Life & Wisdom Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

Brooks calling herself a "reporter" is a quiet flex and a warning label. It frames her poetry not as self-expression in the confessional sense, but as fieldwork: observation with stakes, conducted in public, among other people, in real weather. The line shrugs off the preciousness that can cling to "poet" and replaces it with a job description that implies deadlines, accountability, and proximity to events. A reporter goes where things happen. A reporter talks to strangers. A reporter gets names right.

That intent maps cleanly onto Brooks's lifelong project: rendering Black urban life with exactness and moral attention, from the kitchen-table intimacies of Bronzeville to the political sharpenings of her later work. "I've always" matters too. It suggests continuity across her stylistic shifts, as if the move from meticulous formalism to more openly revolutionary cadences wasn't a change in mission, just in equipment. The method evolves; the beat stays the same.

The subtext is also a defense against a literary culture eager to aestheticize Black experience into symbolism or "voice". Brooks insists on specificity over myth. Reporter implies witness, but also translation: taking what's overheard, half-seen, routinely ignored, and making it legible without sanding off its complexity. In a century where Black life was routinely misreported or not reported at all, her claim is almost corrective journalism. Poetry becomes a parallel press - one that can publish interiority, contradiction, and the kind of truth that doesn't fit in a column.