``If you wanted a poem,`` wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, ``you only had to look out of a window.
Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume,.
There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.`` From the life of Chicago\'s South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. ``If you wanted a poem,`` wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, ``you only had to look out of a window