I'm going to die, so why can't a poem?

Michael Dumanis: Some years ago, I heard the poet Claudia Rankine question the act of writing for posterity, for a reader who may not exist yet, as opposed to writing into the present. This made me think of poets in the Black Arts Movement consciously writing to a particular community, or of writing about what’s on the news at the moment you’re writing. Do you feel like you’re increasingly writing more for the present than for posterity, and this is something you think about a lot?

Jericho Brown: I think I use the tools that are given to us, and those tools have something to do with immortality and posterity. For instance, the tool of metaphor is human and everlasting, and when we think, whether we like it or not, we make use of metaphor in order to better process certain things. I think structure, I think narrative, I think order, I think juxtapositions, I think certain things are going to be the tools that everybody uses, regardless of when. Ultimately I don’t have tools that are different from Milton’s tools, though I might know more about poetry, quite honestly, than what Milton knew. Because he didn’t have access to the poetry of the East, for one thing. He also didn’t have Langston Hughes, do you know what I mean?

Michael Dumanis: He didn’t have access to all the incredible things that happened after he died, which you do.

Jericho Brown: And also, he made those incredible things happen. They would not have existed without him. You know, Milton’s like my homeboy lately. Everybody gets sick of me talking about Milton.

But I think either Claudia says what you heard her say a lot or maybe I was there for that same conversation, because that comment of hers has long been on my mind. This was before I had a first book, when I heard her say this. It’s interesting when you’re not aiming for your poem to live forever while every poet around you seems to be. It’s like everyone was aiming to write the immortal poem, and I was like, “Who told us that, that that was the most important thing in the world? I’m going to die, so why can’t a poem?”

- Jericho Brown, in conversation with Michael Dumanis over at The Bennington Review. You can read the whole thing here. (Please just read the whole thing already - it's wonderful!)

you have to face your excuse

Michael Dumanis: Do you think there’s something to the idea that form inherently functions differently for some writers because of race and background?

Jericho Brown: You know, the 18th-century poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” by Phillis Wheatley is I think her most famous and most quoted because it allows her to subvert discourse on race in a way that feels subversive even now. There’s a moment in that poem where she expresses gratitude for Christian missions to enslaved Africans, arguing that the reason Africa needs to be under the thumb of Europe and under the thumb of the white Americans is that when we get to Heaven, now that we have become Christian, everybody’s gonna get to be together. All the black people and all the white people are gonna hang out together. And there’s a way that no one white on Earth had really thought about that or would have wanted that at that time.

I think this idea that form functions differently is definitely the case for somebody like Gwendolyn Brooks, though not for somebody like Langston Hughes, which is why Hughes is interested in inventing a form, or taking something outside poetry that the folk are already using and making it into a form, as opposed to using a traditional form himself. But I do think that somebody like Brooks, and people like Countee Cullen and Claude McKay, 100% Claude McKay, are interested in what happens when you put the black body inside the sonnet. When I make formal the black body, it is still a black body and you will still be offended by its presence. But then you have to face your excuse. So there’s a way that you have to deal, as in the Phillis Wheatley poem, where the black body says, I’m enslaved because I’m a savage and you’re going to Christianize me. But then, once I tell you I’m a Christian and I’m going to Heaven with you and we’ll hang out there together, you then have to be faced with your excuse. You’ve made an excuse for your evil, and now you’re going to have to be faced with it, because here’s my subject-verb agreement, here’s my rhyme, here is me knowing what a pentameter line is. So, if your excuse was that I was illiterate, if your excuse was, as Thomas Jefferson says, that there’s no poetry among black people, then you have to be faced with the fact that, actually, you’re just a hater. I think there’s something much more automatically and subconsciously political going on when black people write in a form that has to do with participating in a larger culture outside, and I shouldn’t say larger, but participating with the culture that black culture circulates through and dwells within.

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

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.

...

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.