"The Sermon on the Warpland"

Gwendolyn Brooks approaches the pulpit with her poem “The Sermon on the Warpland,” one of three warpland sermons in her 1968 collection, In the Mecca. The message is both ominous and didactic, warning of a turbulent future that may be survived only through the fortitude of Black love. The form expresses Brooks’s transition toward a radical Black poetics that more closely resembles the work of her contemporaries like Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) and other Black Arts Movement figures. In 1967, almost 20 years after becoming the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, Brooks attended Fisk University’s second Black Writers’ Conference, which inspired her to experiment with a different style, one specifically directed toward Black audiences.