We Real Cool

This article is about the poem. For the book, see We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity.

"We Real Cool" is a poem written in 1959 by poet Gwendolyn Brooks and published in her 1960 book The Bean Eaters, her third collection of poetry. The poem has been featured on broadsides, re-printed in literature textbooks and is widely studied in literature classes. It is cited as "one of the most celebrated examples of jazz poetry".[1][2][3]

It consists of four verses of two rhyming lines each. The final word in most lines is "we". The next line describes something that "we" do, such as play pool or drop out of school. Brooks has said that the "we"s are meant to be said softly, as though the protagonists in the poem are questioning the validity of their existence.[4] The last lines of the poem, "We / Die soon," indicate the climax, which comes as a surprise after the boasts that have been made previously. It also suggests a moment of self-awareness about the choices that the players have made. The poem also contains references to the seven deadly sins.

  1. ^ Kimmelman, Burt; Cone, Temple; Huff, Randall (2008). The Facts on File Companion to American Poetry. Facts On File. p. 627. ISBN 978-0-8160-6950-7.
  2. ^ Jones, Meta DuEwa (2000). African-American Jazz Poetry: Orality, Prosody and Performance. Stanford University. pp. 52, 56.
  3. ^ Jones, Meta DuEwa (2011). The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word. University of Illinois Press. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-252-03621-7.
  4. ^ Brooks, Gwendolyn; Stavros, George (1970). "An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks". Contemporary Literature. 11 (1): 1–20. doi:10.2307/1207502. JSTOR 1207502.