Gwendolyn Brooks: A Poet In The Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement left a lasting impression not only on African-American culture, but on all American cultures. “…criticized as misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racially exclusive, the Black Arts movement is also credited with inciting a new generation of poets, writers, and artists” (A Brief Guide to the Black Arts Movement). The Black Arts movement is dated from approximately 1960 to 1970, coinciding with the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement. African American artists within the movement tried to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience. A Poet in the Black Arts Movement that really stood out to me was Gwendolyn Brooks.
By the age of seventeen, Gwendolyn Brooks, had more than one hundred poems in print, and her subject matter was frequently the difficulties of growing up black and impoverished in America. Best known for …show more content…
Brooks’ had set up a black aesthetic that is an accurate representation of the urban, working class black people she treasures. From the stems to producing and recycling a collective and nationalistic black consciousness of writing. Writing about blackness in a way that is best understood not only to the writers, but produced for the black masses they wanted and needed to reach. Brooks uses persona in her art to create a diverse community of black characters, representative of the real black people in her community and other communities alike. For example, Brooks uses form, structure, and language to not adhere to “white” standards of writing about these people or attempting to humanize them through respectability politics, but instead appropriates those standards to talk about black life in a way that makes sense to her and communicates to her target