#sparkchamber 021224 — Gwendolyn Brooks
Celebrating Black History Month, #sparkchamber continues to highlight the fierce women of the Black Arts Movement, a Black nationalism movement made up of Black artists and intellectuals active during the 1960s and 1970s that focused on music, literature, drama, and the visual arts. Today, we shine a spotlight on Gwendolyn Brooks, an American poet and teacher, the first Black poet to win a Pulitzer — she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Annie Allen [Harper & Brothers, New York, 1949]. She was also the first Black woman to serve as the United States Poet Laureate [and held the role of Illinois Poet Laureate for 32 years].
Ms. Brooks was born in 1917, “the eldest of two children. Her father was a janitor who had attended medical school and aspired to be a doctor. Her mother was a schoolteacher and a classically trained pianist. The family moved from Topeka, Kansas, to the South Side of Chicago when Brooks was only a few weeks old. The South Side would provide Brooks with the backdrop of her poetry, the language and everyday experiences of its African American residents finding their way into her work. As she wrote in her autobiography Report from Part One [1972], “If you wanted a poem, you had only to look out of a window.”
And so she did … “Brooks was 13 when she published her first poem, Eventide, in American Childhood; by the time she was 17, she was publishing poems frequently in the Chicago Defender. After attending junior college and working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP], she developed her craft in poetry workshops, and completed her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville [Harper & Brothers, 1945, following with Annie Allen four years later. Both collections were “devoted to small, carefully cerebrated, terse portraits of the Black urban poor,” commented Richard K. Barksdale in Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays [Prentice-Hall, 1973].
Her later works — in her 50s and beyond — addressed politics, race, and social justice more directly. “In 1967 she attended a writer’s conference at Fisk University where she said she “rediscovered” her blackness. This rediscovery is reflected in her work In the Mecca“— a long poem about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago apartment building — “Citizen-poet, mixing the radical with the conventional. Spokesperson for Black Activism and African separatism. Urban scenes and lower-middle class characters. Social injustices of racism and poverty dictate choices of scene and character. Color and the color line preoccupy her characters’ lives, whether heterosexual relations, relations of mothers to children, or racial relations themselves are at stake.”
Ms. Brooks lived a long, productive, thoughtful, remarkable life, spending “her later years dedicated to public service. She conducted poetry readings at prisons and hospitals and attended annual poetry contests for school children, which she often funded.”
“Gwendolyn Brooks died on December 4, 2000 at age 83, pen in hand, surrounded by her loved ones. Her legacy continues through her poetic depictions of so-called ordinary people, which awaken, inspire, and instill hope in her readers, prompting a new generation to take up their own pens and write.”
Thank you for your voice, Ms. Brooks.
1.] Where do ideas come from?
Poetry is life distilled.
2.] What is the itch you are scratching?
What I’m fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.
3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?
Art hurts. Art urges voyages — and it is easier to stay at home.
4.] How do you know when you are done?
First fight. Then fiddle.
