We Real Cool.
by 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.

We, the Collective Identity

At the heart of the Harlem Revolution, there was a blossoming of African American culture in the the Harlem borough of New York around 1910-1935. During this time, many poets, writers, musicians, and other artists found their voice and started a new age of African American Art and representation in the United States. Gwendolyn Brooks was a poet from this time who is regarded as one of the most influential poets of the last century. She wrote many poems about the people she would meet and see in the streets of Harlem, which could be seen in the poem “We Real Cool”. After walking home one day on her commute, she walked by a pool hall where she spotted 7 boys playing, and asked herself what they must think of themselves. This poem takes a look at a group of young adults who are discussing their life with Brooks putting emphasis on certain themes with various literary tools. Gwendolyn Brooks uses lineation and repetition of sentence structure to emphasize her view of the narrators in the poem as they described their lives to be in the spirit of carpe diem.

Growing up in Kansas and moving to the city, Gwendolyn wrote about her life when living in the booming neighborhood of Harlem. The Harlem Revolution brought a lot of ideas up with it as many African Americans in the south had been migrating north as the racial tensions were becoming too great in rural areas. The “Great Migration” powered by the economic boom of the 1920s, led to a flourishing of culture. Musicians such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, all over New York, even in white clubs, were this new ear in music started to spread across the country. Gwendolyn Brooks was a prolific poet and her book “The Bean Eaters” was all about the identities of African Americans adjusting to these new lifestyles and political conditions. “The Bean Eaters” is the book that discusses the environment that was around Brooks when she was living in New York. From stories of a poor couple, to the pool players at “the Golden Shovel”, the bean eaters talked on black identity, racial issues, and the political state of the world.

With the multiple connotative definitions that the reader can assign to the lines in this poem, one that stood out was the commentary on the attitude of the collective black youth at the time. Starting with the use of enjambment on the word “We”, used alongside repetition to create emphasis on the voice that wants to be heard. In an interview, Brooks talked about how the poem should be read in a small, wispy voice, to give away to the fact that the narrators aren’t what they claim. With this in mind, the narrators can be talking quietly as a way to show that their viewpoint is not used to being heard, and with the poem coming from them, they may sure to emphasize “We” as a way to bring themselves up. Reflective of the time, black youth in America was not being heard by the government or by those living in the same cities. Rarely had African American voices been heard within the country and as a result, Brooks had felt that the narrators would want give their opinion instead of being cast aside. Brooks uses the literary techniques that deal with the lineation and flow of the poem to additionally convey denotative meanings throughout. The pacing of the poem relies on the structure, created by the lineation and punctuation. Brooks in “We Real Cool” uses enjambment, a technique that drops off a part of a sentence to the next line to create a pause. This pause can be used to have the reader reflect on the part of the sentence that they read, without having to use any punctuation. Though using the punctuation that Brooks does, such as in the second line “Left school. We” there is a forced pacing to the poem that is presented. There is a pause both before and after the “We” being used in this poem. Leaving “We” on the end of each line forces the reader to take a second to reflect on the narrator’s point of view, taking away the importance of what they are doing, but putting it back towards the narrator themself.

Within the repetition of stanza structure in this poem which builds the foundation for how the reader approaches reading it. Alongside the words that are used, such as “We”, there is a repeated pattern of verb followed by noun. When the words or phrases are repeated, their function become more apparent with each repetition as we start to see what the narrator is wanting the reader to “hear”. The poem starts off with Brooks addressing that the group of boys feel that they “Real Cool”, the first instance of the verb, noun pattern. As the poem progresses, it follows an “AABBCCDD” rhyming pattern, placing each couplet as things that relate to one another. The rhyming in this case is a signifying mark that those words that rhyme have a connotative meaning that these actions are related and done sequentially. For example, the lines “We Jazz June. We Die soon.” both are not only the end of the poem, but the end of the boys life. At the end of their night and life being this last line. This poem starts with establishing who the group is. Then telling the reader that they decided to leave societal norms behind, which in this case is dropping out of school. Then they go out late, play pool and “Strike straight”. As the night pushes on, the boys sing and drink, likely leading to the next events. The boys first “Jazz June”, while the denotation of this phrase is not clear, the connotation would be that they could have killed or had sex with June, who it is not clear if they are a man or women. This action leads to them “dying”, as their night ends, there was a pressure that they had to live their live to the fullest for that night. This night being the only one they have left, as one would living in the carpe diem mindset.