Hello my Beautiful Hearts,
I've been experimenting with poetry lately, after my Language Arts teacher gave our class an assignment to write 20 poems over the course of 20 days.
Now, I'm the kind of person who procrastinates a lot, but with this assignment, I was really hyped for some reason. I finished all twenty poems and then some before they were due, and I realized it was because creative language allowed me to express what I felt without any literal meaning. I also discovered many poems that inspired my writing, but one of them struck me deeply. That poem was "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks, who unfortunately died 18 years ago, in the year 2000.
WE REAL COOL
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.
Now, this poem is unique in itself already. I'm sure you can tell why, but I'll explain anyway. The way the lines are split requires the reader to take a breath between the "we"s and the rest of the sentences. This allows the feeling of hesitation and I, as the reader, feel like whoever this poem depicts is regretting what they did before because of this pause. Which ties into a recurring fact that every move you make in poetry is extremely important to the whole of the poem. I heard somewhere that every line has to change the story, or the line is useless. Every line in this poem changes the story a little bit. It starts off with the characters thinking they're so 'cool', to the point when they die before they've even lived. There is so much hidden feeling in this poem, but you have to look beyond the literal meaning of maybe a drug overdose, a car accident, or something else. Keep that in mind the next time you read poetry.
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