TERSE AND BOTH RHETORICAL AND LYRICAL, Jericho Brown's poems explore race and sexuality with an unflinching gaze. Sometimes formal and always smart, the poems are infused with a sense of grace. Subjects that feel at first deeply personal become part of the experiences of a greater we. At the core of Brown’s poems is a call for love.
A New York Times book reviewer writes of The Tradition, “In Brown’s poems, the body at risk—the infected body, the abused body, the black body, the body in eros—is most vulnerable to the cruelty of the world. But even in their most searing moments, these poems are resilient out of necessity, faithful to their account of survival, when survival is the hardest task of all.” Yusef Komanyakaa writes of his collection The New Testament, “The lyrical clarity in this poignant collection approaches ascension. And here the sacred and profane embrace. . . . Naked feeling is never abstracted, and this poet knows how to see into the dark.”
Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition, was a Pulitzer Prize winner; it also won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
We met Jericho outside a coffee shop in Portland, the chaos of the AWP conference swirling around us. We talked about formal elements in poetry—in particular his own created form, the duplex—race, the blues, prayer, vulnerability, and love. Jericho was popular among the passersby, and we got to eavesdrop on several enthusiastic conversations with friends and fans. Brown was charming, down to earth, candid and open; he kept us laughing with his raw and honest humor.
JOSH ANTHONY
What are you reading right now, and what do you look for in a book?
JERICHO BROWN
There are a lot of writers who are really good . . . I don’t like this question. I want that in print, that I don’t like that question, but not that I have a problem with you asking me the question. I just think there’s something that happens where people try to figure on you based on your answer to this question, and I don’t like being figured on, you know what I mean? Because for some people there’s a right answer to this question. What I’m really reading right now is George Oppen. I’m reading Keith Wilson’s new book. I think it’s really beautiful. I’m reading Vievee Francis all the time. I’m reading Natalie Scenters-Zapico. Lyn Hejinian’s last book—y’all should read it. It’s really good.
When I was getting a PhD, I was reading a book of poetry a day. I was going to the independent bookstore and if it was there, I was going to read it. I thought it was my responsibility, particularly when it came to Black poets, to know everything. So I’ve read a lot of books. If I don’t think something’s good, I don’t feel like I have to finish it. But I also read systematically. I could read anthologies and find poets that way. When you’re reading an anthology, you can sort of be like, “No. No. No. Oh! There’s something. Look!” I think I found the poet Ai in an anthology. Then I read all of Ai’s books. I had a teacher who used to tell us to figure out who our favorite poet was, who you feel you’re close to. If you read all of that poet’s work, then you’ll be able to glean who their favorite poet was. Then what you should do is read all of that poet’s work, then you’ll be able to glean who their favorite poets were, and you should read all their work, and that’ll take you all the way back to the Bible. You’ll always have something to read, and you’ll get a history of poetry.
No matter how widely I read, I know that there are people out there trying to nail me down, and I don’t want to be nailed down. And I don’t want to nail anybody down. People have aesthetic prejudices. People try to find aesthetic prejudices in other people.
HANNAH ENGEL
Do you see reinvention as a way to not be nailed down?
BROWN
No, that’s not what I mean when I’m talking about not wanting to be nailed down. As a Black poet, as a southern poet, as a gay poet, as somebody who is comfortable in all of my identities, I want for you to find out as a reader that that identity becomes of use to you, whether you are queer or not. That you are and are not in that identity. People really think that in order to like a poem, it has to be relatable. It’s so dumb. What’s relatable about Wallace fucking Stevens? If you don’t like ice cream, I guess you can’t read “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” It’s so fucking stupid, this idea, “I have to find myself in the thing and then it means I like the thing.” That is the whitest shit I’ve ever heard in my life! Stuff is not good because you’re there. That’s crazy! I don’t like when people feel like they can cordon you off, given an identity or given an aesthetic, then they can say, “Oh, I already know I don’t like that.” Bitch, read my poems! You ain’t read my poems, so you can’t say that. When I really look at it, it turns out not to be about aesthetic or identity at all, it ends up being about friendship, it ends up being about something more social.
