Gwendolyn Brooks: Remember that poetry is life distilled. 

Ed Herman: That, of course, is Gwendolyn Brooks. Welcome to Poetry Lectures, a series of lectures by poets, scholars, and educators presented by poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we hear Gwendolyn Brooks speaking in 1990 at Poetry Day in Chicago. A free celebration sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Day was established in 1955 with Robert Frost as the first speaker, and it is the longest running series of its kind in the country. Although born in Kansas in 1917, Gwendolyn Brooks was raised in Chicago and spent most of her life there. She began writing poems at an early age, and was inspired by discovering African-American writers such as Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. At the age of 16, she met one of her heroes, Langston Hughes, who encouraged her to keep writing. While still in school, Brooks contributed poems to the Chicago Defender, the leading African American newspaper at the time. In the early 1940s, her work began to appear in national magazines, including Poetry. Her first book, A Street in Bronzeville, received instant critical acclaim, and with her next effort, Annie Allen, Brooks became the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize.  

Gwendolyn Brooks: In writing your poem, tell the truth as you know it. 

Ed Herman: Throughout her career, Brooks wrote unflinchingly about tough social issues. In the 1960s, she began a series of university teaching jobs, and her views on race took a sharper focus. While remaining an established public figure in the white literary world, Brooks was both influenced by and a mentor to the younger militant poets of the Black Arts Movement. Brooks finished her teaching career at Chicago State University, where her legacy is honored through the Gwendolyn Brooks Center, and the annual Conference for Black Literature and Creative Writing. Here is Gwendolyn Brooks, speaking in 1990. 

Gwendolyn Brooks: Thank you very much. Thank all of you for coming, and I thank the Poetry Society of America, and I thank Poetry magazine for honoring me in this way. When I was 14 and first began submitting little manuscripts to Poetry Magazine, I never would have thought that a day like this could ever come to be. And I’d like to quote to you a short paragraph from the 75th anniversary issue of Poetry magazine, in which under comments I say “I see myself at 14, when I first began to pound at the gates of the magazine Poetry. It was a 14-year siege, but the rejection slips gradually gentled. Finally, in 1944, Paul Engle, a poet I hope you all know, of Iowa, sent a group of my poems to the editors, and at last I was starred in the cherished magazine that above all others, poets have considered the goal.” I do a lot of travelling around the country, meet a lot of poets, young, middle-aged and old, and they all still seem to feel that being published in Poetry is a goal of sterling kind. There’s a very famous black poet named Mari Evans, and she says, classically, “Speak the truth to the people.” She’s been saying that for decades. I certainly subscribe to that. I have, in this little book, Young Poet’s Primer, “Number 12: In writing your poem, tell the truth as you know it. Tell your truth. Don’t try to sugar it up. Don’t force your poem to be nice or proper or normal or happy if it does not want to be. Remember that poetry is life distilled”—which I’ve said thousands of times—“and that life is not always nice or proper or normal or happy or smooth or even-edged.” Some of you might decide later, it’s a good thing she told us that since she has elected to read that poem. Further, in a long poem of mine called “Winnie,” I have Winnie Mandela thinking of herself as poet, considering herself as poet, and those of you who have seen her in interviews or have seen that splendid picture—I thought it was a splendid picture—called Mandela, will agree with me, I believe, that this woman was and is essential poet. I spent a whole summer impersonating Winnie Mandela, what a wonderful summer that was. I hope that you people here do not believe everything you read in the papers about Winnie Mandela. I feel that she is a splendid, courageous contribution to society. I have her saying  

Yet I know 
that I am Poet! 
I pass you my Poem. 

A poem doesn’t do everything for you. 
You are supposed to go on with your thinking. 
You are supposed to enrich 
the other person’s poem with your extensions, 
your uniquely personal understandings, 
thus making the poem serve you. 

I pass you my Poem!—to tell you 
we are all vulnerable— 
the midget, the Mighty, 
the richest, the poor. 
Men, women, children, and trees. 
I am vulnerable. 
Hector Pieterson was vulnerable. 

