We Real Cool (Style)

Style

The monosyllabic words and quick lines of “We Real Cool” suggest the jabbing of pool cues and the short, fast life of the pool players. The poem is made up of four, two-line stanzas, each of which is end-rhymed. The lines also internally rhyme (“Thin gin”) or alliterate (“Strike straight”). The “We” at the end of each line is not for the purpose of rhyme, but rhythm. Normally, the voice continues on or falls at the end of a line. In this poem, however, the voice falls just before the end and then rises, yielding an unusual accented syllable at the end of each line — except for the last. This is due to the repeated foot throughout the poem, the rather unusual dactyl, a three-syllable foot with the first syllable accented and the following two unaccented. A dactyl yields a falling rhythm that is evident in the poem’s first three syllables: “We real cool.” Afterward, however, the dactyl foot is broken between the two lines of each stanza, with the accented “We” being placed on the line before. This unusual distribution suggests waltz rhythm or, if one pauses after “We,” jazz syncopation — a shifting of accents to unusual positions. The rhythm of the poem suggests a burst of bravado that quickly peters out, as if the pool players boldly proclaim who they are but cannot maintain that elevated status.

Compare & Contrast

• 1955: Emmett Till, a black fourteen-year-old, is killed by white men while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, because he called a white woman, “Baby.”

  1998: James Byrd, a forty-nine-year-old African American, is murdered in Jasper, Texas by several whites associated with the Aryan Brotherhood and Ku Klux Klan.

• 1957: A desegregation crisis occurs in Little Rock, Arkansas. President Eisenhower sends in the 101st Airborne to stop whites from keeping black high school students away from a formerly segregated high school

  1996: Proposition 209 passed in California, ending affirmative action at all campuses of the University of California.

  1998: At the University of California at Berkeley enrollment drops for African-American, Hispanic, and Native-American freshmen combined, from 23.1 percent in 1997 to 10.4 percent in 1998.

• 1957: Samuel Beckett publishes Endgame, a bleak farce situated in a postapocalyptic landscape decimated by, presumably, nuclear weapons.

  1998: India blows up several nuclear bombs as part of what is called a “test.” Pakistan answers with the same. The shows of force are part of a long-standing rivalry between India and Pakistan about territory and religion.