So you were talking about reinvention. I think the proper stance to being a poet in the world is that you’re always a little mistrustful of whatever you set down. If you set down something, an idea, if your poems are proving a certain poetic, by the time you write a book, you should be doubting that poetic. My students are always trying to do something I tell them they can’t get away with doing. But then my job becomes, “Let’s figure out if you can do that in a poem.” That’s what I mean by reinvention. You need an idea of what you think poetry is to write your poems, but that idea always must be changing if you’re going to keep writing poems because after a while you keep writing that same poem.
I also think it’s a good idea that whenever we write a poem, somewhere in our writing we’re also thinking, “I want to change my idea of what poetry is in this poem.” What I tell my students about revision and cliché is that when they come upon the cliché, they don’t have to stop writing and lose their minds. You can keep going, but you need to recognize that you’ve written a cliché. If you can say, “Oh shit, I said it’s raining cats and dogs,” you might need to write that to get to the next line, which is killer. If you write, “It’s raining cats and dogs,” and then you write another line, and it’s killer, and we’re in workshop, and you bring me the poem and it still has “It’s raining cats and dogs” in it, we got a problem, because that means you don’t know the difference between the cliché and the killer line. That’s gonna stress me out! If you can have that kind of knowledge on the line level, I think you can have that kind of knowledge on the word level, on the poem level, and on the book level, too: “There are ways of being in a poem that I’ve already done or that have already been done, and maybe I’ll want to find new ways.” You don’t have to find new ways to do everything in the same poem.
I have a whole lecture on penultimates because I think they are actually more important than endings. At least in American poetry something happens right before the end of a poem where everything goes crazy, or where things get really psychological, or where the language slips just a little bit, and it’s that slippage that directs toward the end of a poem. In Frost, for instance, it always happens with rhyme. In “Fire and Ice,” he brings up the new rhyme at the penultimate moment of the poem—all the rhymes had been the same before that. And in “The Road Not Taken,” for instance, it’s “and I—/I,” so there’s a certain kind of double rhyme; he makes a literal enactment of a sigh. Komunyakaa, in “We Never Know,” says “I fell in love” in that penultimate moment.
ANTHONY
You’re really enthusiastic with your rhyming schemes—maybe not schemes, but how you move around with the language.
BROWN
For me, there’s always been, in every book, a great deal of internal rhyme, because I’m interested in the music of the line and the sound of the line and rhythm. That has a lot to do with what I think poems are.
CAYLIE HERRMANN
I love “Bullet Points” and hearing the musicality behind it while you were reading. I often don’t notice rhymes when they’re on the page because it’s not what I look for in a poem, and it seemed very different from the rest of what you do. Why did you make that shift in this book?
BROWN
I was reading a lot of Gwendolyn Brooks, and I noticed that there are times in her career where she chooses a very stark, obvious rhyme, sometimes on monosyllabic words. It seems like she was trying to get at something that was at the root of us, something that was childlike in us. An example of it is a poem called “Song in the Front Yard,” which is literally in the voice of a little girl. Something about that lends itself to song, lends itself to the ballad, and when you have so called “difficult material,” it’s a way of veiling it in what seems to be simplicity, so that if something comes to you as song, you can’t refuse it because you’re enjoying it, no matter if what’s being said might be something you want to refuse. You have to deal with an ambiguity as you are reading or hearing the poem—“I don’t want to hear that, but I want to hear that”—and you’re trying to figure out why.
KARI RUECKERT
Is that childlikeness something you try to inhabit in your own work?
BROWN
Yes. I’m interested in telling the truth. I’m interested in writing adult poetry. I want people to deal with the reality we deal with. I want my poems to be an opportunity to deal with those realities. I like for people to be honest about our bodies; I’d like us to be honest in particular about women’s bodies. I think that stuff feels unpalatable to people.
