Author: Michael Janairo

Gwendolyn Brooks, poet, 1917 to 2000.
I don’t remember the first time I read a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, either in grade school or high school. But the notion of what poetry is — or can be — has always been informed (at least for me) by the spareness, wit, grace, live-fast-and-die-young mentality of the subject and the gaze on that subject (through the use of a plural first person, no less) in what is perhaps Brooks’ most famous poem, “We Real Cool.” Here’s the poem:

THE POOL PLAYERS.

SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

From The Bean Eaters by Gwendolyn Brooks, published by Harpers. © 1960 by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Brooks was the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950 for the collection of poems “Annie Allen.” [I have since learned that she is the first African-American to win the Pulitzer, and not just the first African-American woman (thanks to Barbara Smith)]To hear Brooks’ speak about “We Real Cool” and read it (and lament that few people know her other poems), click on the link below.

• http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433

The audio clip is from May 03, 1983; Guggenhiem Museum, from the Academy Audio Archive.

Here are some links:

• University of Minnesota
• Modern American Poetry
• Poets.org
• Gale Group biography
• African American Literature Book Club

Is there a book, play or essay you think is a vital part of the African-American literary tradition, especially something that has touched you personally? E-mail your idea to me at mjanairo@timesunion.com.

In recognition of Black History Month, the Books Blog will highlight important books, plays, poems and contributors to the African-American literary tradition. Of course, a month isn’t long enough, and there is no reason why this will end with this month. But it is a good excuse to highlight important works that help define not only the African-American experience, but what it means to be an American.

Is there a book, play or essay you think is a vital part of the African-American literary tradition, especially something that has touched you personally? E-mail your idea to me at mjanairo@timesunion.com.

The first book the Books Blog will highlight is also one of the earliest:

“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789),” (Bedford edition). I was introduced to this book in graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh in a class on slave narratives with professor Ronald Judy.
The book is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, first-person slave narratives written by a former slave. The book recounts a life that began in freedom in 1745 in what is now Nigeria and then his being taken captive and sold into slavery as an 11-year-old boy (first in Africa and then through the Middle Passage to Barbados and, eventually, Virginia), being purchased by an Englishman and traveling to Britain, and earning money to buy his freedom.
“The Narrative” was a best-seller in England and later America. As an anti-slavery text, it gave graphic accounts that helped to shore up abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. After writing the book, Equiano traveled extensively to promote it and its ideas. He married an English woman. He died in 1797.
The book is of vital importance for an understanding of the complexities and cruelties of the slave trade.
The introduction to the Equiano section in the “Norton Anthology of African American Literature” says:

Equiano’s Life bequeaths to modern African American literature a prescient and provacative example of what W.E.B. Du Bois would call “double-consciousness” — the African American’s fateful sense of “twoness” born of a bicultural identification with both an African heritage and a European education.

Click “more” for a passage from Equiano’s “Narrative” and for links.

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