Happy birthday, dear Gwendolyn

I never imagined I would gather with a large crowd around a cake to sing “Happy Birthday” to a dead person, but a few days ago I found myself doing just that. We had just viewed a short film celebrating the legacy of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who was born 100 years ago today.

The film, which portrays its characters through puppets and silhouettes, imagines what the poet might have imagined as she watched seven boys playing pool at the Golden Shovel in the middle of a school day. These young hooky-players inspired what would become her most famous poem, “We Real Cool.” As the film’s puppet version of Miss Brooks looks in on the pool hall, she wonders how the boys feel about themselves, what their lives are like, and how they relate to the people in their lives. A recording of Brooks reading the poem is followed by a hauntingly beautiful musical rendition, which combines jazz and Motown with elements of rap and incorporates some of the lines from Haki Madhubuti’s poem “Gwendolyn Brooks.”

Brooks’s vocation, which the film captures well, was to be a witness. She saw into the everyday lives—the joys and shortcomings and tragedies and hopes—of the people around her, especially African Americans living on the south side of Chicago. Her poems linger in the quotidian particularities of urban life. Two people sit down to eat at the local diner. A woman mourns the babies who were lost to her abortions. Parents sadly send their grown son out into the world. A renter hopes for lukewarm water as she waits for her neighbor to finish using the shared restroom. A group of boys skips school to play pool and drink gin.