We Real Cool (with Music)

I’ll keep this one short. I have always loved the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks. Everyone knows her most famous poem:

We Real Cool

  The Pool Players.
        Seven at the Golden Shovel.

            We real cool. We   
            Left school. We

            Lurk late. We
            Strike straight. We

            Sing sin. We   
            Thin gin. We

            Jazz June. We   
            Die soon.

When I entered the poem’s full text into Midjourney, the renderings were largely expected, with the usual strong aesthetic. Behold:

For a change of pace, I took an audio recording of Gwendolyn Brooks herself reading the poem (Morgan Freeman was also an option), and I chopped and remixed in GarageBand. I call it “Seven is a Golden Vowel” because all of the loops I used to make the song (from the GarageBand loop library) begin with the letter “u.” So, a little experiment in audio Oulipo.

I hope you enjoy this bit of mixplay.