Art & Creativity Quote by Gwendolyn Brooks

Brooks frames writing less as a choice than as a moral reflex. The line begins with a directive - "Look" - that feels almost conversational, but it’s also a demand for attention. She positions the world as a daily feed of the "exciting or disturbing", a pairing that collapses spectacle and crisis into the same inexhaustible prompt. That’s the trick: she’s not romanticizing inspiration; she’s admitting that history won’t let you off the hook.

The subtext is responsibility. For Brooks, a Black poet who made the interior lives of Bronzeville legible to mainstream America, "what's happening" is never abstract. It’s housing, violence, war, children growing up under pressure, dignity negotiated in tight spaces. The sentence "With all that's going on, how could I stop?" carries the rhetoric of obviousness, but it’s edged with impatience toward the idea that art is optional or episodic. Stopping would mean consenting to erasure, letting the day’s harms pass unrecorded, unchallenged.

Context matters: Brooks lived through the Great Migration’s aftermath, Jim Crow, World War II, the civil rights movement, and the cultural turn of Black Arts politics. Her career tracks a widening of address - from meticulous formal control to sharper public urgency - without abandoning craft. So the quote reads like a manifesto disguised as plain speech: the world keeps generating material, yes, but more importantly it keeps generating stakes. Writing becomes surveillance, witness, and counter-narrative, a way to insist that the "disturbing" not become normal background noise.