Gwendolyn Brooks
Poet / Writer
"Kitchenette Building"
The setting of this poem is in a kitchette- a small cooking area, or kitchen. They are commonly found in motels, studio apartments, and even some small houses. This is a free verse poem, but the end words of the first and last lines rhyme like in the first stanza "plan" (line 1) and "man" (line 3) rhyme. In the second stanza (even though there are two lines in between instead of just one), "fumes" and "rooms" rhyme.
The reader is speaking of a dream- a dream that maybe one day they will have more than a kichenette; they want the "American Dream". In the poem, in seems as if " a dream" is it's own character. Gwendolyn writes how " a dream" could fight with fried potatoes and yesterday's ripening garbage. THis is an example of perosnificaiton. The last stanza , "We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it" indicates that the rader was in a daze thinknig of how much better things could be. Gwendolyn lived in the 30's and it was a hard time for African Americans back then and man yof them lived in small homes with several people with shared bathrooms.
