Poem Analysis: We Real Cool

753 Words4 Pages
Reading Response to the poem, We Real Cool Samantha M. Lavoie English 125 Benzon Barbin July 6, 2013 Ashford University Reading Response to the poem, We Real Cool The Pool Players We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon. The poet, Gwendolyn Brooks grew up in Chicago. Gwendolyn Brooks (2013) Chicago is the birthplace of Rhythm’ n’ Blues and was “mutating the changing social and artistic landscape.” Scaruffi, P. (2005) Music is essential to the poem. I can picture the young black men in a smoky billiards hall. Brooks does not mention this, but I was like these young men skipping school. When this poem was written, you could smoke freely where…show more content…
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote many poems as the African American Civil Rights demanded equality. I think race is important to this author and to this poem. Another famous poet, Langston Hughes was making a lot of noise within his writing like the poem, “A Dream Deferred” Clugston, R.W. (2010). Both of these poems were written around the same time. It was a political time of social unrest but, it was a pivotal time for this country. “We Real Cool” is truly musical almost comparable to jazz or even the beat generation’s poetry or prose. Jazz has an unmistakable syncopated beat or rather off the beat. I listen to this one musician, and he raps over live jazz in the studio. Everyone should experience it once in their lives. It is wild. The musicality of this poem trumps all else, in my opinion. It has a rhyme scheme of AABB. A rhyme scheme “is the formal arrangement of rhymes in a stanza or a poem.” Rhyme Scheme (2013) Brooks uses rhyme though her poem. She uses words like cool/school, thin/gin, and sin/gin. Alliteration is the reoccurrences of a sound. Lurk/late is an example of this. This poem resonates with me because of all the musicality and rhythm. I grew up with hip-hop music. It is my first love. I am getting a little older so my tastes have changed. I have included some jazz like Herbie Hancock and Donald Byrd. That is why I so love this

More about Poem Analysis: We Real Cool

Open Document