"We Real Cool" — A Poem for the Ears

Today, the second Saturday of National Poetry Month, we consider the power of sound in poetry with a look at — or rather a listen to — a wonderful poem by Gwendolyn Brooks.  Hearing poetry, after all, often helps us to appreciate it.  It can be difficult to find performances of famous poems, but I'm doing my part to remedy that problem.  I have begun performing and recording poems by Poe, Dickinson, Shakespeare, and others here at Mind Inclined.  My recordings are a bonus feature available to anyone who purchases a subscription to Mind Inclined on Substack.  (Available this month for $30 per year for the next year.)

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Where does a poem live?

The simple answer is "in a book" or "on a page."  That's where most of us encounter poetry in school.  I remember some of the literature textbooks I used in college.  My favorite was called simply Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, and it's still sold today — in its fourteenth edition and with a slightly different title.  Some core concepts that have remained with me for decades came from that book.

(I recently looked up the editor, poet X. J. Kennedy.  He's 95 — living proof of the sustaining power of poetry!  Then again, maybe he just lives right and exercises.  After all, poetry didn't prove all that life-sustaining for Byron or Keats or Shelley or Plath or Crane or Poe, who all died way before their time.)

Kennedy's book contains a marvelous poem by a poet named Gwendolyn Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, becoming the first black writer to do so.  The poem is short, but it's a tour de force of sound.  It goes:

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.

If you read this poem aloud — go ahead, try it — I think you will agree that poetry does not live merely on a page.  Really good ones, like this one, come to life in our ears.  Indeed, some of the greatest poems in history — The Iliad, The Odyssey, Beowulf — were performed aloud by bards before they were written down on pages. 

By the way, unlike the ancient and medieval bards, Brooks lived during the age of sound recordings.  You can hear a recording of her performing the poem here.

Sound is often a very powerful part of a poem.  That's certainly the case here.  For one thing, several of the lines contain alliteration — that is, the repetition of identical sounds at the beginnings of words or stressed syllables: "Lurk late," "strike straight," "sing sin," and "Jazz June."

Then there is the inescapable rhyme: "cool" and "school," "late" and "straight," "sin" and "gin," "June" and "soon."  Notice, however, that Brooks has chosen not to place these rhyming words where we typically expect rhyme to occur — that is, at the ends of lines.  Instead, she ends nearly every line with the word "We."  Why?  I don't know how Brooks would have answered that question, but I can comment on the effect of this choice.  For one thing, it adds an aural element, since the identical sounds at the ends of the lines — "We," "We," "We" — function like rhyme.  (We could argue about whether the words technically rhyme, since they are actually the same word, not similar-sounding different words.  That's a topic for another podcast.)  Furthermore, the position of the word at the ends of lines gives it a little extra prominence (especially if we read the poem the way Brooks did or listen to her read it.)  The unity or at least identity that the speakers feel comes through that word.  They do these things together, and they seem proud of them.

It's easy to imagine speakers like these, as young people often do travel in packs and cultivate a group identity, something that seems to build their confidence.  In this case, they may be speaking in unison — although it's also possible that they are taking turns.  The poem tells us that there are seven of them, and the word "We" occurs eight times.  Might we read the poem as a succession of statements spoken by different speakers and one spoken by all?  I like this interpretation: it makes the poem read like a song sung by a group of individual singers.  I like to think that all of the pool players deliver the first line — a declaration of their status or attitude, and then each one makes one simple boast until the final one utters the surprising final line.

The final sentence is, of course, the most interesting, as it seems to present a twist on the overall poem.  Alas, some of the same things that rebellious young people do to look "cool" are inherently self-destructive.  Staying out late and engaging in sinful activities — committing crimes, for example — could lead to dangerous situations.  One way to read the final line is as an ironic commentary by the poet.  It's also possible, however, that one or more of the boys utter this sentence as an epiphany, a resignation, a lament, or even a boast.  Part of what makes a poem interesting and revealing is such ambiguity.  Each interpretation carries a different kind of insight.

Returning to the subject of sound, I would argue that we can use tone, pacing, and more while reading the poem aloud to convey these different interpretations.  Sound, in other words, can convey sense, as it does in our own voices as we communicate with one another. 

Sound doesn't need sense to be appealing, though.  As this poem demonstrates, a poet's creative selection and arrangement of sounds makes for an experience akin to that of listening to music.  Whatever it might mean, it just sounds wonderful.