FAVORITE POEM

	December 5, 2000
	Poet Gwendolyn Brooks died this week at the age of 83. After a video of Brooks reading her poem "We Real Cool," a Boston art student reads it as part of former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project.

JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, two readings of the same poem, in memory of poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who died Sunday night at age 83. In 1950 she became the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. One of her best-known poems is "We Real Cool," an eight-line portrait of a group of young men. And here is Gwendolyn Brooks talking about, and reciting that poem. It's from a 1986 Library of Congress interview. GWENDOLYN BROOKS: I wrote it because I was passing by a pool hall in my neighborhood in Chicago one afternoon, and I saw... well, as I said in the poem, seven boys shooting pool. And I wondered how they felt about themselves, and I decided that they felt they were not quite valid, that they certainly were insecure, they were not cherished by the society, and therefore they would feel that they should, well, spit in the face of the establishment. I used the month of June as a symbol, an establishment symbol. Whereas the rest of us love and respect June, and wait for it to come so we can enjoy it, they would jazz June, derange it, scratch in it; do anything that would annoy the establishment. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon. JIM LEHRER: Here now is another reading of that poem. This one is part of our ongoing favorite poem series, the project of former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. The reader is a Boston art student. JOHN ULRICH: My name is John Ulrich. I'm from South Boston. I'm 20 years old. And I'm a student at Mass College of Art. JOHN'S MOTHER: When is your final? JOHN ULRICH: Tomorrow at 10:30. My family is just this big, loving family. There's never a day where I didn't think my parents did 100% for me. They're just amazing people, they really are. I come from a family of eight. I have seven brothers and sisters, four sisters and three brothers. We're really a tight, close family. We're all a year apart. You know, I was never by myself. I always had this huge family. I could always go back, and they would always be there with that unconditional love, you know, that... it never goes away. So I was... that was what kind of saved me. I always had this huge backing, you know? And it wasn't just friends or... there was blood, and brothers and sisters that don't turn their backs, no matter what, you know? When I was, like, 17, 18 years old or, like, 1997, 250 friends and neighbors tried to commit suicide, tried to take their own lives. Six succeeded. And I lost six friends and neighbors, all under 25 years old to suicide. And since then, I lost about five, five friends to heroin overdoses and suicide. It's just like this cluster of death that surrounds me, surrounds my neighborhood. It's kind of a desperate thing. I formed a group with my girlfriend, my little sister, and a couple of other friends. It's called South Boston Survivors. What we try to do is to start programs to distract young kids from life or depression, just to get their minds somewhere else, like into art or creativity, something to spark a flame in them that might redirect them from this depression, this, like, despair that was just flooding the streets of South Boston. "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon. When I first heard "We Real Cool" in a poetry class in high school, and it was in the middle of the cluster of suicides and all this, like, despair that was going on, and it just made sense to me. It just really made sense how things started off so innocent, and got so drastic so quick, you know? I remember being in high school and, you know, we were just having a good time, and cutting school was innocent. And then three years later, a lot of those kids I went to high school with aren't alive anymore, you know? And it just made so much sense. It was like telling my story, a perfect picture of what was going on in my neighborhood. I don't think we ever thought we were real cool. I think it was just the whole innocence of the... how innocent we were, you know? We were just young, and you think you're going to live forever, you know? You're invincible. And how quick it just snatched them up, you know? It's crazy, how drugs just overcame an entire generation, my entire generation. It's crazy. "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.