Most of what I talk about is pretty regular stuff, like Black people are getting shot by the police, or fearing getting shot by the police, or us knowing that Black people could get shot by the police. Why would that be controversial? There’s a way a child learns information—you know, how you can trust children but you can’t trust them, because they will say what’s true, because they don’t know what you’re not supposed to say. That’s really what I was interested in getting at in this particular book [The Tradition].
There’s a poem by Sharon Olds called “May 1968,” which I really love. It has this moment where there’s this woman on the groundcounting, and right after that, she makes the revelation that if her period doesn’t come that night, she must be pregnant. I’ve been teaching this poem since 2002. When I ask the men in my class what she’s counting, they don’t know. They’re like, “I have no clue.” She literally says, if my period did not come tonight, I’m pregnant. But they want to fuck, and I imagine the students in my class don’t want to get nobody pregnant, but they don’t know what she’s counting. How is that? These are 18-, 19-, 20-, 21-, 22-year-old people. All the women in my class know what she’s counting.
ENGEL
You’re talking about poetry as telling truths about the body, but you’ve also mentioned poetry as coming out of the body and from your lived bodily experience. What does being a poet look like, as far as how you live bodily?
BROWN
When I’m in the act of writing a poem, I don’t know what the poem is going to be about because I think that’s a bad idea. I’m interested in following the language for what it will tell me, the sounds of the language—that’s how I write. I try to put myself in the position of whomever the speaker is in the moment of that particular poem. So, like, in the track “Summertime,” I try to put myself in the position of Janis Joplin. “Bullet Points” is in many ways a poem of prayer. What does it sound like in that intimate moment of prayer when you’re asking for something that you really need? If I do that well—this is why it’s sort of funny for me to be writing in front of people—then I look certain ways, literally, while I’m doing it. If I’m angry in a poem, I can start hitting the computer because I’m trying to become the thing I’m doing.
How to be a poet, or how to live as a poet in the body, is going to be different for each poet. For me, it’s very important to get out of my head and into my body in a physical way. So I do one of two things in the morning: I wake up and I do one hundred burpees, then I try to write for two hours. Or I wake up and I eat, and then I write for two hours. That’s my writing day. If I’m really working on something, I wake up and I eat and I write for two hours, and then I go to the gym. During the moment when I’m doing burpees or I’m trying to pick up something heavy, I’m not thinking about anything because I’m scared that this weight is going to fall on me and I can’t have my mind on anything but that. That way, when I revisit the work, it’s new to me. Before I write, I’ll pray. I’ll have a mediation period. I have a time where I read a little bit of a book, which will make me feel more grateful for who and what I am and what I have and where I am.
ENGEL
What does prayer look like for you?
BROWN
I’ll read something either by somebody like Earnest Holmes or Michael Bernard Beckwith, and I’ll read until I get to a sentence that makes me feel enlightened somehow. Once I get to a sentence like that, I put it down, and then I pray in the way that I was taught in my church. I recognize that there is a source, a God, whatever I want to call Him, that particular day. Him, Her, It. I recognize that God has in Him whatever I am affirming in that moment. If I am affirming health, or if I am affirming prosperity, or if I am affirming courage, or if I am affirming time, or if I’m affirming peace, I say, “There is a God, and everything peaceful in this world comes from one source.” I’m doing this in front of my big window in my living room, so I can really, like, see peace, because I have a yard now and I live in a quiet neighborhood, which everybody doesn’t always have. Then I say, “Well, if that God is everywhere, then that God must be in me, and therefore peace is in me.” Or whatever I’m affirming is in me. Then I say some things that are in the world every day of my life where I’m not seeing peace, but if I think about it, there is peace there somewhere. And I sort of affirm that out loud. And then I give thanks for the realization of that, for understanding that it’s there in ways I didn’t understand before. Then I release it. I let it go. That’s how I pray.
