Hearing Brown perform his poetry at the Ledbury poetry festival this year, I was struck by the deep musicality of his work, the way his clipped breath at the end of each line propels us forward in anticipation at each shift in tone or meaning. Brown’s profound ability to intermingle private grief with systemic injustice reveals a greater truth: that intergenerational trauma has shaped the very fabric of African American lives. Four poems are titled Another Elegy: in the first, violence is a familial trope, as the speaker recalls his mother’s threat to his brother: “You don’t believe her / When, sobbing as usual, she / Calls to say if you don’t stop / Your brother, / she will kill him / This time.” In Langston’s Blues, Brown draws on Langston Hughes’s poem The Negro Speaks of Rivers to meditate on the legacy of slavery, exploitation and mass incarceration, flowing like a “bloody river … through the fattest vein / Of America”. In juxtaposing violence with intimacy, Brown urges us to see the body for what it is: a marvel capable of both destruction and tenderness.ĭeath looms large over the entire collection. Elsewhere, in Fairy Tale, Brown reminds us of the fate of “those men / Brought, bought, and whipped until / They accepted their masters’ names”. That the speaker is “given / a new name” is an allusion to the horrific erasure of names during slavery, but also bears testament to the power of naming in the wake of collective and personal trauma. Here, faith and religious ecstasy are transfigured by the speaker’s desire for another man’s flesh, a union that is at once earthly and transcendent. I will begin with the body, In the year of our Lord, Porous and wet, love-wracked And willing: in my 23rd year, A certain obsession overtook My body, or should I say, I let a man touch me until I bled, Until my blood met his hunger And so was changed, was given A new name …Īs part of a lineage of American writers including James Baldwin, Mark Doty and, most recently, Danez Smith, Brown seeks to write, in the words of Doty, “the tragedy of this body”. In this specific Bible verse, believers are urged to “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice … this is your true and proper worship”. In Romans 12:1, Brown refashions the scriptural passage to reveal his experiences of living as a gay black man in the deeply religious and socially conservative southern states. In To Be Seen, a preacher appears in the guise of a doctor who “clings to the metaphor / Of war” as he holds the speaker’s life in his hands and “ through clenched teeth, / Look at me when I’m talking to you”. Unearthing the Bible’s violent moments, Brown powerfully subverts the meanings and implications of holy verse. Expanding on the themes of his debut, it offers a dazzling array of lyrics on the inextricable relationship between masculinity, sexuality, desire, violence and race. His second, The New Testament, daringly juxtaposes the sacred and the profane, and in doing so encourages us to reconsider those very terms. His poetry has received critical acclaim in the US, with his haunting first collection Please winning the 2009 American Book Award. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and director of the Creative Writing Program.As a former speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans, Jericho Brown understands the importance of speaking directly and persuasively. His third collection of poetry, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press), was published in April 2019 and was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry and winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Buzzfeed, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Best American Poetry. Jericho Brown is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, a Whiting Writers' Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the National Endowment for the Arts and USA Artists.
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