Today we’d like to introduce you to Jericho Brown.
Jericho Brown grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. On both sides of his family, he’s the grandson of sharecroppers who fled rural parts of the South in fear of white terror. He grew up landscaping for his father’s “yard business” and spent the winter months at the Morningside Branch public library where he fell in love with poetry. Looking back, he thinks the work he did in the heat prepared him for the work he’d have to do as a reader, understanding labor as a property of beauty and beauty as a property of the organic. He attended the HBCU Dillard University for his BA in English before becoming the speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans. He wanted to be surprised by what he wrote, so he turned to poetry, getting an MFA from the University of New Orleans. In order to fully immerse himself, he left New Orleans for the University of Houston where got a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing and finished his first book Please, which went on to win the American Book Award. Today, Brown is an associate professor at Emory University, the recipient of a Whiting Award and of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. A third collection, The Tradition, is forthcoming. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, TIME Magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
My entire life, I’ve encountered the oddest of assumptions based on my class, ethnic, and regional backgrounds, and, yes, on my sexuality. I write to debunk these assumptions, to make a space larger and more human than the pigeonholing of any identity, and to allow readers to encounter beauty.
I think of my writing as an opportunity to make a reader—oh, anyone human heart at a time will do—more aware of the fact that emotions wield some power over our lives. These emotions lead to questions and steady questioning leads to changes in one’s thought, and then in one’s life. Though the capitalist culture that shaped me does everything in its power to inhibit them, I like questions. I like the way they slow the momentum of any moving object or person. I like the fact that they assume a starting point, an agency. Ask enough questions and suddenly someone has to take responsibility for something.
Here are some of the questions I find myself asking while writing poems: How is the resilience of black people on this planet possible? Is it fair to talk about their resilience when they’ve been the victims of so much unwarranted state-sanctioned murder? Do I love us enough? How is it that the same erotics that can lead to joy can also make way for violence? How narrow can the separation between tenderness and violence be? In a bed? In a family? What is a citizen in a nation that doesn’t want my citizenship? What the hell is a man, and is he not built with the ability to listen?
If your tears still mean anything to you, I want my poems to make you cry. And then, I want them to make you wonder why you are crying. If your tears don’t mean anything to you, I want you indignant, exasperated, aggrieved enough to wonder. Did the poem invent the feeling, or did it only remind you? When did you first feel that way? Do you want to feel that way again? No? Never? No one should feel that way? What will you do to make sure of that?
I want you to do the crying that leads to real thinking, and I want you to think yourself into the kind of action that old black people in the old black church where I grew up called “conviction,” as in, “And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last…” (John 8:9). Poems make it impossible to return to the world unbothered.
I work to revise traditions. I am a black Southern queer American writer, “and I sound like one” all at once. When I write, I shift how well these identities are known even unto myself. I make more room for an identity that is expansive and delimiting. I keep asking how much I can be.
I remain haunted by Plato’s reasons for throwing poets out of the city. Poets are overtaken and possessed. Their bodies are not their own. For Plato, the definition of a poet is the same as the definition many of us have for a person in love. I wrestle with the fact that the violent and apocalyptic world we have made for ourselves is also the world in which we fall in love. I believe art manages to stage in one place such as contradictory aspects. My work, for instance, concerns itself with the ways love leads to touch and the fact that touch may well be an invasion.
Writing Please, I became aware of myself as a poet obsessed with examining race, masculinity, and sexuality. In The New Testament, I openly court these obsessions while also revising foundational stories (Biblical, mythological) that formed my consciousness. In The Tradition, I cut closer to the marrow with poems about my own rape and about the way whiteness in the United States is necessarily invested in normalizing evil.
These latest poems were written with an abandon I had never experienced. Yes, this newest work comes from asking myself new questions about metonym rather than metaphor, and how to allow other forms of art to influence me. And yes, I still have an investment in story and folklore, particularly of peoples whose stories have been erased. But the writing asked something different of me because the stakes were higher than ever. I mean that my last book is the first book I wrote only because I am a poet. My first book was a dissertation. My second book was written for job security. I’d like to live in a world where I could say I didn’t think about keeping the electricity bill paid. These latest poems, though, are proof to me that I am a poet no matter what! And the kind of work I did to write them can now lead to new rebellions against ideas that were given to me as fact.
The turning point of any writer’s work is often marked by a rebellion against precepts handed down to her about art, precepts she may have needed for her early work. I no longer believe what I was taught. I do not believe that the most a poem can do is move us. I think, instead, that poems can help lead readers to movement, to action where there was inaction. Adrienne Rich writes in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision” that “…until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.” I am writing confrontations that remake my American consciousness.
Today, I believe in a poetry that is as now as it is later…poetry that makes things happen without waiting until anyone is dead to get started. My interest in United States Artists has to do with the certainty of my identity as a poet who re-envisions the traditions that made him.
Please tell us more about what you do, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown’s daring new poetry collection, despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday. The Tradition questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police, Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither—or survive. In the urgency born of real danger, Brown’s work is at its most innovative. His invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is an all-out exhibition of formal skill, and his lyrics move through elegy and memory with a breathless cadence. Jericho Brown is a poet of eros: here he wields this power as never before, touching the very heart of our cultural crisis.
Contact Info:
- Website: jerichobrown.com
- Instagram: @jerichobrown1
- Facebook: Jericho Brown
- Twitter: @jerichobrown
Image Credit:
Angel Nafis
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