I learned that through The Science of Mind, which is where I go to church, the Spiritual Living Center of Atlanta. I grew up in a very Christian church in Louisiana, but I started to New Thought teaching when I started going to Michael Bernard Beckwith’s church, Agape, when I lived in California. New Thought is a movement that started in the 1800s; Ralph Waldo Emerson is thought of as one of its progenitors or founders. Book people, literature people who find their way toward some sort of spirituality are of interest to me.
HERRMANN
In The Tradition, you started this form—the duplex. To me it feels almost like a crown of couplets. How did you come up with that?
BROWN
In a crown, you go from the first line to the last line, then the last line repeats. I kept thinking, what happens if you just get rid of everything in between the repeats? And then I tried it, and it looked bad. And I was like, there’s got to be a way to make this a poem, to make it work. If I can figure out how to merge the formal turns of a sonnet with the juxtapositions of a ghazal with the tone of the blues, if I can put those three forms together, then I’ll have this mutt of a form—just like the person that I feel like I am in the world, a mutt, this person who for whatever reason, when encountered I’m sort of misunderstood. People are like, “What’s happening? What are you? Which thing do you want to be?” I have all these forms that I put together to make what I call the duplex, which is actually one house, but with two or maybe three houses in it. This is the best name for the merger of things that are whole and remain whole even afterwards but with a wall between them. How do you live together with a wall between you is something that I kept asking myself about these couplets—sometimes disparate, sometimes leaning into one another. I wanted some to be narrative and some to be much more lyric and to really live off of their metaphors. I wanted to see how many I could do, and so I worked on a lot of them. And then Michael Wiegers, my editor, told me I needed another one. But the other ones I had sitting around I didn’t like. I was so tired. I was like, I can’t look at another duplex. I was really frustrated with Michael. I’ll show his ass. So instead I wrote a cento [“Duplex: Cento”], which used all the lines from all the duplexes in the book.
When I was working on these poems, I was in a workshop led by Mark Jarman and A. E. Stallings. I really wanted to talk to some people who had worked with form. Because you have to learn a thing in order to do a thing. Obviously, I had written formal poems before, but I knew this was going to be a different kind of an endeavor, and I wanted to really commit to it.
HERRMANN
Do you intend for it to be something that other people can use?
BROWN
Yeah, I want everybody to write a duplex. It’d make me so happy. I want to see duplexes in every journal I pick up! I want a duplex in The New Yorker every other month.
ANTHONY
I keep thinking about the blues, too.
BROWN
It’s really tonally important to me. When I read “Theme for an English B” by Langston Hughes, I just remembered thinking, “This is a blues poem that is also somehow a narrative poem, and it’s also not using the blues structure.” There are other writers who are good at that. I’ve always been thinking about how to get that tone into my poems. There’s a poem by Hughes called “The Island” that I think does it, and a poem called “Suicide’s Note,” which I have an essay about online—I think it’s called “To Be Asked for a Kiss.”
ENGEL
I read an interview where you were talking about the transition from Please to The New Testament, about how you wanted to stay away from musical language at first when you were writing The New Testament because Please was so musical. You said you wanted a new lexicon for The New Testament.
BROWN
I still wanted the poems to be musical, although it is true that the poems in The New Testament lean toward a certain kind of discursiveness, some digression, which also meant a certain kind of flatter language sometimes, which I was interested in trying because I had become enamored of the work of people like Claudia Rankine and Marie Howe and Lyn Hejinian and Anne Carson, who were making use of a flatter language that wasn’t as tinged with music as what I had been interested in before. I see music as the artifice of Please.
ENGEL
Did you find that for The Tradition you developed another new lexicon of words that you were coming back to?
