Poetry which does not rhyme or have a regular rhythm

allowing all people to use the same toilets

separate toilets for black people and white people

smiling at people on the other side of the road

Because it has the wrong number of lines.

Because it is not written by Shakespeare.

Because the rhyme and rhythm is not traditional and is more musical.

Why is 'the sonnet-ballad' not a traditional sonnet?

What book of poems was 'the sonnet-ballad' published in?

Gwendolyn Brooks

Key Stage 3

English

The sonnet through time: 'The sonnet-ballad', Gwendolyn Brooks

How many syllables are in each line in a sonnet?

The soldier will have to 'play' with death when it tempts him.

'Would have to court coquettish death.' What does this line of the poem mean?

﻿Hello, welcome to lesson two on "the sonnet-ballad" by Gwendolyn Brooks. Today's lesson is the most exciting part when we learn about poetry, in my opinion. I love finding out more about the poets and their lives and how their lives really make a difference on the poems that they write. That's what we'll be finding out about today. Who was Gwendolyn Brooks? Why did she write the poems that she wrote? So it's a really interesting part of looking at literature. To get ready, please make sure that you have a pen or a pencil, a piece of paper or a notebook, something like that, and a place that is clear of distractions, or at least a quietish place to make sure that you can concentrate throughout the lesson and have fun. When you're ready, let's get started. Excellent stuff. Now we are ready to learn all about Gwendolyn Brooks. And today we will start off by looking at who she was, before moving on to discovering what her writing was like. And then thinking about the question of how her life influenced her writing. Finally, we will have a look in a little more detail about how Brooks and her life influenced "the sonnet-ballad" which is the poem that we're looking at in this unit of lessons. Now, Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917. She was raised in Chicago in the United States. And her mother was a school teacher and her father was a janitor. Now, a janitor is like a caretaker we would probably say in England. And he had trained to be a doctor beforehand. So he got most of the way through his training to be a doctor, but actually he couldn't afford to finish school. And that's how he became a janitor or a caretaker in the end. So that's her background, that's a family. In 1938, so she would have been 21 in 1938, and she joined the NAACP youth council. The NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. And it was set up in 1909. So that's a bit of a mouth full, which is why they use the acronym NAACP instead. This association was set up to ensure a better life for black Americans. So, their aims were to abolish abolish, abolish meaning get rid of, segregation. And we'll talk about segregation very shortly. Get black people a better education, and also get them better voting rights. Now all of these things will make more sense as the lesson continues. All you need to know right now is that the NAACP was out there just to make sure that black Americans had a better life. And Gwendolyn Brooks joined this association in 1938. By the 1960s then, which is quite a few years later, Gwendolyn Brooks was becoming more and more famous. Her poetry was really successful. And by the 1960s she actually had a strong interest in the Civil Rights movement. The Civil Rights movement in the United States was led by Martin Luther King, who you may have heard of. And he was a black American fighting for equality and fighting for black people to have the exact same rights in the United States as white people did. And by the 1960s Gwendolyn Brooks was also taken an interest and taking part in this movement towards allowing black people the same rights as white people. So bearing in mind all of that information that I've just given you, let's have a think about what kind of poetry she might write. How would Gwendolyn Brooks want her audience to feel do we think? Have a think now, or have a chat to anyone who's around you if you're learning with other people. And think about the kind of poetry that Gwendolyn Brooks may come up with. How would she want her audience to feel? Press pause here to have a think and note some ideas down, and then press play when you're ready to move on. Well done. I'm sure there have been some super interesting and really impressive thoughts, conversations, and notes made all about what kind of poetry you think Gwendolyn Brooks might have created. We're going to look now at three of her collections of poetry that are really useful ones to look at to kind of track her poetry journey. By the late 1930s, so when she was around 20-years-old, Gwendolyn Brooks had published 75 poems. That's a lot of poems for a 20-year-old. Brooks was the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. And she also received loads of other honours in her lifetime. So this really reflect how popular and how successful Brooks was as a poet. Please bear in mind that is the United States in the '30s, '40s, '50s, where being a black woman would have been very difficult indeed. And we will look at that in a lot more detail over the course of the lesson. But just have that stat in the back of your mind. Just remember that Brooks was a black female poet and she was this successful. In 1945 she published her first collection of poems in book form and she titled it "A Street in Bronzeville." This collection of poems was essentially a description of the everyday lives of black people. And she said that she wrote these poems whilst she was sat at a window in her house, just looking down at the street, seeing people go about their daily lives, going shopping, meeting friends, et cetera. So this was really just a reflection of the lives of black people in America at the time she was writing. The next collection of poetry that she published in book form was called "Annie Allen." This is the book that the poem we're looking at comes out of. Now it was labelled "Annie Allen" because it followed the journey of a young girl becoming a woman in America. So Annie Allen was the speaker of the poems in this collection. And she started off at the beginning of the collection being a young girl, not really know much about the world. And as the poems go on through the book she becomes a mature, wiser, older woman. This collection of poetry then really focuses on social issues. That means the issues that black people and particularly black women would