The Sound and the Fury of Jericho Brown

In this terrible spring of 2020 Jericho Brown has a lot to celebrate. His third book, The Tradition, won the Pulitzer Prize, and he won the Lambda Literary Trustees’ Award for groundbreaking work in LGBTQ literature and culture. Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown now lives, writes, and teaches in Atlanta at Emory University. His poetry deftly names the forces — be it cop, disease, or addiction —  that would have him dead, while he celebrates the beauty, be it in a flower, in a lover’s embrace, or in anything that helps him thrive in this burning world.

Story by Josina Guess | Video & Photographs by Darnell Wilburn

June 2, 2020

~ Watch Jericho deliver his poem “Foreday in the Morning” ~

We were talking about the ways we become our parents when Jericho Brown shifted from his father’s exacting standards for a well-kept yard to compassion for what his parents were going through, raising a young Black man in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the ’80s and ’90s amid the crack epidemic, gang violence, and the emergence of hip-hop, a new musical language that utterly confused them. 

“I can imagine being absolutely as terrified as my parents were,” he says.

When he was around 14 or 15 his mother began a ritual that was so tender and natural he didn’t even notice it. “Every time I would leave the house she would tell me I was Black, as if we didn’t have mirrors.” It was only after his friend Marcus pointed it out to him one evening that he realized she said that to him and his friends whenever they walked out the door. “I understood it as something necessary. I didn't fully comprehend how necessary until it started really reverberating back to me. All of these videos that we see where unarmed black [people] get murdered for absolutely no reason at all.”

She would say, “Ooh, y’all look so handsome, don’t forget that you’re Black.” This was her way of affirming his beauty and telling her son and his friends to be careful in ways that other people don’t have to be careful. 

“It’s how the initiation of race goes on in this nation.” Brown recalls, “It’s something that has fascinated me. All these half-said and unsaid things that go along with being a person of color in this country, or a person who is marginalized in any way in this nation. You sort of gain this common language outside of language that is made through silence. You know, my mother never told us why she was telling us we were Black, she just told us we were Black.”

I first heard about Jericho Brown in the fall of 2014. My friend Melisa “Misha” Cahnmann-Taylor, a professor of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia, invited me to drive with her to Atlanta from Athens for a poetry reading. Since the featured poets were new to me, I was weighing the time investment. Then Misha mentioned free books and added, “Jericho Brown is a local DYNAMO.” Based solely on the musicality of his name, her enthusiasm, and the promise of a new book, I was sold. 

Jericho Brown doesn’t read his poems, he delivers them — a master of both page and stage. After providing some context for “Langston’s Blues,” Brown opened the dam to release a river of words conjuring Bessie Smith, young Langston Hughes who wrote “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” at 18, and the violent river of racism coursing through the blood of America. The packed auditorium was silent, rapt.

What runs through the fat
Veins of a drowned body? What
American can a body call
Home? 

He conjured blood and memory, death, belonging, and poetic ambition; and I was baptized into the lyrical waters of Jericho Brown. I dug through my old journals to see what I wrote during the 15 minutes that he had the stage. Just one sentence, “Poetry can change the fabric of your soul.” 

That fall of 2014, Brown was celebrating the release of The New Testament, his second volume, which would win the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for its contribution to our national understanding of race. One of its poems, “Homeland,” selected for Best American Poetry 2015, ends with these lines: 

Nobody in this nation feels safe, and I’m still a reason why.
Every day something gets thrown away on account of long

History or hair or fingernails or yes, of course, my fangs.

In July 2013, amid outrage after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, activists Alicia Garza, Patrice Khan-Cullors, and Opal Tometi began using the phrase and hashtag Black Lives Matter. In July 2014 a police officer in New York City killed Eric Garner in broad daylight. His final words, “I can’t breathe,” became a desperate rallying cry. That August, a police officer killed Mike Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri. After the desecration of Mike Brown’s body, left exposed in the August heat, Black Lives Matter grew into an international movement to end white supremacy and celebrate the integrity of Black lives. The movement did not start in 2013, but it got a name.

Since that first encounter in Atlanta, in which I was too shy to even ask Jericho Brown to sign my book, I’ve joined the ranks of devoted fans who celebrate his meteoric rise as master of his craft. His voice is one in a four-century lineage of great African American poets describing the truth and agony, the tension of the American dream juxtaposed against the nightmare of systematic denial of basic human rights. His poetry speaks with a prophetic urgency across history and into current events.  

