Jacinda: We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

Although the poem We Real Cool, by Gwendolyn Brooks, is short, the simplicity of it is what makes it significant. The poems straight-forward message for teens and adolescents during this time was to immediately get their attention and inform them that the lifestyle they chose to have is unacceptable. The basic meaning of the poem was to describe the journey of seven teens that chose to drop out of school and play pool in the meantime, while drinking and living a carefree life. The poem also insists that this life leads to death. The irony in the poem is that with the title being “We Real Cool”, the reader immediately thinks that the poem is about some people who are living the fabulous life, meanwhile these people are headed for destruction, as Vendler stated. Personally, I thought the poem would be the opposite because of the way the title was written. “We Real Cool, instead of “We Are Real Cool”, kind of gave me the since that is was going to be about the opposite type of person. I felt that Brooks wrote this because of the abundance of African American teens that dropped out of school in the 1960s, while trying to get them to return to school and understand that life on the streets did not lead to success. I feel like she wanted to approach this issue with such a simple poem that even the “drop outs” could comprehend. I also think she wrote the poem in three word sentences so that it would seem as if the teens were saying it, since they lacked the proper education.