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Branching Out Kansas City: Elizabeth Alexander on Gwendolyn Brooks

Apr 19, 2006 | 6:30 pm

Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago’s great South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks has been one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century. Her poems distill the very best aspects of Modernist style with the sounds and shapes of various African-American forms and idioms. Brooks is a consummate portraitist who found worlds in the community she wrote out of, and her innovations as a sonneteer remain an inspiration to more than one generation of poets who have come after her. Her career as a whole also offers an example of an artist who was willing to respond and evolve in the face of the dramatic historical, political, and aesthetic changes and challenges she lived through.

Featuring music by a Jazz ensemble

Location The American Jazz Museum Historic 18th & Vine Jazz District 1616 E. 18th Street/Kansas City, MO Sponsored By Poets House: A joint initiative with the Poetry Society of America, Branching Out: Poetry for the 21st Century is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Details

Date:
Apr 19, 2006
Time:
6:30 pm
Event Category: