Culture
The Power and Paradox of a Sonnet by Gwendolyn Brooks
Here’s a poem about patience, about self-control, about the need to conserve your energy and constrain your desire. Fittingly enough, it’s a proper old-school sonnet, orderly and elegant: 14 lines of iambic pentameter, crisply punctuated, with syllables cut to measure.
But like a great many sonnets — most famously the 154 written by William Shakespeare — “my dreams, my works” is part of a sequence. Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was a modern master of the form. This one comes from her first collection, “A Street in Bronzeville,” published in 1945 and named for the working-class Black neighborhood in Chicago where she grew up.
The book illuminates the lives of Bronzeville’s residents through a series of snapshots, character studies and monologues in various lengths and styles. Brooks’s lyrical gifts are matched by a novelist’s eye and psychological insight — talents on display in her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Annie Allen” and her only book of fiction, “Maud Martha.”
Gwendolyn Brooks with her first collection, “A Street in Bronzeville,” published in 1945.
Associated Press
“A Street in Bronzeville” is a book full of faces and voices. It closes with a cluster of sonnets, gathered under the subtitle “Gay Chaps at the Bar,” that adopt the perspectives, the personae, of Black soldiers fighting in World War II. In their blend of bravado and vulnerability, these poems capture the anxieties and aspirations of men facing a double battle: against fascism overseas and racism at home.
The reader, opening the box she has placed in our hands, completes the circuit and discovers a new feeling. One word for that is empathy. A better one is electricity.
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment highlights observations from future or alternate worlds depicted in popular science fiction. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s challenge tests your memory of books that made huge impacts on society after they were published — some of them even spurring changes to American laws. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
-
Fitness4 minutes agoGary Neville’s 5-Day-a-Week Fitness Routine – and How Exercise Changed His Life After Football
-
Movie Reviews12 minutes ago‘Dreams of Violets’ Review: What Does a Film Made Entirely with AI Look Like? Ash Koosha’s Iranian Protest Drama Is Dramatically Numbing, but It’s Still a Startling Portent of the Future
-
World22 minutes ago
Sabrina Carpenter gets 5-year restraining order against man who kept trying to enter her home
-
News27 minutes agoVideo: Federal Reserve Holds Interest Rates Steady
-
Health49 minutes agoCan You Lose Weight Without Exercise? 7 Surprisingly Easy Tricks
-
Lifestyle1 hour agoGreetings from Maputo, Mozambique’s capital, shaped by a modernist architecture
-
Technology1 hour agoTim Cook says RAM expenses are ‘unsustainable’ and Apple is going to raise prices
-
World1 hour agoFinland’s parliament votes to lift decades-old ban on nuclear weapons in historic NATO defense shift