My Poem is life, and not finished. 
It shall never be finished. 
My Poem is life, and can grow. 

Wherever life can grow, it will. 
It will sprout out, 
and do the best it can. 
I give you what I have. 
You don’t get all your questions answered in this world. 
How many answers shall be found 
in the developing world of my Poem? 
I don’t know. Nevertheless I put my Poem, 
which is my life, into your hands, where it will do the best it can. 

I am not a tight-faced Poet. 

I am tired of little tight-faced poets sitting down to 
shape perfect unimportant pieces. 
Poems that cough lightly—catch back a sneeze. 
This is the time for Big Poems, 
roaring up out of sleaze, 

This is the time for ice, vomit, and tainted blood. 
This is the time for stiff or viscous poems. 
Big, and Big. 

Now you’ll all be listening to see just how much bigness is coming from this podium, I know. There are some children here, and the little darlings asked me sign autographs for them. One little boy named Jason, I’m looking at him now, took about a hundred pictures. I think I ought to read at least one poem deliberately addressed to children. This poem is called “Computer.” We all know, children are wonderful with computers. Often they’re better with them than are their elders. That’s okay, cause it’s a technological time; great emphasis on technology now. But I like to think that everyone here, young and old, will subscribe to what I said in this poem called “Computer.”  

A computer is a machine. 

A machine is interesting. 

A machine is useful. 

I can study a computer. 

I can use it. 

Who made it? 

Human beings made it. 

I am a human being. 

I am warm. I am wise. 

I have empathies for animals  

and people. 

I conduct a computer. 

A computer does not conduct me 

I hope the kids will at least remember that and not be in awe of those things. I have never learned to operate a computer myself, kids, so you’re way ahead of me. They also were interested in a poem of mine called “We Real Cool.” So I better recite that right now. Many young people know me only by this poem.  

(AUDIENCE LAUGHTER)  

You’d think I’ve never written anything else. I’ll tell you something about it after I’ve recited it.  

THE POOL PLAYERS 

SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL. 

We real cool. We 

Left school. We 

Lurk late. We 

Strike straight. We 

Sing sin. We 

Thin gin. We 

Jazz June. We 

Die soon. 

Now I wrote that because I was passing by a pool hall in my neighborhood many, many years ago, because this poem was published in “The Bean Eaters” which came out in 1960. And I saw through the windows of this pool hall seven boys shooting pool. And I wondered how they felt about themselves. I decided, perhaps mistakenly, that they felt not cherished by their society. Therefore, they were thumbing their noses at their society by playing hooky from school. That was my decision. You people might have come to another. Let me read to you a poem called “Jane Addams.” Here again I’m impersonating. And I’ll say, not minding the least in raising a little halo over my head, that a few months ago I went to Springfield and 35 Illinois authors had been cut into stone in the new library there, state library. And of course I’m very proud of that. It just looked magnificent seeing my name way up there under the blue. I had to say a few words in dedication, and I was standing right under Jane Addams’s name. So I read this poem. She was born, most of you know, a few of you know, September 6th 1860, died May 21st, 1935. 

I am Jane Addams. 

I am saying to the giantless time  — 

to the young and yammering, to the old and corrected, 

well, chiefly to Children Coming Home 

with worried faces and questions about world-survival  — 

“Go ahead and live your life. 

You might be surprised. The world might continue.” 

It was not easy for me, in the days of the giants, 

And now they call me a giant. 

Because my capitals were Labour, Reform, Welfare, 

Tenement Regulation, Juvenile Court Law (the first), 

Factory Inspection, Workmen’s Compensation, 

Woman Suffrage, Pacifism, Immigrant Justice. 

And because 

Black, brown and white and red and yellow 

heavied my hand and heart. 

I shall tell you a thing about giants 

that you do not wish to know. 

Giants look in mirrors and see 

almost nothing at all. 

But they leave their houses nevertheless. 

They lurch out of doors 

to reach you, the other stretchers and strainers. 

