at the mercy of the language you already know

Michael Dumanis: What do you see as the dominant modes in American poetry today?

Jericho Brown: Many more of us than before are very aware that we’re in a social and political crisis. And I think that’s led to an attraction to knowing who’s on what side, which pervades much of the poetry that I’ve been reading—that it be made clear who’s on what side, that the poem is on the right side, or that the poem is on my side. And while I think that’s important, because I think we need poems for our moment right now, of course that can also be concerning. Poems have to be complex in order to be poems, poems have to make revelations that a poet wasn’t prepared to make, and things like that might go beyond what side you’re on. A poem should go beyond what you already know, and if it’s going to go beyond what you already know, a poem might say something that begins to have you question what side you’re on, which, in turn, might begin to have an audience question what side you’re on. I’m saying all that to say that while I’m really interested in poems in the political realm, I’m also interested in precision, and not all poems call for the same type of precision. Sometimes a poem might call for a precision in emotion where it does not call for a precision in language.

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I’m much more interested in a poem that is like the life we live. I want the poem that is like, “I saw that people got shot at the synagogue today, and I had a sandwich, and I miss my daughter.” And in actuality, that’s what a day in our life looks like, and the poem has to carry the tones of all those emotions. Sometimes I think that poems lately are interested at the outset in settling on an emotion, as opposed to gradually discovering several tones and seeing if those tones might accumulate into a single poem.

But I also think that part of this has to do with the fact that I am directing a creative writing program and that I am teaching and that I am teaching much more intensely than I’ve ever taught before, so I’ve been thinking about pedagogy a lot differently. I think one of the troubles of being a younger writer, of being someone who wants to write poetry, is that you put the cart before the horse. You put the ideas that you want to get to, or that you think you want to get to, before your language. If you put language first, then you can discover your ideas. But if you are thinking about your ideas, then you’re going to be at the mercy of the language you already know instead of one that you can figure out. And so maybe what I’m seeing in the writing of my students I’m ascribing to contemporary poetry at large. But I also do feel like I’ve read a ton of books in the last couple of years, and there’s a lot of knowns that I see coming through in the poetry, as opposed to unknowns that the poems discover.

- Jericho Brown, in conversation with Michael Dumanis over at The Bennington Review. You can read the whole thing here.