Our Miss Brooks.

At age 83, she continues with us, strong as ever, and even more honored by her beloved community of poets--especially the community of black poets to whom she is a pioneering example and godmother.

Since 1950, after becoming the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for her second book of poetry, Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks has emerged as one of our most honored poets. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in June 7, 1917, Ms. Brooks and her sturdy family of origin moved to the Chicago Southside during her infancy. She not only grew up and was educated there but, after marrying Henry Blakely in 1938, raised her own two children in the place she called Bronzeville.

Gwendolyn Brooks gave the impeccable short lyric to her city. She went inside Bronzeville's homes, wrought tableaux of its people's intimate lives, and venerated them. In both the verse of Annie Allen and her novel Maud Martha (1953), she showed us the inside of a brown girl's head.

BIBR asked the distinguished younger poet Elizabeth Alexander to give props to the long career and encouraging presence of Gwendolyn Brooks, the reigning queen mother of the African American poetry aesthetic.

Ode to Miss Gwendolyn Brooks

Ten Small Serenades

1. "A Lovely Love"

Think back to the first poems you loved. Perhaps those first-cherished poems spoke to a child's love of rhythm and rhyme, or put into words a sentimental truth that seemed profound when you encountered it but now seems matter-of-fact. What lasted? When I look back at my poetic passions, the one who has been with me all along is Gwendolyn Brooks. Her work resonates for me as much today as it did to me as a child thrilling to the urgent, be-bop slang of "We Real Cool."

As the years have passed and I have myself become a working writer, l have been lucky enough to meet or hear many of the writers whose work has meant so much to me. Some have disappointed and others have exceeded expectations. Writers are, after all, just people who write, which is to say, they eat, sleep, love, work, wake up on the wrong and the right side of the bed, live in communities, and function like the rest of us, though their words tend to heighten our expectations of them. Gwendolyn Brooks is one writer whose artistic brilliance is matched by her humanity and generosity. Stories of this generosity are legion: young people whom--she sent to Africa out of her own pocket; young people who have received awards from that same pocket. Her eyes are everywhere, and her endowments seem to come from out of the blue.

In 1977, I received a note from Miss Brooks announcing her awarding of the George Kent Prize to me--I was quite overcome, given that she is the poet I most admire. And when she sent me a personal check for my unexpectedly pricey plane ticket from the East Coast to Chicago, despite my protestations, because she wanted me to be able to come and collect the award, I became one of thousands who have been touched by this acknowledgement of good work and financial generosity. Miss Brooks is an Encourager, she might write. With her many prizes she says, "You did a good job. Now keep going."

2. "Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies."

She is queen of the specific, of titles that are themselves small stories, complete poems: "I love those little booths at Benvenutis"; "pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps"; "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith"; "the white troops had their orders but the Negroes looked like men"; "The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock"; "A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon."

3. "the mother"

What would American literature look like without her sleight of hand? For example, she chose the poet Michael Harper's first book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, for publication in 1970. Imagine American poetry without that magnificent poem, or "Brother John," or "Reuben Reuben," to name just a few in that remarkable debut. "You were my clear winner," she wrote to him, a story he loves to tell. So many of us have similar stories to tell. Miss Brooks does her work quietly.

4. Brooks on Brooks

In 1994, the professor and writer Joanne Gabbin organized and hosted an unprecedented gathering of African American poets at George Mason University. She called the conference "Furious Flower" after Miss Brooks' great lines from "The Second Sermon on the Warpland," in honor of the lady herself: "The time/cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face/all unashamed. And sways with wicked grace." Professor Gabbin has edited the proceeding of the conference into an invaluable volume, The Furious Flowering of African-American Poetry (University Press of Virginia, 1999). It includes a wonderfully pointed interview with Miss Brooks. A few of her pronouncements: "I am an `organic' Chicagoan." "The black experience is any experience that a black person has." "I want to report; I want to record. I go inside myself, bring out what I feel, put it on paper, look at it, pull out all of the cliches. I will work hard in that way." "I don't like the term African American. It is very excluding. I like to think of blacks as family ... As a people, we are not of one accord on what we should be called. Some people say it doesn't matter, `call me anything.' I think that is a pitiful decision."

5. Business

At the apex of her popularity, she left Harper and Row and took her work to black presses evermore. She put her money where her mouth was, shared the wealth, gave back, bought black.