Erased under ermine or loud in tatters, oh 

moneyed or mashed, you 

matter. 

You matter. And giants 

must bother. 

I bothered. 

Whatever I was tells you 

the world might continue. Go on with your preparations, 

moving among the quick and the dead; 

nourishing here, there; 

pressing a hand 

among the ruins, 

and among the seeds of restoration. 

So speaks the giant. Jane.  

Now I want to introduce to you a darling little boy of my own invention by the name of Lincoln West in a poem called “The Life of Lincoln West.” Little Lincoln had a hard time because he had come here with a wide little pair of lips, plump little nose, no Michael Jackson he. And he had a dark, dark complexion. And we all know that these are not attributes that make you particularly popular in our society. But I’m providing, having all this power, I am providing some light at the end of this particular Lincoln tunnel.  

(AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) 

Ugliest little boy 

that everyone ever saw.    

That is what everyone said. 

Even to his mother it was apparent— 

when the blue-aproned nurse came into the    

northeast end of the maternity ward    

bearing his squeals and plump bottom    

looped up in a scant receiving blanket,    

bending, to pass the bundle carefully    

into the waiting mother-hands—that this 

was no cute little ugliness, no sly baby waywardness    

that was going to inch away 

as would baby fat, baby curl, and    

baby spot-rash. The pendulous lip, the    

branching ears, the eyes so wide and wild,    

the vague unvibrant brown of the skin,    

and, most disturbing, the great head.    

These components of That Look bespoke    

the sure fibre. The deep grain. 

His father could not bear the sight of him. 

His mother high-piled her pretty dyed hair and    

put him among her hairpins and sweethearts,    

dance slippers, torn paper roses. 

He was not less than these, 

he was not more. 

As the little Lincoln grew, 

uglily upward and out, he began    

to understand that something was    

wrong. His little ways of trying    

to please his father, the bringing    

of matches, the jumping aside at    

warning sound of oh-so-large and    

rushing stride, the smile that gave    

and gave and gave—Unsuccessful! 

Even Christmases and Easters were spoiled.    

He would be sitting at the 

family feasting table, really 

delighting in the displays of mashed potatoes    

and the rich golden 

fat-crust of the ham or the festive 

fowl, when he would look up and find    

somebody feeling indignant about him. 

What a pity what a pity. No love    

for one so loving. The little Lincoln    

loved Everybody. Ants. The changing    

caterpillar. His much-missing mother.    

His kindergarten teacher. 

His kindergarten teacher—whose    

concern for him was composed of one    

part sympathy and two parts repulsion. 

The others ran up with their little drawings.    

He ran up with his. 

She 

tried to be as pleasant with him as    

with others, but it was difficult. 

For she was all pretty! all daintiness, 

all tiny vanilla, with blue eyes and fluffy    

sun-hair. One afternoon she 

saw him in the hall looking bleak against    

the wall. It was strange because the    

bell had long since rung and no other    

child was in sight. Pity flooded her.    

She buttoned her gloves and suggested    

cheerfully that she walk him home. She    

started out bravely, holding him by the    

hand. But she had not walked far before    

she regretted it. The little monkey.    

Must everyone look? And clutching her    

hand like that. . . . Literally pinching    

it. . . . 

At seven, the little Lincoln loved 

the brother and sister who 

moved next door. Handsome. Well- 

dressed. Charitable, often, to him. They    

enjoyed him because he was 

resourceful, made up 

games, told stories. But when 

their More Acceptable friends came they turned    

their handsome backs on him. He 

hated himself for his feeling 

of well-being when with them despite— 

Everything. 

He spent much time looking at himself    

in mirrors. What could be done?    

But there was no 

shrinking his head. There was no    

binding his ears. 

“Don’t touch me!” cried the little    

fairy-like being in the playground. 

Her name was Nerissa. The many    

children were playing tag, but when    

he caught her, she recoiled, jerked free    

and ran. It was like all the 

rainbow that ever was, going off    

forever, all, all the sparklings in 

the sunset west. 

One day, while he was yet seven, 

a thing happened. In the down-town movies    

with his mother a white 

man in the seat beside him whispered    

loudly to a companion, and pointed at    

the little Linc. 

“THERE! That’s the kind I’ve been wanting    

to show you! One of the best 

examples of the specie. Not like 

those diluted Negroes you see so much of on    

the streets these days, but the 

real thing. 

Black, ugly, and odd. You 

can see the savagery. The blunt    

blankness. That is the real    

thing.” 

His mother—her hair had never looked so 

red around the dark brown    

velvet of her face—jumped up,    

shrieked “Go to—” She did not finish.    

She yanked to his feet the little    

Lincoln, who was sitting there 

staring in fascination at his assessor. At the author of his    

new idea. 

All the way home he was happy. Of course,    

he had not liked the word 

“ugly.” 

But, after all, should he not 

be used to that by now? What had 

struck him, among words and meanings    

he could little understand, was the phrase    

“the real thing.” 

He didn’t know quite why, 

but he liked that. 

He liked that very much. 

When he was hurt, too much 

stared at— 

too much 

left alone—he 

thought about that. He told himself 

“After all, I’m    

the real thing.” 

It comforted him. 

That’s an identity poem.  

(APPLAUSE) 

Thank you. We hear a lot about child abuse these days. It seems to be everywhere. I’m sure just about everyone in this audience heard about little Lisa Steinberg who was so brutally killed, so said the papers finally, by her foster father Joel Steinberg. Papers kept announcing that this was a brilliant liar, I don’t know why that emphasis was there for us to do what with. This poem is called “Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg.” 

Already you’re on Page 8.  

And in a while your name will not be remembered 

By that large animal The Public General.  

I don’t know who will remember you, Lisa, 

Or consider the big fists breaking your little bones 

Or consider the vague bureaucrats 

Stumbling, fumbling through Paper. 

Your given name is my middle name, Elizabeth.  

But that is not why I am sick when I think of you 

         —there, 

No one to help you in 

your private horror of monsters and fools.  

You are the world’s Little Girl. 

And what is a Little Girl for?  

She is for putting a bow-ribbon on. 

She is for paper dolls. 

She is for playmates and birthday parties.  

She is to love, to love.  

She is to be precious, precious.  

She is for ice cream cones.  

She is not to be hurt.  

She is not to be pounded.  

Elizabeth, Lisa.  

We cannot help you, 

They wept at the wake at Redden’s Funeral Home 

Among messages, bright gladiolas, there was weeping  

At your grave. Tardy tears will not return you to air.  

But if you are somewhere, and sentient, be comforted, 

Little spirit. Because of your lean day, the vulgarity of your storm, 

The erosion and rot of your masters, sitting in the sputum of their souls,  

Another Lisa will not die. You help us begin to hear.  

We begin to hear the scream out of the twisted mouth 

And out of the eye that strives to be normal. We shall listen, 

Listen. We shall stomp into the horror houses. 

Invade the caves of the monsters.  

In the name of Elizabeth Steinberg.  

In the name of Lisa.  

I think that I should read you one sonnet, only because I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of sonnets. I feel I’ll never write another sonnet. That’s because I don’t consider this a sonnet—type time. Some of you may, though I rather doubt that. In teaching poetry writing classes, the part of the study that most of the students abhorred was the sonnet writing. Well, I always felt it was rather a challenging piece of fun. Suppose you want to write a Shakespearean sonnet; you know you’ve got 14 lines, you know that your scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. You know it must be a perfect octave and a perfect sestet. Well, I feel that this a wild, roar, ragged free verse kind of time. This sonnet I’m going to read you is number four of a five-part series called “The Children of the Poor,” in which my heroine, Annie Allen, is wondering what she can do to validate her children, what she can do to make it possible for them to deal successfully with the outdoor world. This happens to be the poem, well, there’ve been a few others, but this one especially in the late 60s was responsible for my reputation as a militant. Militant, that word that covers a multitude of vices and virtues. Well, I know that most of you here feel it’s impossible to consider me in such a role. Okay.  

First fight. Then fiddle. Ply the slipping string  

With feathery sorcery; muzzle the note  

With hurting love; the music that they wrote  

Bewitch, bewilder. Qualify to sing  

Threadwise. Devise no salt, no hempen thing  

For the dear instrument to bear. Devote  

The bow to silks and honey. Be remote 

A while from malice and from murdering. 

But first to arms, to armor. Carry hate  

In front of you and harmony behind.  

Be deaf to music and to beauty blind.  

Win war. Rise bloody, maybe not too late  

For having first to civilize a space  

Wherein to play your violin with grace 

Gwendolyn Brooks: I know this Annie Allen, my little woman who is the mother of children, is feeling desperate on this day. You can tell that. But since I am her creator, I can tell you that she would, no matter what her frustrations, take her children to the Art Institute, as did my mother, and to the Field Museum, and to the Museum of Science and Industry, and give her children piano lessons as my mother insisted that I have piano lessons for three and a half years until she saw that it was going to be no use whatsoever. And this is typical of a great, I believe, majority of mothers. They have their frustrations, but they go on with their business as did Mrs. Small. This is patterned on a woman in my own neighborhood who came over one morning and told me she had been so flustered, she had so much to do. How many children did she have? About ten. And the insurance man flustered her so that instead of getting something out of her pocketbook for him, she handed him a steaming coffee pot. That’s what she told me a long time ago. 

Mrs. Small went to the kitchen for her pocketbook  
And came back to the living room with a peculiar look 
And the coffee pot. 
Pocketbook. Pot. 
Pot. Pocketbook. 
 
The insurance man was waiting there  
With superb and cared-for hair. 
His face did not have much time. 
He did not glance with sublime 
Love upon the little plump tan woman 
With the half-open mouth and the  half-mad eyes  
And the smile half-human 
Who stood in the middle of the living-room floor planning apple pies 
And graciously offering him a steaming coffee pot.  
Pocketbook. Pot. 
 
“Oh!” Mrs. Small came to her senses,  
Peered earnestly through thick lenses, 
Jumped terribly. This, too, was a mistake, 
Unforgivable no matter how much she had to bake.  
For there can be no whiter whiteness than this one:  
An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run. 
This Mrs. Small now soiled 
With a pair of brown 
Spurts (just recently boiled) 
Of the “very best coffee in town.” 
 
“The best coffee in town is what you make, Delphine! There is none dandier!” 
Those were the words of the pleased Jim Small—  
Who was no bandier of words at all. 
Jim Small was likely to give you a good swat 
When he was not 
Pleased. He was, absolutely, no bandier. 
 
“I don’t know where my mind is this morning,” 
Said Mrs. Small, scorning 
Apologies! For there was so much 
For which to apologize! Oh such 
Mountains of things, she’d never get anything done  
If she begged forgiveness for each one. 
 
She paid him. 
 
But apologies and her hurry would not mix.  
The six 
Daughters were a-yell, a-scramble, in the hall. The four 
Sons (horrors) could not be heard any more. 
No. 
The insurance man would have to glare  
Idiotically into her own sterile stare 
A  moment—then depart,  
Leaving her to release her heart  
And dizziness 
 
And silence her six  
And mix 
Her spices and core 
And slice her apples, and find her four.  
Continuing her part 
Of the world’s business. 

Gwendolyn Brooks: I do a lot of traveling on trains now. And this causes my agent a good deal of dilemma. I used to fly everywhere, but I no longer trust those people. I don’t think they care what happens to us, and it’s no fun, I would imagine, to be sitting on a plane and you’ve just been talking to your nice neighbor and all of the sudden, there’s a door where there was none before and your neighbor goes sliding out into the atmosphere. That is not fun, I’m sure. But I get a lot of chances to write on trains. I love the trains anyway. I like to look out the window, to lock myself up in that little room and be my very own, as I’ve said in another poem somewhere. Get all these wonderful thoughts. I’m going to read you a poem that I wrote on a train. As a rule I believe in revising a great deal, but this poem has been less revised perhaps than any other poem I’ve written. I tell students endlessly, and I tell the students here, you must revise, no matter how precious that passage seems to you. That little poem or that little paragraph of a story or an essay. It’ll be better if you go over it, over it, every phrase and say to yourself: “Is this really what I want to say?” Because if you’re a proper poet or a proper novelist or a proper essayist, you don’t want to sound like Shakespeare or Lytton Strachey, some of you say “Strashey”, who is my very very favorite prose writer because you can lean against anything he writes and he will not let you collapse. You want to be yourself. Here is a poem called “Horses Graze.” I looked out a train window that just happened to be clean for a change, and I saw cows and horses grazing. And I said, “How intelligent they are. So much more intelligent than are we." I tried to make pictures for you.  

Gwendolyn Brooks: Cows graze. 

Horses graze. 

They 

eat 

eat 

eat. 

Their graceful heads 

are bowed 

bowed 

bowed 

in majestic oblivion. 

They are nobly oblivious 

to your follies, 

your inflation, 

the knocks and nettles of administration. 

They  

eat 

eat 

eat. 

And at the crest of their brute satisfaction, 

with wonderful gentleness, in affirmation, 

they lift their clean calm eyes and they lie down 

and love the world. 

They speak with their companions. 

They do not wish they were otherwhere. 

Perhaps they know that creature feet may press 

only a few earth inches at a time, 

that earth is anywhere earth, 

that an eye may see, 

wherever it may be, the  

immediate arc, alone, of life, of love. 

In Sweden, 

China, 

Africa, 

in India or Maine, 

the animals are sane; they 

know and know and know 

there’s ground below 

and sky 

up high. 

Gwendolyn Brooks: I better read you a love poem, as I’ve written some love poems. I love to read love poems to young audiences and watch the young people nudging each other and whispering to each other. I know what they’re saying; “Listen to that old woman talkin’ about love! What does she know about love!” However, my husband and I observed—sometimes I say celebrated but it’s really better to say observed—our 51st anniversary on September 17th. And we have two children who arrived in the usual way. So I do know something about this entity called love. This poem is called “when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” and it observes the adolescence of my marriage. And I think I’ll share with you the background of said marriage. When I was 21, and my husband-to-be was 21, I belonged to the NAACP Youth Council here in Chicago. And a mutual friend of ours had told my husband-to-be, you oughta go to one of those meetings because there is a girl there who writes poetry. In those long ago times, there was not the interest in creativity that there is today. So if you wrote poetry and you heard that somebody young in the vicinity was writing poetry, you’d make it your business to meet that individual. One evening I looked up, and there framed in the doorway was my husband-to-be, looking tall and elegant and handsome he thought, and I thought. And I’ve been in the habit of adding “and he stood erect.” And if you knew my husband, as some of you here do, you would know that that was a proper choice of language because he has a habit of standing up very straight and looking commandingly at the world. But at one of my times before an audience, I notice that some of my listeners had a peculiar expression in their faces when I said that, so it’s only mischief that makes me continue to say “he stood erect.” I was sitting with a friend of mine known to many of you, Margaret Burroughs, who is a very famous painter and also the director, erstwhile director, I don’t think she’s the director right now, but she has been and she certainly was the founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History. Well I met her when I was 21, so I said to her, “Margaret, look! There’s the man I’m going to marry.” And she said, “Hey boy, this girl wants to meet you.” That’s the way we met, and that meeting resulted in this poem.  

Gwendolyn Brooks: —And when you have forgotten the bright bedclothes on a Wednesday and a Saturday, 

And most especially when you have forgotten Sunday— 

When you have forgotten Sunday halves in bed, 

Or me sitting on the front-room radiator in the limping afternoon 

Looking off down the long street 

To nowhere, 

Hugged by my plain old wrapper of no-expectation 

And nothing-I-have-to-do and I’m-happy-why? 

