We Real Cool. We Real Cool is a poem written in 1959 by poet Gwendolyn Brooks and published in her 1960 book The Bean Eaters, her third collection of poetry. It consists of four verses of two rhyming lines each. The final word in most lines is we. The next line describes something that we do, such as play pool or drop out of school. Brooks has said that the wes are meant to be said softly, as though the protagonists in the poem are questioning the validity of their existence. The poem has been feature