Poet, Gwendolyn Brooks Uses Social Issues to Connect with the Reader in “Fight First, Then Fiddle” and “We Real Cool”

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The same author Gwendolyn Brooks writes the poems “Fight First, Then Fiddle” and “We Real cool”. I am about to explain to you of how the author uses social issues through of the two poems I am referring to connect to her readers.

The poem “We Real Cool”, by Gwendolyn Brooks was a great piece. I chose this poem because I could relate to the choice of words the author had chosen to use. The choice of words the author had chosen led me to believe the teens that the author described in her poem had to be a part of an African American. I understood this by the cultural similarities that I have often shared. A lot of the time in my culture we have a tendency to shorten many words, which are identified as “slang”. I felt this poem was a powerful piece by the author’s choice of words that captured the cultural sound. The phrase that she used was “ We Real cool”. I felt that the author focused cultural references such as language to catch the attention of the youth within the African American communities. Brooks wrote “We would skip school, yeah we real cool.” identifying that it is a young crowd because they are skipping school and chanting “We Real Cool.” I figured the characters she is talking about are younger because as an adult you often do not refer to being “cool” and skipping school and going to play pool.

(The rhyme scheme in “We Real Cool” the words rhyme in the middle of the couplet rather than the end of the couplet. The stanza meter is very consistent and only one syllable is stressed throughout the couplets. The author has a four-line stanza; she uses key words that I have identified as cultural as if in the stanza she used "Sing sin. We Thin gin." which I have noticed my family usually drinks in and when you're in...

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...e a balance. In which is why I believe “fight first, then fiddle” was a great sonnet to compare the stanza “We Real Cool” to because I believe that in this poem Brooks is expressing that things can be beautiful, but you have to see the bad in order to see the good. Therefore, in correlation that some of the teens that Gwendolyn is describing in “We Real Cool” might need some of the bad things happened to them in order for them to grow since they have no positive role models to stop them from making the mistakes. Thus being the reason why I believe that “fight first, then fiddle” go hand in hand by the content and by the sound of both poems sound song like. I think this is also another cultural touch with getting people to connect because of the upbeat of the two poems. I believe the poems both share a consistent flow of pleasant then dark through these two poems.

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