And if-Monday-never-had-to-come— 

When you have forgotten that, I say, 

And how you swore, if somebody beeped the bell, 

And how my heart played hopscotch if the telephone rang; 

And how we finally went in to Sunday dinner, 

That is to say, went across the front room floor to the ink-spotted table in the southwest corner 

To Sunday dinner, which was always chicken and noodles 

Or chicken and rice 

And salad and rye bread and tea 

And chocolate chip cookies— 

I say, when you have forgotten that, 

When you have forgotten my little presentiment 

That the war would be over before they got to you; 

And how we finally undressed and whipped out the light and flowed into bed, 

And lay loose-limbed for a moment in the week-end 

Bright bedclothes, 

Then gently folded into each other— 

When you have, I say, forgotten all that, 

Then you may tell, 

Then I may believe 

You have forgotten me well. 

Gwendolyn Brooks: I’m going to read you “The Mother,” though I always provide some background in these interesting times. But I’m reading it because so often I am asked, “Why didn’t you read ‘The Mother’?” Well first of all, the first word in it is “abortions.” And people from both sides of this controversy have asked me to let them use this poem as a standard-bearer. And I have certainly refused to let it be used in that way. I hope that you will feel that that was the proper decision. I wrote it because I had a friend when I was about 19 and she was about 21 or so, who had first one abortion, then she had another abortion, then she had another abortion. But she told me what her response to her experience has been, and that is what I put into the poem. It happens not to be my story, as so many English classes have decided that it is. 

Gwendolyn Brooks: Abortions will not let you forget. 

You remember the children you got that you did not get,    

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,    

The singers and workers that never handled the air.    

You will never neglect or beat 

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. 

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb 

Or scuttle off ghosts that come. 

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,    

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. 

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. 

I have contracted. I have eased 

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. 

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized 

Your luck 

And your lives from your unfinished reach, 

If I stole your births and your names, 

Your straight baby tears and your games, 

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, 

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, 

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.    

Though why should I whine, 

Whine that the crime was other than mine?— 

Since anyhow you are dead. 

Or rather, or instead, 

You were never made. 

But that too, I am afraid, 

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?    

You were born, you had body, you died. 

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. 

Believe me, I loved you all. 

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you 

All. 

Gwendolyn Brooks: Well, most of you in here understand that this is not necessarily the response of every woman who has this experience. I’m not going to tell you which side I favor. Side, capital S-I-D-E. Because why should I make enemies of half of you? But don’t be so sure that you can tell which side I favor from the reading of that poem. I’m closing with a little poem, very short, you’ll be happy to hear.  

Gwendolyn Brooks: “Infirm” 

Everybody here 

is infirm. 

Everybody here is infirm. 

Oh. Mend me. Mend me. Lord. 

Today I 

say to them 

say to them 

say to them, Lord: 

look! I am beautiful, beautiful with 

my wing that is wounded 

my eye that is bonded 

or my ear not funded 

or my walk all a-wobble. 

I’m enough to be beautiful. 

You are  

beautiful too.  

Gwendolyn Brooks: So often I end with that poem so everybody in the audience can say, “Hey, I hadn’t thought about it recently, but I do have my little validities. I am a contribution to my society!” Thank you very much. 

(APPLAUSE) 

Ed Herman: That was Gwendolyn Brooks, speaking in Chicago on October 17th, 1990. Brooks was the featured speaker at Poetry Day, an annual celebration established by Poetry magazine in 1955. Much of Gwendolyn Brooks’ work is still in print. Her earlier books such as A Street in Bronzeville and The Bean Eaters are available from Harper. Most of her work after 1980 is published by Third World Press. The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, an anthology edited by Elizabeth Alexander, was published in 2005 as part of the American Poets Project from the Library of America. You can read more about Gwendolyn Brooks and many of her poems at poetryfoundation.org. You’ll also find many other articles about poets and poetry, an online archive more than 9,000 poems, and other audio programs to download. I’m Ed Herman. Thanks for listening to Poetry Lectures from poetryfoundation.org.