have had to face and would have had to deal with at this time in America, in 1940s America. So what was it like to be a black woman at that time? And that's what "Annie Allen" tells us about. That's what that collection of poetry tells us about. And then quite a few years later, nearly 20 years later in fact, she publishes a collection of poems and she titled it "In the Mecca." This was a really interesting collection of poems for Brooks. She now begins to move away from her traditional poems and the traditional forms that she used. And now she starts writing in something called free verse. Free verse is poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular rhythm. There are no rules with free verse. A lot of free verse was very much, how do we say, perhaps disapproved of, or seen as not real poetry by traditional poets when it first began to become popular. However, now it is very much accepted and very much valued as really excellent expression and form of poetry. So with "In the Mecca," Gwendolyn Brooks has moved from her traditional following the rules, making things rhyme and having a form poetry to this free verse poetry that was growing very, very popular in the 1960s. Let's just have a quick review of what life was like for black Americans in this time. We're looking at the years from around the '30s to the '60s. So 1930s, '40s, '50s, and then into the 1960s. Segregation is the action of setting someone apart from others. This was something that was actually included in the law in America until the late 1960s. Black people and white people were segregated. So that would mean black people were not allowed to use the same toilets, not allowed to use the same water fountains, had different places on buses. There were establishments like restaurants and libraries, et cetera that would not allow black people in. Universities, schools where you could not have both black and white children. And you could only go to the school with the people of the same colour skin of you. So that's segregation and that was something that black people had to deal with in America at that time. And then a broader idea of what was going on is the word that you can see on the right-hand side of your screen, injustice. Some of you may have heard this word before, which is excellent. And for those of you who have never heard this word before, injustice means a lack of fairness. This is a really simple way to explain injustice. And in my opinion, it does not really share how unfair the situation was in the 1930s, '40s, '50s. A lack of fairness suggests something quite small and something that doesn't really have a big effect. However, real injustice is actually very dangerous, very damaging for those people who get treated unfairly. They do not get treated in the same way as others. And this can have a knock on effect for years and years to come. In the 1930s in, this is what America looked like for black Americans, segregation. They were made to use separate toilets, drinking fountains, et cetera. The right to vote for black Americans was very difficult. By law black Americans either had to pay something called a voting tax, which meant that if they would like to vote, they would have to pay money. Alternatively, they could pass a literacy test. This literacy test however, was so difficult that actually most white Americans would have struggled to pass it as well. What that meant was that a black American, although could technically vote by law, was made to feel like it was nearly impossible. It was very difficult for them to actually do so. And finally, if we look at statistics, over half of the black people who lived in the north of the country needed government support to live. They needed help to live because they were in poverty. Poverty, meaning not much money, no job, no food on the table, et cetera. Over half of the black people who lived in the north of the country needed help. Chicago, which is where Gwendolyn Brooks grew up and wrote her poetry, she lived in the north. Chicago is in the north of the country. So she would definitely have seen this and experienced this firsthand. You're going to have a go now, at thinking about what life was like for black Americans in the 1930s. There are four options on the screen for you to think about. So we have option one, brilliant, loads of opportunity for them. Option two, they did have to work hard but they were generally happy. Number three, they were treated unequally and unfairly in society. And finally option four, life for black Americans was the same as life for white Americans. I'd like you now to pause the video here, select the option that you think is correct, and then press play when you're ready. Brilliant, I hope you guys managed to get that correctly after our discussion about it just previously. So option three, they were treated unequally and unfairly in society. And that's because of things like segregation and their struggle to vote and their struggle to get jobs, et cetera. So they were treated very unequally and very unfairly. Let's move back on to have a look at Brooks' poetry now. So we are connecting all of the ideas that we now know about what it was like to be black in America at that time with the poetry that Brooks has written. So "Annie Allen" was Brooks' book of poetry focused on the experiences of a young black girl becoming a woman in America. Brooks herself described her poetry before the 1960s as "work that was conditioned to the times and the peoples." What she means by that is that the way that she wrote her poems, the style of her poetry, was very traditional and actually the kind of poetry she was writing originated in white Europe. She was writing poetry in the same style that white Europeans had written in for centuries. These early poems and her reputation as an excellent poet. And as we said at the beginning, she achieved amazing things, extreme popularity, lots and lots of prizes, et cetera. However, although her poems did talk about the injustice that black people experienced, there were some people who thought that these poems were actually written for white people. So Brooks was a black poet having a black experience in America. But her poems about that black experience were written for white people, because they were written in this traditional style that white people could access. And actually what Brooks wanted to do and what people said Brooks needed to do was to experiment and create a unique voice. So what that means is, instead of her just sticking to this traditional style that she had learned when