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What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project.

Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gwendolyn Brooks
Age: 83 †
Born: 1917
Born: June 7
Died: 2000
Died: December 3
Novelist
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Topeka
Kansas
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Work
Manner
Project
Tavern
Street
Taverns
Projects
Blacks
Streets
Housing
Expression
Halls
Fighting
Poems
Take
Relevant

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I think there are things for all of us to do as long as we're here and we're healthy.
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I who have gone the gamut from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sunam qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now... I have hopes for myself.
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Reading is important - read between the lines. Don't swallow everything.
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Each body has its art.
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Do not be afraid of no, Who has so far, so very far to go.
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Writing is a delicious agony.
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I like the concentration, the crush I like working with language, as others like working with clay, or notes.
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With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
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I've always thought of myself as a reporter. When people ask why I don't stop writing, I say, `Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about.’ With all that's going on, how could I stop?
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Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.
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Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home.
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And if sun comes / How shall we greet him? / Shall we not dread him, / Shall we not fear him / After so lengthy a / Session with shade?
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Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
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The poetry is myself.
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My last defense / Is the present tense.
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Exhaust the little moment. Soon it dies. And be it gash or gold it will not come again in this identical guise.
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at a certain moment in social proceedings, I am on FIRE to leave: I have a leaving-FIT.
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The forties and fifties were years of high poet-incense the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!
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It frightens me to realize that, if I had died before the age of fifty, I would have died a 'Negro' fraction.
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When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
Gwendolyn Brooks