Exquisite The Poetry and Life of Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn grew up in the big city of Chicago with little money to spare. Yet her family owned great treasure, a bookcase filled with precious poems. Each night, her father read fine poetry aloud, passionate and proud. Nothing sounded sweeter to Gwendolyn than Father’s deep voice reciting the rhythmic words. Gwendolyn memorized those lines fine words in time to share with her big-hugging aunts.

When she was seven, Gwendolyn began arranging words into poems of her own. One day, her mother found those scribbly lines and announced with sincere conviction (as mothers do when making a prediction), “You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Gwendolyn beamed. He was her favorite poet!

Gwendolyn loved to sit on her big back porch with colorful clouds dancing overhead and dream about her future “I was at my happiest, sitting out on the back porch, to sit there and look out at the western sky with all those beautiful changing clouds and just to dream about the future, which was going to be ecstatically exquisite, like those clouds.”

Writing became like eating and breathing to Gwendolyn it was something she just had to do. She carefully strung words together like elegant jewels in perfect meter and time. Her rhythmic lines described paper dolls and tick tock clocks, raindrops, sunsets, and climbing rocks. She poured her poems into notebooks filled them to the very tops. Her room became a swelling sea of poems.

When Gwendolyn turned eleven, she decided to set her words…free…and mailed four prized poems to a newspaper. Her words were printed on crisp pages for the whole neighborhood to see. Elated, she sent her nature poem “Eventide” to a magazine. It appeared on shiny pages for the entire country to read!

Gwendolyn’s future seemed as bright as morning’s first clouds. But then a terrible storm blew in- the Great Depression. With too few jobs for too many workers, her father’s pay was cut in half. Dinner each night was the same: beans. Hungry for food yet more hungry for words, Gwendolyn kept writing. She sent more poems to magazines, but they were all rejected.

In high school Gwendolyn felt rejected, too. She was too quiet and shy for some crowds, her skin too dark for others. Every year she tried a different school all white, all Black, and a mix of both. But she didn’t seem to fit in anywhere.

Soon, Gwendolyn headed off to college, where she devoured thick books of poetry Dickinson, Wordsworth, and Hughes and penned poems about her family and friends.

After graduation, jobs were still hard to come by, and poems didn’t pay the bills.

So Gwendolyn found work wherever she could cleaning homes, typing, even making deliveries.

Then along came Henry, a handsome man who adored poetry, too. The two married and squeezed into a tiny apartment in a Black neighborhood, where they were supposed to live. A year later, baby Henry arrived. A busy wife and mother, Gwendolyn continued to write. She took a poetry class at night, where she studied modern poems with different-length lines unpredictable meter and time. Inspired, she created unique poems about the nonstop busyness, the hard-luck grittiness, of life in her South Side Chicago neighborhood- Bronzeville-where businesses boomed on 47th Street, where hardworking families didn’t have enough to eat, where people jumped and jived to a new, jazzy beat.

And Gwendolyn kept polishing her words until they sparkled like silvery summer clouds.

“I am proud to feature people and their concerns their troubles as well as their joys.”

Gwendolyn’s words drifted into the world like bright, brilliant clouds. Her poems helped people better understand others. They encouraged people to take a closer look at themselves. They changed the way some people thought and acted. But even two books couldn’t pay all the bills. Money was tighter than ever. Yet everywhere she looked, Gwendolyn saw more stories that needed to be told.

So she kept writing.