Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, reads poems that explore in her unique way the painful historical and contemporary lives of Africans under Apartheid, suffragettes fighting for the rights of the poor, and even the tragic tale of a young girl murdered by her foster father in a fit of rage. In her booming cadence and never ambiguous phrasing, Brooks unpacks moments and images that signify the lives of the powerless and gives them voice in moving words that continue to haunt.
Works by Gwendolyn Brooks
The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks (Poetry Foundation article)
Other Related Books or Materials
Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks
The Importance of Being Ordinary (New Republic article from July 2017)
On Gwendolyn Brooks’ Birthday, a Statue of the Powerful Poet (Chicago Tribune article from June 2018)
A Short History of South Africa
About the Host
Novelist Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and principal of St. Michael’s College, where he holds the Basilian Chair in Christianity, Arts, and Letters. He is the author of three novels: Original Prin, Beggar's Feast, and Governor of the Northern Province. His fiction has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize (2006) and IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize (2012), and named a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Selection (2012 and 2019) and Globe and Mail Best Book (2018). He contributes essays, reviews, and opinions to publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, First Things, Commonweal, Harper’s, Financial Times (UK), Guardian, New Statesman, Globe and Mail, and National Post, in addition to appearing frequently on CBC Radio. He served as President of PEN Canada from 2015-2017.
Music is by Yuka
From the Archives
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is the first series associated with the Toronto Public Library’s multi-year digital initiative, From the Archives, which presents curated and digitized audio, video and other content from some of Canada’s biggest cultural institutions and organizations.
Thanks to the Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) for allowing TPL access to their archives to feature some of the best-known writers in the world from moments in the past. Thanks as well to Library and Archives Canada for generously allowing TPL access to these archives.
Audio and transcript used with the permission of the Brooks Estate.
Writers Off the Page
Gwendolyn Brooks: The World Might Continue
OPENING MUSIC SEGMENT (2-3 seconds)
Randy Boyagoda (RB): Welcome to Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA produced by Toronto Public Library. I'm Randy Boyagoda. In this episode, we return to the American poet Gwendolyn Brooks reading her poetry.
Teaser: Because black, brown, and white, and red, and yellow heavied my hand and heart. I shall tell you a thing about giants that you do not wish to know. Giants look in mirrors, and see almost nothing at all, but they leave their houses never the less. They lurch out of doors to reach you. The other stretchers and strainers erased under ermine or loud in tatters, oh, moneyed or mashed, you matter.
RB: If you ask most people who read Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry what it might mean for her to sound, as she put it with such wonderful self-regard in the prior episode, “Gwendolynian” in her verse, they’d probably point the importance of Chicago to the sights and sounds of her work, and specifically Black Chicago, and rightly so. That said, her eye and ear didn’t stop there, especially later in her career. In the poetry she’s reading from in this episode, Brooks moves well beyond her beloved Bronzeville world.
She goes back in time, to reflect in verse on the life and work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams, a white feminist peace activist and advocate for social equality; she travels across the Atlantic to South Africa, to think through the prospects of a young Black man living just outside Apartheid-era Johannesburg. Elsewhere, Brooks defends the memory of a murdered little girl from what she calls “that large animal, the public,” after the girl becomes the stuff of lurid newspaper reports following her violent death in New York. In all of these instances, Brooks’ capacities for socio-political solidarity and imaginative sympathy model and enact exactly what she asked readers to offer the Bronzeville people she more frequently wrote about, throughout her career.
It’s not hard at all, I think, to make the case for Brooks’ continuing relevance, on all of these terms, whether we think about her writing about Black experience in urban America or about other persons and places. But the final poem she reads in this segment, one that she sneaks in just before time’s up, might just be the most unexpectedly relevant, in no small part because of how incredibly irrelevant it seems at first. The poem is called “Computer,” and the way Brooks talks about the state of our humanity during machine age living, never mind her vague reference to some tech-related announcement that had taken place around the time of her being in Toronto, feels, well, like an old person complaining about the world these days.
So, listening from our shiny, appy future, we hear her out, humouring her … only to get a one-line declaration of computer age rights and freedoms and real human agency that’s as caustic as it is confident in its sense of who — not what — should be in control. The line strikes you with the force of a suddenly revealed and recognized truth, as poetry makes possible like no other written form. And for something written in response to a development in technology, years ago, it’s striking how much the poem feels part of our present moment. For these reasons, it’s so much better than all our worried scrolling and hating about Big Tech these days. Zuckerberg and his critics should turn off their notifications for sixty seconds and turn on “Computer,” by Gwendolyn Brooks.
This was recorded live at the International Festival of Authors in 1995.
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Gwendolyn Brooks (GB): I wrote this poem because I was listening to the news on TV, and it was said that little Black children in South Africa are meeting each other in the road and asking each other the equivalent of, "Have you been detained yet? How many times have you been detained?" I thought that was perfectly appalling, and I decided I would have to empathize with one of those children. And I have here, The near Johannesburg boy. This boy can't live in Johannesburg, perhaps he lives in Soweto. My way is from woe to wonder. A Black boy near Johannesburg. Hot in the hot time. Those people do not like Black among the callers. They do not like our calling our country our. They say, our country is not ours. Those people visiting the world as I visit the world. Those people their bleach is puckered and cruel. It is worth to speak of my father. My father. His body was whole till they stopped it, they stopped it suddenly, with a short, shot. But before that physically tall and among us, he died every day, every moment, my father.