BROWN
For The Tradition, there probably are words that I was coming back to, but not as consciously. When I notice those words return, I push toward them, but in Please, those words are different in terms of the world-building of the book. There are different factors that go into the world-building of The Tradition, and those factors have more to do with what I was trying to figure out in poetry. In The New Testament, and in Please, what I’m trying to figure out with poetry is not necessarily part of the world-building of the book. In Please, I’m just trying to figure out how to write a damn poem. In The New Testament, I’m trying to figure out how to be more discursive in a poem or how to write a longer line. In The Tradition, I was thinking, how direct can a poem be and still be a poem? I was thinking about metonymy as a corrective to metaphor. Can I write poems that are based in the metonym, rather than the metaphor? So that’s why you have these poems like “The Card Tables” and “The Rabbits” where what I mean to do is look at the thing for the thing, as opposed to comparing it to something else, to bring it to the reader, to allow the reader to make whatever assumptions they’re going to make based on the thing, without me saying it’s like something else. And I’m such a metaphoric poet—which is hilarious to me, I’ve turned out to be such a metaphoric poet—but I have to say I wasn’t before.
You watch Beyoncé a long time, you see her improve on something, you see her trying to learn to do a thing, and she gets better at doing that thing, and the same thing with Lebron James, or anybody you can pay attention to. One of the things I’m wanting to figure out was, how do you use a metaphor? And I think I’ve finally figured it out. And then after I figured it out, I couldn’t get rid of it.
ENGEL
So then you were trying to figure out how not to use a metaphor.
BROWN
Exactly. The metonym was what I was trying to make, and then there are these poems titled that thing that’s sort of obvious in the world. And then there are the duplex poems, which, they’re part of the world because you know you can come across a duplex. Right? I’m interested in that as a title because I imagine that when people see the word “duplex” they see a duplex. And so they have to imagine whatever happens in the poem happening in whatever world they think a duplex is.
RUECKERT
You talk a lot about vulnerability as a poet. I see vulnerability as something that’s internal, being vulnerable to yourself when you write a poem, and also externally when you share it with the world. How do both those experiences work together?
BROWN
I don’t know how they work together. I’ll say this one thing: it is really nice to find yourself in the middle of questions of integrity in ways that you may not have found yourself in the past because you didn’t know to question when you had integrity. Vulnerability in poetry is interesting to me because vulnerability is what leads to integrity. If you are really allowing your poems access to everything you know and everything you’ve done and everything you believe, then anything can appear in your poem. And you’ll be like, “Oh shit, I just wrote that thing.” But then there’s an opportunity there because once you’ve written it, you have to decide if that’s who you really are: “I said this, do I believe that?” So simply having a question and trying to answer it, through the poem or in yourself, is the process of figuring out what you believe, understanding that what you believe is going to be based in your ethics and your morals and your values and what you think of as right or wrong, what you think of as gray or whatever. When I’m talking about being vulnerable, that’s what I’m doing. I’m making myself available to the poem as much as possible, and then dealing with what that means when it’s on the page by finishing it and allowing it to work on my life. Once you say something in a poem, you as the poet, maybe I shouldn’t say you, but I as the poet, have to say, “Well, that’s how I have to live, then.” I just can’t be out there saying that if I’m not going to make that revelation a part of my life. So once I make the revelation a part of my life, then questions of integrity come up because I’m going to be asked to do things I can’t do anymore because I think that’s crazy now. I have to realize that.
Being vulnerable to people is a little different. I don’t think I have the same questions about that in the world, probably because of my upbringing and because I had priorities for a long time. It’s not so much that I feel like I’m vulnerable, I just feel like I’ve tried my best to build a world where I can love people and people can love me, and I can trust that I am loved. You know, sometimes you don’t feel that way. But I always have to remember that when I don’t feel that way, that’s anxiety, it’s a conspiracy theory of one, telling myself that I don’t have nobody or don’t nobody love me. There are people who’ve been really supportive of what I do, and I have gotten signs of appreciation. And I think somehow that’s enough for me to know.
