Why you never became a dancer

If I could write poetry

Feeling να γεννάει…
λέξεις,
ρυθμός από μετρονόμο εντός,
and
you got yourself some… real cool poetry

We real cool (Gwendolyn Brooks reads Gwendolyn Brooks)

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.
*********************************************
Question: How about the seven pool players in the poem “We Real Cool”?

Gwendolyn Brooks: They have no pretensions to any glamor. They are supposedly dropouts, or at least they’re in the poolroom when they should possibly be in school, since they’re probably young enough, or at least those I saw were when I looked in a poolroom, and they. . . . First of all, let me tell you how that’s supposed to be said, because there’s a reason why I set it out as I did. These are people who are essentially saying, “Kilroy is here. We are.” But they’re a little uncertain of the strength of their identity.

Gwendolyn Brooks: The “We”—you’re supposed to stop after the “We” and think about their validity, and of course there’s no way for you to tell whether it should be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it rather softly because I want to represent their basic uncertainty, which they don’t bother to question every day, of course.

Question: Are you saying that the form of this poem, then, was determined by the colloquial rhythm you were trying to catch?

Gwendolyn Brooks: No, determined by my feeling about these boys, these young men.

Question: These short lines, then, are your own invention at this point? You don’t have any literary model in mind; you’re not thinking of Eliot or Pound or anybody in particular . . . ?

Gwendolyn Brooks: My gosh, no! I don’t even admire Pound, but I do like, for instance, Eliot’s “Prufrock” and The Waste Land, “Portrait of a Lady,” and some others of those earlier poems. But nothing of the sort ever entered my mind. When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

Filed by wunbad at Δεκέμβριος 1st, 2009 under Bits and pieces