Poetry often catches our attention through the mood that is created within the poem. Through the tone, the reader is drawn into the time period, setting, and emotion the speaker of the poem is trying to convey. In her poem, “We Real Cool” Gwendolyn Brooks takes her audience on a journey into the struggles faced by African Americans living in America during the 1950s through the 1960s. By taking an in-depth look at Brooks’ use of colloquial speech within her poem we can see how she used this poem to express the black experience during this time of severe racial inequality in America.
As we begin to read “We Real Cool” our immediate reaction to the title, which is identical to the first line of the poem, is that the speaker of the poem must not be very well educated. Grammatically, “We real cool.” is not a proper sentence. However, we have all heard people speak this way before. As we search our minds we immediately associate this improper sentence with a group of individuals who are underprivileged and/or lack the motivation and proper environment to pursue an education. Staying on this thread of thought as we continue reading the poem, we take into consideration both the following lines and time period in which this poem was constructed. Putting aside the many literary devices that are at work in this poem such as alliteration, repetition of “we,” rhyme, etc. we see simple, short sentences which often aren’t even sentences at all. Lines of the poem other than “We real cool.” that don’t quite meet the standards of a sentence crafted by an intelligent speaker include “We thin gin.” and “We Jazz June.” Since we know this poem was written in the late 1950s and is portraying a speaker who is skipping school to play pool, we come to the conclusion that the speaker is a black person facing the struggles of social and class inequality. Generally, white people of America in the late 1950s received a better education and lived in households where parents had the money and motivation to succeed since they were of a higher class. Therefore, through simply noticing the sentence length and the way those sentences are constructed, Brooks has given us a way to characterize the speaker of her poem. The word choice of “Jazz” and “cool” also help us to connect this poem with a specific group of people. Jazz was seen as black people’s music and cool used in a way to express personality was seen as slang mostly used by a less educated or unsophisticated group that would have consisted of African Americans.
Why would Brooks want to make a poem that seems to characterize a group of black people that are in fact uneducated and up to no good? Wouldn’t she want to prove that black and white people are equal by presenting good upstanding African Americans in her poetry? This question may trouble you as you read through this poem. Perhaps, you may even feel guilty that you have pictured a group of young black and not white fellows who are skipping school and getting into trouble. The answer to your dismay comes to the simple conclusion that Brooks wanted to portray the honest realities of the black experience. Much of her poetry stems from what she witnessed. In an article by Mel Watkins the following is recorded, "I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street," Ms. Brooks once said. "I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other. There was my material."(Watkins p.51) In fact her inspiration for this poem came from a scene that she witnessed in her life. She thought about what the pool players’ circumstances might have been and wrote this poem by putting herself in their frame of mind. (Stavros, 2002) She wanted to create poems that represented the lives that many African Americans led and to make art of what was their reality. One of the main goals of many African American poets of this time period was to show the lives of black people which were so very different from the lives of white Americans but equally as important. Gwendolyn Brooks remarks, “"In the black experience everything is important just as it is in the white experience."” (Clark, 2005)
Since Gwendolyn Brooks was interested in presenting the black experience through poetry it comes to no surprise that she would have played a role in The Black Arts Movement. This movement started in the mid 1960s which would have been a few years after “We Real Cool” was published. In an article on the Black Arts Movement, Kalamu ya Salaam states that, “Both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic. The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black Power.” (Salaam, 1997) While I will not go into detail about the Black Arts Movement, I do believe that it is important to recognize that although written before this movement, works such as “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks show the type of poetry that led up to such a significant movement of the black voice in America.
While Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool” certainly is original in the way it expresses the pool players’ situation, the colloquial nature of the poem itself is not something that only she is known for. Poets such as Langston Hughes of the Harlem Renaissance, whom she looked up to and was introduced to as a young girl, also used vernacular and slang to represent black people’s speech. Nevertheless, this fact only further demonstrates how “We Real Cool” was a poem in which colloquial language was used to add to the growing list of poems in which the black experience was voiced. In an article in The Norton Anthology of Poetry website called “The Poets Craft,” there is a quote that I believe perfectly sums up the category of Brooks’ poems that “We Real Cool” falls under. It is written that, “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.” (Knapp, 2005). With the short sentences and word choice used in “We Real Cool” Brooks’ utilizes such “street talk” to complete the scene we have created in our minds of the pool players. Often, we may disregard the importance of the use of dialect within “We Real Cool” and not realize how Brooks has successfully produced the image of her black pool players in our minds. However, an article by Natalie Maynor titled “A Synthesis of Literature, Dialect Study, and Composition” states that in “We Real Cool” “dialect contributes to meaning, and discussion of this dialect can lead to writing assignments directly or indirectly related to the poems under discussion.” (Maynor, 1981) How we speak and the words we use play a huge part in how we are perceived by others and in representing the life we lead. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the way we hear “We Real Cool” gives us insight into the background and attitudes of black people that Gwendolyn Brooks so desired to portray.
If this one seemingly simple aspect of this one short poem can accomplish so much we must certainly realize the power of speech. We must recognize how much depends on even just the words we leave out of a sentence or the way we arrange them. Gwendolyn Brooks speaks to this importance of words as she says, “I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it’s too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.”(Stavros, 1970) The way words are spoken can impact how a poem like “We Real Cool” is interpreted. In the case of all of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry, words can even work to add a whole new element to black history.
