• 2019 Volume 14
Discussion: Jericho Brown 
By Tesserae Staff
Jericho Brown

 

Biography

Jericho Brown grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated with a BA from Dillard University in 1998. Brown is the author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019); The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), which received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; and Please (New Issues, 2008), which received the 2009 American Book Award. Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. He is currently an associate professor of English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Discussion

I became a poet because I like listening to people talk much more than I am interested in what they have to say.

I became a poet because I like listening to people talk much more than I am interested in what they have to say. I am interested in the way things were delivered or the way people say things. I grew up in the black church where people were always going the extra mile to say something in a way that is beyond just saying. It was never, “Pass me the program.” It was, “The program that you are holding I would also like to hold.” 

The first time I finished reading a book of poems, I said, ‘Mommy, I read a book’ and the face my mother made was amazing. 

I became attracted to poetry in particular when I was a kid. I was very fortunate to have a mother who couldn’t afford child care. She was an improvisational genius. She would take me and my sister to the library when she had to be somewhere. We spent a lot of summers in the library. The librarians and my mother didn’t have to be worried about us to tearing anything up. We weren’t going to run crazy in the library. The other wonderful thing about libraries is there were no computers, at least back then. So where we would go in the library there was nothing there but books. We didn’t have the internet to distract us from reading. Poems were interesting because they were short. I would look a page of prose and I’d be so worn out. I thought, “How am I supposed to do all that?” I would look at a poem and be like, “Oh Lord Jesus that’s only a fourth of the page! I can do this!” 

The first time I finished reading a book of poems, I said, “Mommy, I read a book” and the face my mother made was amazing. It was the only time she ever made it. She said, “My baby, my baby read a book?” I’ll never forget that. I wanted to see that again. So, I would be in a rush to get to the library and I would read every book of poetry I could find. I fell in love with poems then because I wasn’t under the impression that I had to explicate the poem. There was no need for interpretation. I just needed to read them and enjoy them for the music of language. I didn’t know what was going on and I didn’t feel like I needed to know what was going on. 

I write poems asking questions of my life. At the root of my poems I don’t have any intentions. I don’t have any designs. 

I write poems asking questions of my life. At the root of my poems, I don’t have any intentions. I don’t have any designs. At the root of them I’m thinking, “Well, let me figure this out. Let me see where I’m wrong. Let me see where they’re wrong. Let me just blow that thing up.” I guess that some people don’t like that. I don’t think that many people who don’t like how I do what I do are looking at me. I think the people who are looking at me are the people who want to hear what I have to say. 

At the root of my poetry is tenderness, not politics. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to be more tender and put more tenderness into the world.

The part of my life that has the biggest influence on my writing is the willingness to fall in love and fall out of love and make love and be a romantic, intimate person. Ultimately, I’m a love poet. People like talking about me being a political poet and that’s fine. But people don’t really have much to say about me being a love poet because they have to think before writing their essay or what not. I think it also has to do with the fact that I’m black. 

When I say something about the police or something everyone is like,“Oh let’s see what he’s got to say about the police.” I think on the whole that people still have a hard time understanding that black people walk around here falling in love, that they are in a rush to get home so they can cuddle with somebody. There’s a wholeness to being that I know among black people. But I don’t know if people looking at black people see that. They see the ways of the black people can be offended, but they don’t necessarily see the fact that we can fall in love. At the root of my poetry is tenderness, not politics. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to be more tender and put more tenderness into the world. 

Video: Poet and professor Jericho Brown, director of Emory's Creative Writing Program, reads the poem "Stand" from his acclaimed collection The Tradition.

discussion

Explore

Pedal Gracefully

Poetry

The petals will be sand in my rain jacket pocket.
They lick dryly against the polyester static
in the zipped cell set flat against my chest.
I was taught to leave them until they
shriveled by their own means, the only pressure
my movement, my legs gliding through circles
on the spokes of my droplet-dotted bicycle in evening’s rain,
the jerks and shifts to avoid senseless puddles threading waves,
energy, loops of ice pebbles
up through my muscles, startling my core
and promoting the slight saunter, delayed erosion
of the curled-up, cocoon shape of decay
beyond replenishment dangling
in my hidden pocket.

When I feel their knots and spikes
jutting slightly against the thin, glossy fabric of my coat
to skim my chest, I know that their abrasion
counts on more than the donut circulation
of pulses in my legs, the swaying of my torso
set on an evening of shades lighter than gray
but softer, less blinding than white:
an evening where my head moves from ground
to overhead, to every side as lustrous cars,
colors of maroon, navy, black,
ripe cherry
paint strokes of my reflection beating by.
The people on the sidewalk
glance down at their puddle-tinted soles
though inside their heads feel nothing close to dread.

When I halt by the sidewalk, slip off my bike,
tumble on sleekness,
When I rush through the black metal
gates, dripping and shedding minced tile slates,
trickling beetle skins of paint to the garden,
my hand hesitant as it hovers before my chest,
I think to
pinch the crinkling petals of the tulip
which once sat dry above dampened dirt
that had not yet turned to mud. I remember there was
a fresh series of days when stems cascaded white silk,
were ruffled against softly by brown rabbits,
so delicately skipping, wisping their rain-stained,
acute triangle noses
against flourishing roots and petal skins, glazed by a natural
film of strawberry milk, frosted white or evergreen-mist blue.

Never bring fingers
like pennies
of frozen plush
to a dry, wrinkled yellow stem:
a stem that may wiggle, hold on
but proceeds to crack.

Art: Flower Fossil by Grace Baranko

Consecration

Poetry

Born anew in elasticity, beige and borrowed,
I bathe in barrels of crimson wine
Until it stains in droplets of sacrament on my skin,
Unrelenting, like ashen sediment.

I bathe in barrels of crimson wine
In drunken baptisms veiled by vapor haze.
Unrelenting, like ashen sediment,
My morals bleed in the eggshell of stolen scriptures.

In drunken baptisms veiled by vapor haze,
Could I distill what drapes above in a sole stream?
My morals bleed in the eggshell of stolen scriptures,
Like ink tarnishing cobalt-stained glass.

Could I distill what drapes above in a sole stream?
Its contents coursing, intravenous and acute,
Like ink tarnishing cobalt-stained glass.
I exist outside of solemn syllables and damning.

Its contents coursing, intravenous and acute,
I’m ridden with rituals composed of moss and memory.
I exist outside of solemn syllables and damning,
Evergreen and unforgetting.

I’m ridden with rituals composed of moss and memory,
Curiosity like venom dispersed in opaque milk.
Evergreen and unforgetting,
Do I fear both the life I live and its residue?

Curiosity like venom dispersed in opaque milk,
I feel tangible when speaking in what is not said,
Do I fear both the life I live and its residue?
Sordid in silence, an apple in my teeth.

I feel tangible when speaking in what is not said,
Like how blind blends into midnight with ease.
Sordid in silence, an apple in my teeth,
The remnants of the Sistine chapel on my palm.
Like how blind blends into midnight with ease,
At the week’s closure, I lament and wash away
The remnants of the Sistine chapel on my palm,
Calloused from judgment’s embers.

 

Art: Angel by Anthony Sanchez

Ramesses II

Poetry

I used to lounge on the Nile flood plain
to watch the river churn and cut the sands,
and to think how people cheered
for my glory long ago
and now there is only the same glory to cheer for.
Yes, I was great;
I saw it in the flames,
the cascades of shifting bodies in the streets,
proud of swordsmen, land-winners,
fledgeling charioteers.
For them I was enigma,
Ramesses, the Great Ancestor, the god
who tinkered in the life-forge.

But sulking at the Nile bank, I saw rocks
moved and smoothed and shattered, simple water
ravaging the earth, and my mind sprung
up and asked the gods to let me
become water, so Ra told me,
smirking, I was a man.

Yes, I was a man, but maybe
if I climbed high enough
I would be a man emancipated
from the anchors of the world.
Yes, I was a man, but I was a man
deserving, and for years
I climbed the climb to power.

In the seventh year I summited, stumbling
in the sky-wind as gods blew
out their lungs to sound
a warning over the winds, calling
you are no god, just
one speck
on Ta Dehent. Nothing around.
No yielding soldiers, complacent
prince, palace, throne,
glory. Sand. There was sand and I wilted
into it. I took to the tomb.

Now, at night the Nile is not mine;
the red sky sees an empire
wrinkling
and a man in the gloom stands
with a pensive lean.
I am granite; I cannot turn;
neither of us can see the other’s eyes.
In the prelude to boundlessness,
marble does not freeze him,
though his body
mocks me. He forgets
how it is to have everything
and still for the world to spin
unsatiated.

Art: Destruction by Jade Wilson