First fight. Then fiddle. It's Gwendolyn BrooksDay!

June 6, 2017 12:04 PM

Tomorrow, June 7, 2017, would have been Gwendolyn Brooks' 100th birthday, and the city of Chicago has declared BrooksDay in her honor. To prepare for the big day, here is a paper-cut puppetry, poetry, and music video featuring audio of Brooks reading and describing the inspiration behind her much-anthologized 1960 poem, We Real Cool.

This video is a companion to live staged production, No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, which is set to debut in Chicago in November, with the possibility of a touring show for those who can't make it to Chicago. It is the product of a number of Chicago artists, including:

-Paper-cut puppetry by Manual Cinema
-Music by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods
-Story by Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall.
-Supported by Crescendo Literary and The Poetry Foundation, two Chicago-based arts foundations.

More on Gwendolyn Brooks:

-Gwendolyn Brooks' biography and bibliography at The Poetry Foundation

-NPR: Remembering the Great Poet Gwendolyn Brooks at 100

-PBS NewsHour: How Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry is connecting Emmett Till with the violence in Chicago today:

[I]n 2017, some worry that Brooks is in danger of being set aside. “The Golden Shovel Anthology,” a new book of poems honoring Brooks, seeks to make sure that doesn’t happen. In the book’s foreword, poet Terrance Hayes writes: “I have been, since her passing, returning to her work again and again with the feeling not enough of it has been made of it or her … Perhaps we can never say enough.”

The poems of this anthology do not pay homage to Brooks in a traditional way. Instead, they seek to carry on her words through an entirely new literary form, called the “Golden Shovel.” In a Golden Shovel poem, a poet takes a line or lines from a Brooks poem, and then uses each word from those lines, in order, as the end words of their new poem.

-More examples of Golden Shovel poems in Golden Shovels: In the February 2017 Poetry, digging into the legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks.

-Angela Jackson: The Radical Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, the First Black Author to Win a Pulitzer Prize:

A Street in Bronzeville was published in August 1945. It hit Afro- America with the force of an atomic bomb. But it was by no means destructive. It was life-affirming for black people, who often felt a strong need to prove they were equal to whites because many whites were so blatantly disproving of this essential fact. Gwendolyn was important because she surpassed not only the expectations of whites about black people but whites themselves.

-Topeka, KS, Brooks' city of birth, will also be celebrating her life and work with their Brooksfest

-Carl Phillips - Brooks’s Prosody: Three Sermons on the Warpland:

It is interesting how evolution in one writer can win praise, and in another be disparaged. What I want to look at here is how, in her suite of three sermons on the warpland, we can see Brooks finding a way to adapt, rather than sacrifice, her mastery of prosody to her new sense of blackness; and across the three sermons, we can see, as well, an enactment of Brooks’s wrestling with, straddling, and ultimately reconciling the seeming conflict between English prosody and the language of black revolution.

-Her Modern American Poetry entry

-Post title from First fight. Then fiddle.

previously

posted by palindromic (4 comments total)

She's definitely an author/poet/writer I do not have a lot of familiarity with but this is a great introduction and starting place, so thank you for pulling all these links together. Much appreciated.
posted by Fizz at 12:32 PM on June 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

Well, Fizz, you're were a step ahead of me -- I hadn't heard of her at all!

Many thanks, palindromic, for a most informative post.
posted by On the Corner at 1:44 AM on June 7, 2017

Fantastic post! That stage production sounds really awesome; I hope it does go on a wide tour, because I want to see it.
posted by mixedmetaphors at 7:46 PM on June 7, 2017

More Brooks:

Brooks in conversation with Studs Turkel in 1967.

Story map from the University of Illinois Rare Book & Manuscript Library (who have her archive)

Poetry magazine has a Brooks-centered issue out this month; here's a discussion guide for it.
posted by carrienation at 8:27 AM on June 8, 2017 [1 favorite]