GB: First was the crumpling, no first was the fist-and-the-fury. Last was the crumpling. It is a little used rag that is under. It is not, it is not my father gone down. About my mother. My mother was this loud laugher below the sunshine, below the starlight at festival. My mother is still this loud laugher. Still moving straight in the getting it done as she names it. Oh a strong eye, is my mother. Except when it seems we are lax in our looking. Well, enough of slump. Enough of old story. Like a clean spear of fire, I am moving. I am not still. I am ready to be ready. I shall flail in the hot time. Tonight I walk with a hundred of playmates to where the hurt black of our skin is forbidden. There, in the dark, that is our dark. There, a pulse across Earth. That is our Earth. There, there exulting there exactly. There redeeming, there roaring up. Oh, my father. We shall forge with the fist-and-the-fury. We shall flail in the hot time, we shall, we shall And there's no punctuation at the end 'cause there's no punctuation to that situation as yet. We real cool, the pool players. Seven at the golden shovel. We real cool, we left school. We lurk light we, stride straight we, sing sing we, thin gin we, jazz June we, die soon. That poem has been put on a lot of buses in the United States, and I like to think of people sitting there and looking up and seeing between an ad for Calvert whiskey and an ad for Ex-lax, we real cool.
[applause]
GB: I'm gonna read you a poem called Jane Addams. Many of you have heard of Jane Addams and Hull House, born September 6, 1860, May 21, 1935 she died. I just recently wrote this poem. I am Jane Addams, I am saying to the giantless time. To the young and yammering, to the old and corrected. Well, chiefly, to children coming home with worried faces and questions about world survival. Go ahead and live your life. You might be surprised the world might continue. It was not easy for me, in the days of the giants, and now they call me a giant. Because my capitals were labor, reform, welfare, tenement regulation, juvenile court law the first, factory inspection, workman's compensation, woman's suffrage, pacifism, immigrant justice. And because black, brown, and white, and red, and yellow heavied my hand and heart. I shall tell you a thing about giants that you do not wish to know. Giants look in mirrors, and see almost nothing at all, but they leave their houses never the less. They lurch out of doors to reach you. The other stretchers and strainers erased under ermine or loud in tatters, oh, moneyed or mashed, you matter. You matter and giants must bother. I bothered. Whatever I was tells you the world might continue. Go on with your preparations. Moving among the quick and the dead. Nourishing here, there, pressing a hand among the ruins, and among the seeds of restoration. So speaks a giant, Jane.
[applause]
GB: I'm gonna close with Thinking of Elizabeth Steinberg. This was a little girl who was beaten to death by her foster father and he was supposed to have been an intelligent lawyer. Already you're on page eight. And in a while your name will not be remembered by that large animal, the public general. I don't know who will remember you Lisa, or consider the big fist breaking your little bones. Or consider the vague bureaucrats stumbling, fumbling through paper. Your given name is my middle name, Elizabeth. But that is not why I am sick when I think of you there, no one to help you in your private horror of monsters and fools. You are the world's little girl, and what is a little girl for?
GB: She is for putting a bow ribbon on. She is for paper dolls, she is for playmates and birthday parties. She is to love, to love. She is to be precious, precious. She is for ice cream cones. She is not to be hurt. She is not to be pounded. Elizabeth Lisa, we cannot help you. They wept at the wake in Redden's Funeral Home among messages, bright gladiolas. There was weeping at your grave. Tardy tears will not return you to air. But if you are somewhere and sentient, be comforted little spirit, because of your lane day, the vulgarity of your storm, the erosion and rot of your masters sitting in the sputum of their souls. Another Lisa will not die. You help us begin to hear. We begin to hear the scream out of the twisted mouth and out of the eye that strives to be Normal. We shall listen, listen. We shall stomp into the horror houses, invade the caves of the monsters in the name of Elizabeth Steinberg, in the name of Lisa." I think I got one minute to read you a tiny, tiny poem called Computer in honour of what is supposed to be happening on this day.
[laughter]
GB: I see you've all read the papers and listened to TV. This is a children's poem called, Computer, but I think many of you take something from it. “A computer is a machine. A machine is interesting. A machine is useful. I can study a computer, I can use it. Who made it? Human beings made it. I am a human being. I am warm, I am wise, I have empathies for animals and people. I conduct a computer. A computer does not conduct me." I think I just made it.
__
RB: Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917, in Topeka Kansas, and moved at a young age to the Bronzeville neighbourhood in Chicago, which became the setting and source for much of her work. She began publishing poetry at the age of thirteen, brought out her first collection in 1945, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. By then also married, to a fellow poet, with whom she had two children, Brooks would go on to a long career as both a writer and advocate for writing itself, often with a strong focus on African-American experience and opportunities. She was State Laureate in Illinois, succeeding Carl Sandberg, and poet-laureate of the United States. Gwendolyn Brooks died in 2000, at home in Chicago.
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA is a year-long podcast series that celebrates 40 years of the Toronto International Festival of Authors. It's produced by the Toronto Public Library. The Executive Producer is Gregory McCormick. This episode has been produced by Gregory McCormick and me, Randy Boyagoda, with technical support from George Panayotou and Michelle De Marco, marketing support from Tanya Oleksuik, and research support from Marcella van Run.
For more about Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, visit writersoffthepage.ca where you will find links to the books mentioned in each episode and links to other relevant materials in TPL’s collections. For all of Toronto Public Library’s podcast series, check out tpl.ca/podcasts.
Music is by YUKA.
I'm Randy Boyagoda and we'll be back soon with another episode of Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA.