We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks said this in Report from Part One: “The WEs in 'We Real Cool' are tiny, wispy weakly argumentative 'Kilroy-is-here' announcements. The boys have no accented sense of themselves, yet they are aware of a semi-defined personal importance. Say the 'We' softly” (Bryant, 35).

These young men should be compared to Jeff, Gene, Geronimo, and Bop in “The Blackstone Rangers,” who were a gang of thirty seen by the “Disciplines” (the police) as “Sores in the city/ that do not want to heal.” Yet despite the police officers' contempt for the adolescents on Blackstone Street and Helen Vendler's description of “We Real Cool” as a “judgmental monologue” that “barely conceals its adult reproach of their behavior,” Brooks's insistence on a soft “We” suggests sympathy for lives at an impasse. The “basic uncertainty” of the “We” reveals no bold swagger but instead an awareness of the plight that circumstances have landed them in and represents a brave assertion that though their lives are short they are somebody too. The poem is an elegy for thousands of young black men whose growth has been stifled by prejudice and its resulting poverty and social confusion (Bryant, 36).

Placing the “We” at the end of the end-stopped lines results in a gaping hole at the end of the last line, a visual emphasis on the truth of how they “Die soon” and nothing follows. That is all for these truncated lives. The sound effects are conventional alliteration and rhyme. One critic has suggested that “Jazz June” includes a sexual image and that “Die” carries an old Renaissance metaphor for a sexual climax, but this interpretation may strike some readers as strained and out of place (Bryant, 36).

“We Real Cool,” perhaps Brooks's single best-known poem, subjects a similarly representative experience to an intricate technical and thematic scrutiny, at once loving and critical. The poem is only twenty-four words long, including eight repetitions of the word “we.” It is suggestive that the subtitle of “We Real Cool” specifies the presence of only seven pool players at the “Golden Shovel.” The eighth “we” suggests that poet and reader share, on some level, the desperation of the group-voice that Brooks transmits. The final sentence, “We/ die soon,” restates the carpe diem motif in the vernacular of Chicago's South Side.

On one level, “We Real Cool” appears simply to catalog the experiences ...