When I start writing a poem, I don’t think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.
We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.
I don’t want people running around saying Gwen Brooks’s work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn’t have to mean that, but it often seems to.
I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don’t pay attention ’cause it probably has floated into somebody else’s head.
No man can give me any word but Wait...
When white and black meet today, sometimes there is a ready understanding that there has been an encounter between two human beings. But often there is only, or chiefly, an awareness that Two Colors are in the room.
To be in love Is to touch things with a lighter hand. In yourself you stretch, you are well.
What, what am I to do with all of this life?
With melted opals for my milk, Pearl-leaf for my cracker.
Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.
Nothing could stop Mississippi.
There can be no whiter whiteness than this one: An insurance man’s shirt on its morning run.
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!
Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, “Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night.” You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.
Be yourself. Don’t imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
Life for my child is simple, and is good.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker. It has always been hard for me to say exactly what I mean in speech But if I have written a clumsiness, I may erase it.
The poetry is myself.
I’ve always thought of myself as a reporter.
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
The music is in minors.