has evolved out of the concentrated imagery and narratives of her earlier writing, with its often formal diction, and has moved toward an increased use of the energetic, improvisatory rhythms of jazz, the combinations of African chants, and an emphatically spoken language.

Brooks talks about why she made the formal choice of off-rhyme in writing a series of poems about the experience of soldiers in World War II.

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