Gwendolyn Brooks Thinking Quotations

I don't want people running around saying Gwen Brooks's work is intellectual. That makes people think instantly about obscurity. It shouldn't have to mean that, but it often seems to.

She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. That there might even come a year when no one on earth would think of him at all.

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

A poem doesn't do everything for you. You are supposed to go on with your thinking. You are supposed to enrich the other person's poem with your extensions, your uniquely personal understandings, thus making the poem serve you.