(This is the first of a four-part series celebrating April as National Poetry Month.)

I’ve always been in love with words. From a young age, I was dazzled by the uncanny power of words, puns, foreign phrases, dialects and the people who had a command of language.

But I never thought much of writing until one evening in the spring of my senior year of high school. Watching “Dead Poets Society” changed me forever. I remember coming home after the movie and writing two short poems in a dreamy daze.

I had discovered poetry.

It was magical. I felt as if something seized hold of me and I would go under a sort of trance to write a poem. Being a teenager, it was hard to share that kind of feeling with someone else. After all, teenagers are supposed to feel like nobody understands them. So I wrote on my own and found inspiration in random moments.

Then came college and the poetic voice went into hibernation. I still loved words and valued poetry, but my writing seemed to fizzle out with all those essays.

But once again as a senior, I had another special night. This time with a real live poet. It was almost exactly seven years ago - March 30, 1994 - when I went to see Gwendolyn Brooks give a poetry reading at UNC Chapel Hill’s Memorial Hall. I knew Gwendolyn Brooks was famous and I knew she was a poet, but that was about it.

Walking into Memorial Hall, I was amazed to see how many people had turned out. It was packed. I remember how awestruck I was to hear this small, unassuming woman read her poems behind a podium. I remember loving the way she slowly and carefully pronounced words like “vul-ner-a-ble,” each syllable rolling out as if she’d toyed with it for some time before using it.

When she read “We Real Cool,” it just blew me away.

There were these kids skipping school and hanging out at a pool hall, she explained. But instead of being judgmental, Brooks captured the mood of the scene with quick, punchy lines and a sharp delivery.

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.

I had heard people read poems before, but I’d never heard a real poet read her own poetry. There was something so astonishing and beautiful in it, like seeing a waterfall for the first time. It made me fall in love with poetry all over again.

Brooks’ style was never flamboyant. Instead, she cast a light on the ordinary triumphs and tragedies of our lives, the moments we may be too embarrassed or too tired to write about. She called attention to plain people we often overlook, the regular folks on the street, the poor, the homeless, the people who tidy up a stage before politicians give a speech. “If you wanted a poem,” she once said, “you only had to look out a window.”

In “The Bean Eaters,” a couple uses “Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood ....” They are “Two who have lived their day,/But keep on putting on their clothes/And putting things away.”

And she wrote about Martin Luther King Jr. (“He was a prose poem./He was a tragic grace./He was a warm music./He tried to heal the vivid volcanoes./His ashes are/reading the world.) and Malcolm X (“in a soft and fundamental hour/a sorcery devout and vertical/beguiled the world”). She wrote about martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement and social injustices. She gave poetry workshops in the inner-city, workshops that were attended by gang members. Her poems drew praise from rappers and academics alike.

Born in Kansas in 1917, Brooks moved to Chicago as a young girl and lived there the rest of her life. Encouraged by a school teacher, she started sending her poems to a local newspaper and published her first poem at the age of 13. Under the guidance of Langston Hughes, she continued to publish her poems, contributing regularly to a poetry column in the Chicago Defender. Her first poetry collection, A Street in Bronzeville, came out in 1945. Her second volume, Annie Allen (1949), won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and she became the first African American to win the prestigious prize in any category. Other books followed - Maud Martha (1953), Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), The Bean Eaters (1961) and In the Mecca (1968).

She won grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim Fellowships, lifetime achievement awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Book Foundation, and the post of poet laureate for the state of Illinois.

But for all her accolades, she maintained a quiet diligence away from the spotlight. She encouraged young poets, attended poetry slams and offered her own money for student poetry contests.
Last December, Gwendolyn Brooks died. She was 83 years old.

Her poems will endure.

This month, let us pay tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks and other poets as part of National Poetry Month. Brooks is one of many wonderful African American female poets you can read about. Others include Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni.

Discover these and many other poets. Visit your local library or bookstore. Who knows? You may have an evening encounter that could change your life.

(Michael Beadle is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville.)

 

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