Here’s what I really know. I know that poems changed and saved my life, and that they continue to. I know that. Since I was six or seven years old, poems were doing work on me. And I imagine, “I like this poem, because I’m writing this poem, it feels good,” and I imagine it can someday do work on somebody. When it does, it’ll be cool. I’ll be like, “Yay, it did work on somebody,” if that comes back on me. I might not ever get to know, and I don’t need to know. So being vulnerable is easier. Maybe it’s easier for narcissistic reasons. But I think, “It worked for me, it’ll work for someone else.” It’s harder for me to be vulnerable to myself. Being vulnerable to other people—I don’t really have a choice. I have to stand behind my work. I have to do what I can to help it be in the world.
RUECKERT
You said in your interview with Divedapper that the representation of the self is a representation of the truth of the human race. And it reminded me of what James Baldwin said when he said, “The artist’s struggle for integrity must be considered as a kind of metaphor for struggle. And the poets (by which I mean all artists) are the only people who know the truth about us.” I’m interested in what that looks like in your journey as a poet.
BROWN
I just need to know that something about my work can indeed hold a place in one human heart. It doesn’t have to be that much space. Integrity isn’t only about how you live. It’s also about how you write and what you let out into the world. And how precise you are in your language. When I’m writing my poems, I’m trying to get them right before sending them out into the world. For one thing, I don’t want to be embarrassed. I think it’s important that I give the poem everything I could possibly give it and that it’s as good as I can make it.
ENGEL
How do you know when it’s at that point?
BROWN
Well, for one thing, I have good friends. The wonderful thing about the poetry community is that we’re really good to one another. We like to sit in a room somewhere where it’s a little cold and dark and uncomfortable. And we will read up on each other. For nothing, for feedback. It’s a blessing to have people who will invest themselves and support your work. And it’s a blessing to be able to do that for somebody else. And it’s also a blessing to be comfortable about it. It’s not going to be there automatically, but when it’s there, it’s a real lesson and I’m really glad that it’s there.
HERRMANN
I want to know how you get these communities. How did you personally find your community?
BROWN
People are nice. And I try to be nice to people. And I try to tell the truth. People are like, “Oh, he’s telling the truth. Let me go stand next to him. Let me go stand next to him because he’s telling the truth. I don’t want him to get shot.” [Big laugh.] I also try to be sincerely grateful to people who’ve done nice things for me. That helps to build community itself. People thank you in a real way. They remember you said thank you. You wouldn’t believe how many people will not say thank you.
I try to tell the truth, and I try to be good to people. I try to be there for people. If I see there’s something that a younger writer needs and I can meet it, then I try to meet it. Sometimes that’s as simple as reading a poem. And sometimes that becomes financial, or sometimes it becomes writing a recommendation, or sometimes it becomes talking to somebody who’s in the same place in the same city to say, “Hey, can you let this person in your workshop?” If you support the poetry you love as much as you can, that’ll happen. And if you support the poets you love as much as you can, you’re also creating a world where people will want to support you because they see you as a supporter.
ANTHONY
In an interview, you said if you’re not writing you’re teaching, but it sounds like maybe if you’re not writing you’re giving back to the community.
BROWN
Well, teaching really helps because I feel like I’m writing. When I’m really helping a student with a poem or when I’m really talking about something, I feel myself learning that thing or re-learning it or learning it in a new way. My students will see something I haven’t seen, and it will give me something to chase. So I have this entire class or two classes of people who are giving me ideas and they don’t know it. They’re asking, “Can I do this? Is this possible? Can you have a poem that does this?” I’m like, “Let me go figure it out!”
HERRMANN
Did you ever struggle with students who were less interested in poetry in any level where you were still teaching it?
BROWN
Well, I wasn’t good at it when I started doing it. We’re not supposed to be good at anything we do the first time. And we’re hard on ourselves. Writers are hard on themselves about, like, not being Whitney Houston, but even Whitney Houston couldn’t do what she started doing the first time she tried to do it. I look back, and I think about when I was an early teacher. I wasn’t so great, and I feel bad. There are these people in the world who don’t have everything that I have now, but the important thing is that you give them everything you do have.
The younger my students are, the thing that I’m noticing is, anything I ask them, they’re like, “I can just look it up. I don’t have to know it.” If that’s the case, what happens with the knowledge that you gained from poetry? Because you can’t look that shit up, you’ve got to read it. And you have to internalize it. To really gain knowledge from poetry, you have to be a poetry reader. You have to know how to read poetry. I don’t necessarily know how to combat that yet. That’s another thing I’m learning because I didn’t have that experience at first.
RUECKERT
Do you think poets, no matter what, are teaching in some capacity a lot of the time? Even if it’s casual?
BROWN
Yes, poets are always doing something. I actually have a mini essay I wrote about this. Poets are ambassadors in some way. They’re always curating a reading series or writing a review or teaching a class or doing something to give. There is still in us this belief in introducing poetry to more people so they can know its glory because more people need it. I mean, if you’re a writer, you don’t love much else more than writing. A lot of that teaching has to do with creating a space where writing can be made, that the process itself can be made public and therefore you don’t feel like a crazy person.
HERRMANN
You said in an interview with Interlochen that there’s something so recycled about it all—just making literature for other people who make literature. It makes me wonder who you are writing for, if not other poets. It also made me think about not wanting to be nailed down. If you don’t want to specifically be writing for queer poets or Black poets, who specifically are you writing for?
BROWN
I just write for me when I was nineteen. I had really big needs. And I was getting them fulfilled by poetry. I’m trying to fill that need with the poems I write. And it was a future tense need even with this book [The Tradition]. I feel like there are things that he needed to know that are here. But I’m also trying to feel that need for myself, in the present tense. When I’m reading poems, what do I want from poems that I’m not seeing? And if I’m not seeing it, then I’m making it.
HERMANN
You use beginning caps in the overwhelming majority of your poems. Since it’s so unusual, I’m just wondering what your particular reason for doing it is.
BROWN
I do it for two reasons. One is that there is a history of African-American poets doing it whose work I really love like Gwendolyn Brooks, like Cornelius Eady. It puts a kind of pressure on the line that makes the reader have to read each line one at a time and see it as a line. If you have to see each line as a line, then you have to deal with the poem on its terms as a poem of lines and as a crafted thing. You don’t get to dismiss the poem because of what the poem is about. You see it coming to you formally in a way where you have to deal with it just as formally, no matter its subject matter, which I think has to do with why a lot of Black poets were doing it.
ENGEL
That’s working in an interesting way with what you were saying about rhyme. Rhyme has this song quality to it where you have to receive it, even if you don’t like what it’s saying. The caps make it so that you have to encounter each line.
BROWN
Yeah, and I want that to be visible. I want it in the ear, but I also want it visible on the page. I don’t want you thinking you’re encountering anything other than a poem. If you have prejudices about subject matter, I want you to understand that those are your prejudices and your problems. And that you should go solve them. If you want to tell me a poem can be about anything, it just needs to be well crafted, then I want you to understand if you want to pick me apart based on craft, we can go. “You don’t know how to end a poem. You don’t know how to use a metaphor. You don’t know how to black black black black black black”—whatever you want to call your racism today. Something about the way poems are formed on the page, something about the line, something about the line break, something about all those things, any lack of that ability, becomes an opportunity for some people to dismiss your work.
ENGEL
The Tradition feels like it’s doing more explicit political things, particularly with Black Lives Matter, than previous books. Do you feel like you have to push into the craft even more when you’re doing that because there’s even more danger you might be dismissed?
BROWN
No, I don’t feel that. I feel like I have it, and so I’m going to use it because I love it. I mean I actually love this shit. It seems like a silly thing for people who are not us—it seems odd to discuss it as important—but I think it’s really important to know what caesura is and to know what a caesura can do in a line. I think that’s where it is. I’m excited about it. My poems are what people will call more directly political. But I’m not really thinking about any of that when I’m writing a poem. In the midst of writing a poem, I don’t know where it’s going to go, what it’s going to be about, or how it’s going to work out. I do know I have that in me, so that’s a possibility. When you shoot an 18-year-old and then have his body laid out in the street for hours, I have emotions about that. And some of those emotions probably come from the fact that I’m Black. And some of those emotions I would hope are there just because I’m a person. As a person, I think it’s not a good idea to shoot people and to have their bodies laying out in the street for hours. I don’t think that’s cool. And I would like to believe that people will agree with that, that people don’t think that’s okay. That’s in me, somewhere walking around in my body, my psyche, who I am, so that might come out when I’m writing a poem. But when I’m writing a poem, I’m actually thinking much more about, “Should I make a leap here? Should I indent this line? Do I say the next thing, or do I make a metaphor first and then allow that metaphor to become the next thing after that?” As I’m asking those questions, I’m saying things people keep telling me are intense. But I don’t think it’s intense. Look at the world right now! People are out here acting like my poems are controversial. Girl! Seriously! Like, seriously! People are like, “Oh your poems are so sexual,” like what porn do you watch? My poems are so sexual? Me? What TV show are you watching?
I thank God for Alice Walker every day. She wrote a book called The Third Life of Grange Copeland, which was very important to me, particularly given my own childhood and my own past. I saw her giving a speech, and she said this thing about how she didn’t understand why every image of two people having sex on television and in movies now looks like rape. Somebody has got to get pushed up against something every time, and we’re programmed to believe that’s what feels good. But my poems are too sexual? I tell my students, “If you are just being offended left and right, you’re not going to have a good time in my class.” But then, I also say to my students, “And if you are offended by the fact of something in a poem that you love in a movie, we are not going to get along.” People out here are mad that there is sex in poems. But you’re trying to have sex!
“All your poems are so violent.” What? Do you watch the news? It is so ridiculous! You’re out here pretending that we’re not living in this world together. Why are you pretending that? How have you managed to isolate yourself, that you are not aware of the world, or you are trying to pretend the world does not exist? What kind of hatred is that?
HERRMANN
Do you have any advice for young poets?
BROWN
I think it’s important that you say yes to everything. Try not to say no. If there is something that you have an inkling to do, just go do it. If there is something you have an inkling to write, go write it. If there is something you have an inkling to see, go see it. Go make it happen. But I’m also saying be careful. You might have an inkling to walk down a dark road in the middle of the night by yourself. Don’t do that. But other than that, experience and see. Experience and see. Also, I think it’s a good idea to live the life that you claim. Live the life of whatever identity you’re claiming and if you are a poet just decide now what that looks like in terms of your time. For me, that looks like two hours a day. For you, it might look like fifteen minutes a day.
You keep the overhead low, that’s what Grace Paley used to say. Instead of getting the room that’s $127 a night, get the one that’s $125 because you will need those two dollars. Create some discipline in your life when it comes to the writing. I don’t think that has to be at the same time every day, although if it is at the same time every day, you know when it’s going to happen. I don’t think you should be going to sleep without practicing. You’ve got to practice some. Practice a little.
RUECKERT
On an Instagram post, you say rebirth and renewal are kind of like an invitation. What is your perspective of those words, rebirth and renewal?
BROWN
I just love spring. I was born on April 14th, and Diana Ross was born just a few days ago, and Billie Holiday is an Aries as well. I think it’s the poet’s season. I think Persephone, and I think Orpheus, those mythological people who had something to do with coming up from the underworld. There’s something about that that I think has a lot to do with writing. Making something out of nothing. Creating something, recreating something. There are these memories we have and we put them down or these facts we know and we put them down, and that becomes a whole other thing, other than the memory or the fact. That’s sort of my relationship to writing and to the way I think about . . . I love the fact that I can see, smell, feel spring happening all around. It’s a busy time because of AWP, my taxes are due, the semester’s ending. I have a birthday coming up and everybody wants to know, “What are you going to do for your birthday?” Take a nap. A very long nap.
