When we think of poets, we think of them in lofty, rarefied terms.

We do not expect to hear that it was a mistake to call Gwendolyn Brooks in the early afternoons because if you did, she would hang up on you if she answered the phone at all because she was a devoted fan of the soap opera "All My Children" and was busy watching it.

That story was told at a ceremony in 2010 by Brooks' daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, on the occasion of her Pulitzer Prize-winner poet/novelist mother being among the first class of inductees into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, along with Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Studs Terkel, Lorraine Hansberry and Saul Bellow.

You will be learning a great deal more about Brooks in the coming year — because she was born on June 17, 1917, making this year the 100th anniversary of her birth and a very good reason for remembering her as the giant that she was. (All sorts of information can be found at www.gwendolynbrooks100.org.)

She was not born here but rather in Topeka, Kan., coming to Chicago when she was 6 months old. But also know that the others in that first literary Hall of Fame class came here from elsewhere: Terkel when he was 8 from New York City, Bellow at 9 from Montreal, Algren at 3 from Detroit, Wright at 19 from Mississippi, Hansberry at 8 from New York.

So, none was homegrown and that doesn't matter. We can claim them all.

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There are few more clear-eyed and Chicago-sensitive people than was Brooks. She was wonderfully free of the sort of high self-regard to which many authors cling desperately. She was dignified without pretension, putting her mission simply: "I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street. That was my material." She was a reporter who gave us lyrical words as powerful and understanding of her life and times (and of those around her) as any more ballyhooed Chicago writer.

So, last Thursday night there was an event at the Art Institute honoring Brooks. It featured five African-American Pulitzer Prize-winning poets (Brooks was the first black author of any sort to be so honored, in 1950). It was a packed house. There was a standing ovation and a mass reading of what is without argument Brooks' most famous (though far from best) poem, the eight-line "The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel," often referred to as "We Real Cool."

We real cool. We

Left school. We

Lurk late. We

Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We

Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We

Die soon.

Of all the events to be held and all the publications that will pour forth over the next months in honor of Brooks, among the earliest and most impressive are a couple of books.

"Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks" (Curbside Splendor, $24.95) is homage but also a vivid example of the wide influence Brooks has had. Its editors, Quraysh Ali Lansana and Sandra Jackson-Opoku, were somehow able to create this remarkable book in less than two years.

It is both revelatory and important, and entertaining. Most, though not all, of its dozens of contributions were created expressly for this anthology, which is handsomely packaged by Curbside. It is neatly organized along such themes as motherhood, political activism and memories. The editors contribute a terrific piece and poems.

The other new book is "The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks" (University of Arkansas Press, $29.95), a gathering of many voices and edited by, among others, former Chicago newspaper reporter/critic and acclaimed poet Patricia Smith. Her piece is stunning.

The book takes its "Golden Shovel" title from, of course, Brooks' pool hall, but "Golden Shovel" is also a definition of a new poetic form created by National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes, who has written a fine foreword to this book.

As the form is explained: "Each line in a Golden Shovel poem contains the final word from a Brooks poem, enabling a vertical reading of a Brooks line down the right hand margin."

Most of the dozens of writers and poets in this gathering are up to that challenge, inventively.

Together these books should go a long way to resurrecting Brooks' often diminished reputation and legacy. They should also compel you to seek out Brooks' own work, so much of which resonates hauntingly today.

She died in 2000 when she was 83. She was a lovely woman, fun and interesting, but she did not lead a particularly colorful or loud life. She eschewed what she called "the hollow land of fame" and lived and worked quietly on the South Side, preferring to spend much of her free time in schools with youngsters and not in literary salons or saloons.

Haki Madhubuti, the prolific local writer/poet/activist/publisher, has called Brooks "my cultural mother." His words are in "Revise the Psalm," where he writes, "She was our irreplaceable visionary poet. And our charge is to make sure that her work, her legacy and her ideas forever reign in the ears and minds of our children and our children's children."

rkogan@chicagotribune.com

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