We want nights of vague adventure – Gwendolyn Brooks cc-by lemasney
We want nights of vague adventure – Gwendolyn Brooks cc-by lemasney
“Now, at 77, Gwendolyn Brooks, perhaps our greatest living poet, has been chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the 1994 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. She will speak today in Washington and next week in Chicago. This is the highest honor the federal government bestows for intellectual achievement in the humanities. It was given because she has brought the experiences of black Americans into our national consciousness and transformed them into art. Ms. Brooks began writing poems — ”putting rhymes together” — when she was 7. At 11, she began keeping her poems in composition books, her mother telling her that she would become the female Paul Laurence Dunbar. Believing her mother, Ms. Brooks kept on writing, sometimes turning out two or three poems in one day, ”all very, very, very bad,” she said. Having few friends (she thought it was because she had a dark complexion and nappy hair), she ”slumped through the halls, quiet, hugging books,” immersing herself in reading and writing. The color bar, she explained, was very high. ”A dark-skinned girl just didn’t have a chance.” Ms. Brooks put much of what she experienced into writing. Her novel, ”Maud Martha,” contains a scene where a boy wants to put a light-skinned girl into his wagon but not a darker girl. When she says something, he says, ”shut up, you old black girl.” Many similar scenes appear in Ms. Brooks’ poems. Reading them is like looking through a scrapbook showing various black characters who, like the hunchback girl thinking of heaven as a straight place, say more than they mean to say. A poem about love and war puts it this way: ”We want nights of vague adventure, lips lax wet and warm, Bees in the stomach, sweat across the brow. Now.” Often as the characters talk, the stories of their lives emerge. Speaking of her aborted children as ”damp small pulps with little no hair,” a mother describes the lives they might have led, ending the poem with a declaration of love: ”Believe me, I knew you though faintly, and I loved, I loved you all.”” – Perhaps Our Greatest Living Poet – tribunedigital-baltimoresun – http://goo.gl/bdLKGI
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