she had gone to college and she knew that it was popular, she felt like as a black poet she now needed to use her talents and create a voice that spoke to black people as well as to white people. A lot of people call Gwendolyn Brooks the bridge that connect the academic poets in the 1940s with the militant writers in the 1960s. And by militant writers we mean all of those incredible people who started writing about the injustice and the unfairness and the inequality in America. And those writers created the change to make things better. So the academic poets in 1940s. Brooks was part of those because she used that traditional poetic structure and rhyme. And in "A street in Bronzeville," her first collection of poems, she was very much part of this group of academic poets. But then by the 1960s, when she published "In the Mecca" this was the one where she started to use free verse and she really demonstrated, or really showed a commitment to black identity. So by writing in free verse, and by moving away from the traditional poems she had written, she was showing that she could identify as a black woman and still be successful. She would use her talents. And she would at the same time identify as the black woman that she was. When Brooks spoke about "the sonnet-ballad" poem, she said, "My one claim to fame is that I invented it." Let's have a look at what she means by that. Here you can see a copy of the poem and you can see that it has 14 lines. It's a Shakespearean sonnet in the form that it takes. Where the pink lines are on the screen you can see that we have three quatrains, a quatrain meaning a collection of four lines. So we have three quatrains. And then the end is a rhyming couplet, two lines that rhyme with one another. This then is a traditional Shakespearean sonnet. This is how Shakespeare wrote his sonnets and was a very, very popular form of poetry, particularly when talking about things like love and loss. So here we can definitely see why she called the poem "the sonnet." Here we can see why she also chose to title her poem a ballad. Now, although it had those features of a sonnet that we've just looked at, there are also things about the poem, choices that Brooks made to ensure that it was not a traditional Shakespearean sonnet. The first and the last line of the poem are repeated. This can be called a refrain. Think about when you hear songs. Most of the songs that you can think of have a chorus, the bit that gets repeated and that people learn off by heart because it's heard more than once in the poem. This is used here, and this is what makes it a ballad. This refrain, a refrain is not used in sonnets usually. So the fact that she repeats her first line and her last line is one of the reasons for why she has to title the poem "the sonnet-ballad" rather than just a sonnet. Another reason is the rhyme scheme. The rhyme scheme for a traditional Shakespearen sonnet is not the same as the one we see here. She has changed it ever so slightly, and she's done so to make it sound more sing-song, The rhythm sounds more folksy, more song-like. And again, that's why she's labelled it as a ballad. The reason for Brooks wanting to create a poem that was not simply a sonnet, but was a sonnet-ballad was because she wanted to start moving away from that traditional white European poetry she had been writing. If you remember, we're in the middle of those two stages of Brooks' poetry. We're not at the beginning where she was sticking to her traditional forms. And we're not yet at the end where she used free verse. We're in the middle part, where she was beginning to one to show herself as a black poet. She could identify as an African American now, not just an American, but an African American. And she really wanted to make sure that her poetry were speaking to black people as well as white people. Here you've got three options to choose from. The sentence starts, Gwendolyn Brooks has titled her poem as a "sonnet-ballad" because ... You need to complete the sentence with either option A, B, or C. So press pause when you're ready to have a go and then press play when you've selected the correct answer. Brilliant work, well done. So Gwendolyn Brooks has titled her poem as a "sonnet-ballad" because she wanted to combine her traditional poetic style with the musical style of a ballad to appeal to more black Americans. So it's this idea of keeping her traditional poetic style, because ultimately she is a poet. It does not matter what the colour of her skin is for her abilities. She is an excellent poet, no matter the colour of her skin. However, for her identity Brooks herself really wanted to make sure that her poetry was speaking to everyone and that black Americans could access it, could read it, could enjoy it just as much as white Americans. And that's why she titled her poem as a "sonnet-ballad." Now you are going to complete your final task for the lesson. So these three sentences that you can see have got gaps. These gaps need to be filled in with words that we have spoken about in the lesson. Pause the video here, complete those gaps, and then press play when you're finished. How did you get on? First of all, we have segregation, the action of setting someone apart from others. Secondly we have free verse is poetry which does not have to rhyme. So if you remember, we said that Gwendolyn Brooks started to look into free verse and experiment with that a lot more in the '60s when lots of writers were doing it to try and stand up for their rights, stand up for other people's rights and really get their voices heard. And finally, "Annie Allen" was a collection of poems about a young black girl becoming a woman in America. And that's where the poem that we're looking at, "the sonnet-ballad" comes from. It comes from that collection of poems in "Annie Allen." I have spoken at you for a very long time during this lesson. There's been a lot of information that you have taken in. You've had lots of opportunities to think about things. And hopefully with this final activity you've learned a few more pieces of vocabulary, like segregation and free verse. Before we move on to the next lesson together, there is a quiz at the end of this one. So do you take your to complete the quiz, just to reflect on how much you've learned today and how well you've done. And then once you've completed that quiz, I really look forward to teaching you the next lesson on "the sonnet-ballad," well done.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks

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