Gwendolyn Brooks: Who Ya Talkin’ With?

Abstract This essay looks at the shifting poetic and aesthetic strategies that Gwendolyn Brooks employed over her more than fifty-year career. The first Black American poet to receive a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Brooks initiates a lineage of poetry and poets dedicated to attending to the daily conditions of Black life in America. Long a poet of daily Black life, Brooks announces via her poetry an aesthetics committed to, in the words of Langston Hughes, “the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul — the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.” Through textual analyses of the language of several of Brooks's poems alongside interviews with Brooks and critical essays about Brooks's work, this essay points to Brooks as the poet most steadfastly exploring what philosopher George Yancy describes as “the lived density of race.” Yancy notes that “while the focus on demonstrating the nonreferential status of race is important work within the context of liberation praxis vis-a-vis racism — indeed indispensable work —  . . . it is at the level of the lived density of race that so much more work needs to be done.” This is the work of Gwendolyn Brooks's art.