Реферат: Online Interviews With Gwendolyn Brooks Essay Research

of our very famous European poets has said. This is very difficult because all of us

American poets have been thoroughly brainwashed into believing that what has already been

published is it!

SC: In the short manual on black poetry writing that you wrote, [Gwendolyn Brooks,

Keorapetse Kgositsile, Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L.Lee), Dudley Randall, Black Poetry

Writing, Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975] you comment on poetry being a transient

thing and it serving an immediate purpose more than a person intentionally trying to write

for posterity or for something that will be permanent.

Brooks: That does not express what I have been doing; whatever I said to that effect

was about those black poets in the late sixties, some of whom, not all but some of whom

felt that black poetry shouldn’t be written with an eye to posterity billions and

trillions of years from now. They felt, some of them, that if they wrote a poem that

worked for black people today, it would have served its purpose, and if it died after the

poem had done what the poet wanted it to feel–again not all–feel that they do want to be

read thousands of years from now. I’m afraid that I’m weak enough to think that it would

be very nice if somebody could get some nourishment or healing or just plain rich pleasure

out of poems I’m writing today.

SC: Another thing from Black Poetry Writing that I’d like to get a comment on.

You broke black poetry down into three stages, a first stage that was a statement of

condition, and then moving to a poetry of integration, and then the present poetry being

more an assertive, positive, individualistic thing.

Brooks: I was describing my own three stages of creativity. One, I call my

"express myself" stage, because I was writing about anything and everything in

my environment just because I wanted to express myself–flailing about. And second, my

"integration flavoring" stage when I wrote a lot of poems which I hoped would

bring black people and white people and all people together, and they didn’t seem to be

doing that (laughter) in great numbers at any rate, and a third stage governed by that

little credo that some of the Black poets had in the late sixties, "Black poetry is

poetry written by blacks, about blacks, and to black," and then, I’m trying very