"We Real Cool" actually means "We are real cool," but it became popular in the African-American community in the 1960s to use slang in speech instead of adhering strictly to the sentence structure of Standard English. One characteristic of that slang was to construct sentences without the form of the verb "to be." Brooks uses that slang in the title to communicate immediately to the reader that the subject of the poem will be African-Americans. The saying "We Real Cool" tells the reader that the poem is about young people because it is a short sentence suggesting youthful defiance and arrogance. One would be hard-pressed to hear that expression from an older person.
             Brooks begins the poem with two lines that are separated from the rest of poem, in order to introduce the scene and characters before getting into the narration. First she tells us wh
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