Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, on June 7, 1917, and raised in Chicago. She was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (The David Co., 1987); To Disembark (Third World Press, 1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (The David Co., 1986); Riot (Broadside Press, 1969); In the Mecca (Harper & Row, 1968); The Bean Eaters (Harper, 1960); Annie Allen (Harper, 1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville (Harper & Brothers, 1945). She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha (Harper, 1953), and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (Broadside Press, 1972), and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (Broadside Press, 1971). In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois. In 1985, she was the first black woman appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post now known as Poet Laureate. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000. Source

Boy Breaking Glass

To Marc Crawford

from whom the commission

 

Whose broken window is a cry of art   

(success, that winks aware

as elegance, as a treasonable faith)

is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.

Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.   

Our barbarous and metal little man.

 

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.   

If not an overture, a desecration.”

 

Full of pepper and light

and Salt and night and cargoes.

 

“Don’t go down the plank

if you see there’s no extension.   

Each to his grief, each to

his loneliness and fidgety revenge.

Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”

 

The only sanity is a cup of tea.   

The music is in minors.

 

Each one other

is having different weather.

 

“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!   

And this is everything I have for me.”

 

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,   

the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,   

runs. A sloppy amalgamation.

A mistake.

A cliff.

A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.

Published:

1987

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Black Arts Movement

Anthology Years:

2021

Themes:

Politics

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Epigraph

a short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter, intended to suggest its theme

Juxtaposition

the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect