We Real Cool

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We Real Cool is a poem written in 1959 by African American poet Gwendolyn Brooks and published in her 1960 book The Bean Eaters, her third collection of poetry.

It consists of four verses of two rhyming lines each. The last word in most lines is "we". The next line describes something that "we" do, such as play pool or drop out of school. Brooks has said that the "we"'s are meant to be said softly, as though the protagonists in the poem are questioning the validity of their existence.^[1] The poem has been featured on broadsides, and is widely studied in literature classes and re-printed in literature textbooks.

[edit] External links

• Poem and Audio Clip of Brooks reading "We Real Cool"

[edit] References

1. ^ "An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks" in Contemporary Literature 11:1 (Winter 1970). Available on-line here.