BROOKS, Gwendolyn (1917-2000). 4 autograph draft poems or notes signed ("Gwendolyn Brooks"), with numerous corrections and emendations, December 1968 and May 19, 1994. Together 5 pages, 8vo and 12mo.
Sale 759 - Selections from the Library of Gerald and Barbara Weiner
Oct 8, 2020
10:00AM CT
Live / Chicago
Estimate
$600 -
$800
Sold for $2,125
Sold prices are inclusive of Buyer’s Premium
Lot Description
BROOKS, Gwendolyn (1917-2000). 4 autograph draft poems or notes signed ("Gwendolyn Brooks"), with numerous corrections and emendations, December 1968 and May 19, 1994. Together 5 pages, 8vo and 12mo.
Comprising three drafts for "The Beauty in the Forest" and a draft of "For Sara Miller, sculptor." Both poems were posthumously published in In Montgomery: And Other Poems, (Chicago: Third World Press, 2003).
Brooks examines the notion of the gaze in "The Beauty in the Forest": "And even deep into the forest the beauty was where no one could see. / The Forest Beauties perfected themselves for no gaze." One draft of the poem is written in a small pocket day timer for December 1968, which also includes a note about Carl Sandburg.
Her heavily amended draft of "For Sara Miller, sculptor" includes early notes for a poem Brooks wrote to commemorate Sara Miller's bronze bust of Brooks, which was publicly unveiled the Harold Washington Library Center on 6 June 1994. Brooks saw the sculpture prior to its unveiling, and writes: "Sara, thank you for...sending my life into bronze, and continues "You see me UNBLINKINGLY BLACK!" [crossed out]. She concludes: "You see beyond seeables, see beyond flesh...No longer walking through rooms I shall be gone and not gone."
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