Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

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By permission of The Granger Collection, New York.

Gwendolyn Brooks

We Real Cool (Literature To Go, p. 393)

Listen to “We Real Cool,” as read by the author at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on May 3, 1983.

Reproduced by permission of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org, and with the consent of Brooks Permissions.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

  1. first response. How does the speech of the pool players in this poem help to characterize them? What is the effect of the pronouns coming at the ends of the lines? How would the poem sound if the pronouns came at the beginnings of lines?

  2. What is the author’s attitude toward the players? Is there a change in tone in the last line?

  3. How is the pool hall’s name related to the rest of the poem and its theme?