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We Real CoolBy Gwendolyn Brooks

      The Pool Players.       Seven at the Golden Shovel.

            We real cool. We               Left school. We

5          Lurk late. We            Strike straight. We

            Sing sin. We               Thin gin. We

            Jazz June. We   10        Die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks.

Gwendolyn Brooks1917–2000

Gwendolyn Brooks was a highly regarded, much-honored poet, with the distinction of being the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. She also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—the first black woman to hold that position—and poet laureate of the State of Illinois. Many of Brooks's works display a political consciousness, especially those from the 1960s and later, with several of her poems reflecting the civil rights activism of that period. Her body of work gave her, according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor George E. Kent, "a unique position in American letters. Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she has also managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young black militant writers of the 1960s."

[I married]By Lorine Niedecker

I married

in the world’s black nightfor warmth

                   if not repose. repose: to lie down or relax 5                    At the close—

someone.

I hid with himfrom the long range guns.                  We lay leg

10                   in the cupboard, headin closet.

A slit of lightat no bird dawn—                  Untaught

15 I thoughthe drank

too much.I say

                   I married20                   and lived unburied.

I thought—

Lorine Niedecker1903–1970

Niedecker's verse is praised for its stark, vivid imagery, subtle rhythms, and spare language, which Kenneth Cox described as "whittled clean." Concerned with the distillation of images and thoughts into concise expression, Niedecker described her work as a "condensery," and several critics have compared her poetry to the delicate yet concrete verse of Chinese and Japanese writers. Although Niedecker's long correspondence with Louis Zukofsky, who frequently submitted her poems to the journal, Origin, and contact with such respected writers as Cid Corman and Basil Bunting, brought her some critical notice, her work was generally overlooked until late in her life. Since her death in 1970, several critics have identified Niedecker as a significant and original voice in contemporary American poetry.

Name: ___________________________________AP Literature: Poetry Unit

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made

5 banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, chronic: reoccurring often

10 Speaking indifferently to him, indifferently: without emotionwho had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? austere: severe or strict in manner

Robert Hayden1913–1980

Born Asa Bundy Sheffey into a poor family, Robert Hayden’s parents left him to be raised by foster parents. Due to extreme nearsightedness, Hayden turned to books rather than sports in his childhood. Some of his best-known poems can be found in his collection A Ballad of Remembrance. Hayden was the first African American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Hayden's formal, elegant poems about the black historical experience earned him a number of other major awards as well. "Robert Hayden is now generally accepted," Frederick Glaysher stated in Hayden's Collected Prose, "as the most outstanding craftsman of Afro-American poetry."