Boy Breaking Glass

“Boy Breaking Glass” is included in In the Mecca, the first collection of poems Brooks published after attending a conference at Fisk University in May 1967. According to Brooks, attendance at the conference changed her perspective on her art and was the “real turning point” in her belief about the role of the artist in Black revolution (Brooks, Gwendolyn. Report from Part One. Broadside Press, p. 167). Brooks was an established writer by the time she went to the conference, but that reputation didn’t endear her to the young Black writers at the conference. Of the conference, she writes:

I didn’t know what to make of what surrounded me, of what with hot sureness began almost immediately to invade me. I had never been, before, in the general presence of such insouciance, such live firmness, such confident vigor, such determination to mold or carve something DEFINITE. Up against the wall, white man! was the substance of the [Black poet Amiri] Baraka shout, at the evening reading (Report, 84-85).

The assertiveness of the attendees, especially their confidence and refusal to be cowed by the (white) literary establishment, impressed Brooks, and signaled to her that there was some other force at work in popular Black culture and Black representation.