"We Real Cool" Blog Presentation

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 rhythm of this poem is extremely important for two reasons. The first one being that because the poem flows so easily together, it makes it easily accessible to the audience that Gwendolyn Brooks was trying to target. That target audience is the "troubled youth of the 1960s." She wanted her poem to be easily readable because she knew that most of them weren't as literate as she hoped because they clearly didn't find school worth their time. So, Gwendolyn Brooks comments on that by saying that this lifestyle of hitting the streets instead of the books will lead to death by ending her poem with the line, "we die soon." She is almost warning these specific boys and the general youth to pay attention to their studies because if you don't, you'll end up in a lot of trouble, mainly: Death. She wanted her message to be a strong one by associating all these strong feelings of "ecstasy" and then abruptly stopping them by alluding the fact that all the characters in the poem will die soon.

The use of the pronoun "We" is also important because it is like a rallying word. It unifies the audience by making them act as one unit instead of seperating them and singling them out. She wants to make sure that her message reaches al the youth of the 1960s.

Gwendolyn Brooks' tone in this poem is very important and can be interpreted differently depending on how the reader views it. One could say that the poem's tone is almost that of a maternal one in which she actually cares about the boys' well-being. She actually took the time to write the poem and express her concern for how the illiterate youth will die because of their reckless behavior. Another person could argue that her poem expresses ambivalence towards the boys' behavior. This is because she only plays as an observer allowing them to, "die soon," because she knows that the boys' lifestyles will lead to a probable death.

The other reason that rhythm is so important is because by using such a rhythm, Gwendolyn Brooks captures the feeling of freedom in her poem. There is a care-free tone to this because of how effortlessly the poem is strung together by the diction. The reader is introduced to this feeling of being on top of the world so to speak. The short sentence structure almost jabs at the reader and this demonstrates the "no holds barred" lifestyle choice of these boys. This diction symbolizes how the boys feel when they are skipping school, they obviously feel empowered and strong. They feel like nothing can touch them and the sharpness of these lines really captures that feeling. The rhyming of the poem gives it a feel of a jazz piece, and that parallels the feeling of "cool" that the boys have when they are out skipping school. The rhymes help bring the whole piece together by giving it that "cool-as-ice" feel.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15433