Playing with Poetry

While National Poetry Month is upon us, K-12 students around Illinois are putting pen to paper for consideration in this year’s Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards. Since 2017, Illinois Humanities has been the steward of the annual contest first founded in 1968 by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first Black Pulitzer Prize Winner and then-Illinois Poet Laureate.

Gwendolyn Brooks was always passionate about encouraging young people to write and believed poetry could be a powerful vehicle to help them find their voice. As a writer and public figure, she began hosting small contests to get students writing, but she wanted to do more. Then, she received the opportunity to start the official Youth Poetry Awards in her position as Illinois Poet Laureate.

“All those years of creating impromptu contests at schools across the country,” writes her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely. “Now she could encourage more children to speak their truths with the weight of the state behind her.”

Brooks knew that this was what it was really about. A contest can get students excited to try poetry for the first time, but the prize is in the experience–the gift of writing.

“The new Shakespeare or Richard Wright, the new Garcia Lorca or Pablo Neruda or Bertolt Brecht or Isaac Bashevis Singer, the new Margaret Walker, the new Anonymous may or may not be here among these youngsters. That is not the point,” Brooks said at the 1981 awards ceremony. “The point is that young people, often underestimated, have cared to deal with language, to test it, to challenge it, to curry, illumine, to metamorphose – to PLAY – and that’s okay.” 

We have witnessed it first-hand as stewards of Brooks’s contest: through play, poetry is uniquely powerful in igniting young people’s interest in language, interpretation, self-expression–in the humanities. Through it, they may discover their voice.

In this spirit, let’s take some time to play with poetry this National Poetry Month.

The freewriting prompt shared here is inspired by Brooks’s writing advice in “Young Poets Primer.” In a few short minutes, each of us can experience the magic of poetry that Brooks knew well. A few members of our staff have tried their pen and shared their writing here, inspired by Brooks’s legacy. We hope their playful poems will encourage you to do the same!

Before you start: Pick a subject to write your poem about. Perhaps it is something you love, a cherished keepsake, or your favorite meal.

As you write, heed Brooks’s wisdom about writing what you know: “In writing your poem, tell the truth as you know it. Tell your truth. Don’t try to sugar it up. Don’t force your poem to be nice or proper or normal or happy if it does not want to be. Remember that poetry is life distilled, and that life is not always nice or proper or normal or happy or smooth or even-edged.”