Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brookswas an American poet and teacher. She was the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer when she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, for her second collection, Annie Allen...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth7 June 1917
CityTopeka, KS
CountryUnited States of America
men giving waiting
No man can give me any word but Wait ...
running morning men
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man's shirt on its morning run.
men order swim
... sometimes you have to deal / Devilishly with drowning men in order to swim them to shore.
army men two
Words can do wonderful things. They pound, purr. They can urge, they can wheedle, whip, whine. They can sing, sass, singe. They can churn, check, channelize. They can be a "Hup two three four." They can forge a fiery army of a hundred languid men.
love sweet men
When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.
happening
Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?
color two white
When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.
sweet flower independent
The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!
mean may speech
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.
weed track magic
There are no magics or elves / Or timely godmothers to guide us. We are lost, must / Wizard a track through our own screaming weed.
grief fuel fool
beware the easy griefs / that fool and fuel nothing.
grief mind all-time
I swear to keep the dead upon my mind, / Disdain for all time to be overglad.
running mean thinking
I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.
live-in-the-moment lasts defense
My last defense / Is the present tense.