6. Red Prairie

Bard of Chicago! Bard of the Southside: Bronzeville! Chicago and its Great Migrants, a literary imagination that sings not of Harlem but of Bronzeville. The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till closes: "Chaos in windy gray/through a red prairie"; the prairie where black migrants made Chicago. She gave the impeccable short lyric to the city, she went inside their homes, she wrought tableaux of their intimate lives, she venerated their intimate lives, she showed us the inside of a brown girl's head. She sings the song of the Southside of Chicago, that mighty city and its mighty black people

7. Theme for English B (apologies to Langston Hughes)

I. The Contributions of Gwendolyn Brooks to American Poetry

A. A long and productive career spanning over 50 years, open to change.

B. Unparalleled mastery of the urban ode.

C. Syntactical genius. True to the quirky logic of innovative syntax. Fearless characterizer.

D. No one is more economical with words.

II. Gwendolyn Brooks and the American Novel.

A. Maud Martha! Formal innovations, a true poet's novel.

B. How she faces intraracial issues of color, gender, class, unflinchingly. How ugly we can sometimes be, how jagged and hurtful to one another.

8. Blacks

She called her collected work Blacks, and what more is there to say, really? Pride in blackness is no insignificant matter. What does it mean to claim and celebrate blackness but remain complex and critical? "Blackness," she writes, "stern and blunt and beautiful,/ organ-rich blackness telling a terrible story." She makes us think about what it is to be black, to struggle through blackness to struggle against and within one's community. She made her own struggle for racial self-acceptance public, in her autobiography, Report from Part One. And she showed us "the warpland," where the black soul resides, and in her sermonizing she told us to be both brave and compassionate. "Live and go out./Define and/medicate the whirlwind."

9. Chaos Redux

How to write about the horror of racial violence? If you are Miss Brooks, you go within, go small, imagine the mad mind of the white woman who accused Emmett Till of impropriety, show us the changed life she leads with her husband, the boy's murderer, and then you will understands something about Emmett Till beyond what his mutilated body said to the world. Hear Miss Brooks inside Till's mother's head and feel the wind cut through your ribs at the lines, "chaos in windy grey/on a red prairie," and you will think about Amadou Diallo's mother, and all the mothers, the mothers whom Miss Brooks understands all too well.

10. Unfinished Tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks

(because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery)

   Be righteous.
   Radiate.
   Worship nothing, honor everything.
   Revere and protect what is small.
   The universe is made of small things, of children.
   Hear children.
   Turn away from nothing. Face the sun.
   Evolve at any cost.
   Hoard nothing. Share.
   Above all, be precise
   so you may name the world precisely.
   Let the heart and the guts lead the brain
   and the big feet will follow.
   Laugh loudly and often.
   The heart is both fist and blossom,
   opening and closing, closing, opening,
   each time gathering new bounty.
   Laugh loudly,
   and often. Be righteous
   and radiate.
   Worship nothing, honor everything,
   but today, let us venerate
   Gwendolyn Brooks,
   my first poet, our "First Poet."

Notable Works by Gwendolyn Brooks

Astonishingly, many of her volumes are out of print, but all are available through libraries, private collections and some online book dealers.

Street in Bronzeville

(1945, out of print)

Her first volume of poetry, originally published by Harper and Row.

Annie Allen

(1949, out of print)

Second volume of poetry, also published by Harper and Row; first by an African American to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1950.

Maud Martha

(1953)

Third World Press (reprint edition), 1993, $9.95 ISBN 0-883-78061-5

A groundbreaking poetic novel.

Bronzeville Boys and Girls

(1956, out of print)

First of Brooks underappreciated children's books.

In the Mecca

(1968, out of print)

Report from Part One

Broadside Press, 1972, $19.95, ISBN 0-910-29682-0

A memoir.

Report from Part Two

Third World Press reprint edition, 1996, $14.95 ISBN 0-883-278162-X

Second volume of memoirs.

The Near Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems

Third World Press (reprint edition), 1991, $4.00 ISBN 0-883-78055-0

Blacks

Third World Press, 1991, $19.95, ISBN 0-883-78105-0

Collected works.

Selected Poems

HarperCollins, 1999, $12.00, ISBN 0-060-93174-4