The first of eight sections to John Beecher’s "Report to the Stockholders" (1925) points up the threat posed by industrial conditions to worker bodies:

he fell of his crane

and his head hit the steel floor and broke like an egg

he lived a couple of hours with his brains bubbling out

and then he died

and the safety clerk made out a report saying

it was carelessness

and the craneman should have known better

from twenty years experience

than not to watch his step

and slip in some grease on top of his crane

His name was suggestive: even so a superficial reading of his poetry proves conclusive: John Beecher was a radical poet, perhaps America's most persistent for 50 years, the heir of an Abolitionist tradition and proponent of the dispossessed seizing power. His most enduring lyrics are about the downtrodden's fight for economic justice, human dignity and political freedom. He heard the music in their voices with uncanny accuracy.

It is ironical but in a sense logical that an authentic "proletarian" poet today--one who writes directly from the experience of the people, from the depths of poor people's lives, and mainly poor black people; a poet who speaks their language, and whose poetry in turn can be understood by these people--should be the descendant of a famous old New England family of dissenters, iconoclasts, atheists and freethinkers (among the clergymen members), ardent abolitionists, native non-conformists.

John Beecher's first poems, like those of Van Doren, appeared in the year 1924, but Beecher's tradition is that of Sandburg, Lindsay, and the Edgar Lee Masters of Spoon River Anthology. Beecher’s verse is, however, not poetry at all.

Beecher lays bare the class a caste system of the South with delicate inside knowledge, as in the images of "Fire By Night":

When the burnt black bodies of the homeless  

Were found in the embers of the Negro church  

Into which they had crept to sleep on the floor  

The wails of the people traveled down the cold wind  

And reached the ears of the rich on the mountain  

Like the distant whistle of a fast train coming

WB: That’s where I’ve been lucky. I didn’t have to use the poems as a way of feeding myself. And it’s a tremendous conflict or problem for any young artist. I mean how do you feed yourself? How do you live? Maybe it’s somewhat less for poet because a poet doesn’t need space and doesn’t need materials. A painter, a sculptor, a musician. . . . Even a musician has to have a place with a piano or something of that sort—very difficult to work without some kind of living quarters where you have a piano.

A number of recognizable ideas—signatures of Bronk—are contained in this poem: the possibility of multiple worlds; the inadequacy of the senses, language, and knowledge; and the insufficiency of man-made forms—noted in the poem by the concepts of time, space, and world—to contain the "real." For Bronk, light, as the trace from the outside, confirms the existence of the "real" world and serves as a catalyst for his sustained quest for the unattainable real world.

Of this poem Hortense Spillers, praising the "wealth of implication" in this "[l]ess than lean poem," says it is "no nonsense at all." Finding origi-nal artistry, in-crowd and in-race code, and a full range of traditional poetic techniques in Brooks's poem, Spillers say that Brooks's players "subvert the romance of sociological pathos" and, quite comfortably, she has them read Brooks's lines, thus:

Compare two presentations of "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks: first, the single most widely accessible edition of the poem, on a page of her 1963 Selected Poems published by Harper & Row, and second on the 1966 broadside published by Broadside Press.  The words, in a formal linguistic sense, remain the same, but the material presentation does not.  Those physical qualities, as a necessary condition for reading the poem, as an unavoidable part of the thing read, create a different set of meanings in each artifact.

"We Real Cool," illustrates the wealth of implication that the poet can achieve in a very spare poem: . . .