“Riddle” starts with the fact that Emmett Till’s body was unrecognizable in his casket but moves deeper into a lack of empathy so deep it cannot hear a mother’s tears, which allows for a pattern of violence that destroys not only individuals but the planet itself:

We do not know the history
Of this nation in ourselves. We
Do not know the history of our-
Selves on this planet because 
We do not have to know what
We believe we own. 

When Misha hosted her annual summer poetry series in Athens last summer, Jericho Brown was a featured poet with fresh copies of his newest book, The Tradition. We met just before the reading, and he asked if I could do him a favor. He was exhausted and wanted the closest thing to a Starbucks iced white chocolate mocha latte that Hendershots had to offer. “Be sure that they make it with soy milk and don’t put whipped cream on top,” he insisted, “if they put whipped cream on, it will kill me.” Of all the forces that have been trying to tear him down, I wasn’t going to let my botched coffee order be the death of Jericho Brown.

Fueled by the coffee, which did not kill him, he read several poems that danced between violence and tenderness, eros and terror. He explained the duplex, a poetic form he invented combining the repetition of the blues, the lines of a sonnet, and the couplets of a ghazal. One of his duplexes ends: 

A building of prayer against the grasses.
My body a temple in disrepair.

My body is a temple in disrepair
the opposite of rape is understanding.

This time I took more notes.

Jericho Brown is a harvester of sounds. All week long he gathers words, jots them down, collects a phrase here, a riff there. On Sundays, he prays, then takes printed sheets of his gathered words and cuts up the lines to create text that will carry meaning on the page and in the mouth in surprising ways. He pushes himself, reading other poets and forms, and pushes his poems, waking in the middle of the night, reciting them over and over until they are uniquely his. To aspiring poets in the room he recommended Langston Hughes’s, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” and Adrienne Rich’s, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,” as formative texts. 

Jericho Brown’s poetry is thick with personal trauma, family violence, rape, and the collective trauma of generations of systematic and racist oppression. “Write into the deep dark wreck,” he told us. “Pain is part of the healing.” As he wrapped up, he added, almost as an aside, that he doesn’t really want the Confederate monuments all across the South to come down. This sentence must not be taken out of context. He pointed out the tendency in our country to want to move forward without telling what really happened. “We want to erase the past rather than address it. The pain needs to be addressed.” He wondered what it would be like to encounter every monument in the Southern landscape with an honest depiction of what it truly represents. Just edit them, he suggested. Let them stand with placards that tell the truth: “Traitor, Slaveholder, Rapist.”

After the reading and talk, Misha and I begged Brown to join us for dinner next door at Sea Bear. I brought along my teenage daughter, Zora, who insisted on wearing her shortest, most shredded jean shorts. Jericho teased her about her shorts, asking her if her mama let her go out in those things. From the release of The Tradition in March 2019 until Thanksgiving, Jericho Brown was visiting three cities a week. He had a flight to catch early the next morning, but he stayed. While we waited for a table, he talked to one of Misha’s students, and I asked the waitress to start his order so he could leave early if he needed to. When his food arrived, we realized he had wanted the scallion pancake, not the crab cake. It wasn’t going to kill him, it just wasn’t the same. I ordered the scallion pancake, and we ended up sharing. We had just met, and we were passing our plates back and forth, such a mundane and brilliant thing, to share food and be at the same table. 

Our conversation went deep fast. Where did Zora get her red hair? Jericho wanted to know. Red hair is a recessive gene. My husband has blonde hair and blue eyes and a red-haired uncle. My mother has English and Scots-Irish roots with only brown hair in her family line as far back as anyone can tell. Though his hair is black and his skin the color of chestnuts, the red hair came through my Black father, from the nameless Irish man that raped my great-great-grandmother. We talked into the evening about our stumblings toward religion, community, racial identity, and love. Finally, we said goodbye, and he invited me to come visit his church, a place that was helping him become his fullest, happiest, Black, gay, compassionate self.

I was tongue-tied when I called Jericho for this interview in May. Our dinner last July felt like a lifetime ago. I was in the thick of final edits for our story by Jim Barger Jr. about Ahmaud Arbery’s killing. This conversation with Jericho was an oasis on my calendar, a chance to celebrate, a reminder of the power of art, imagination and friendship in the face of systematic violence. I closed my computer, picked up my recorder and poetry books, sat on my bedroom floor with an open notebook and scribbles of questions. After brief hellos and congratulations, I just sighed. The line was silent. 

“I don’t know where to begin,” I confessed.

“How is everything going with your family?” he asked. “You have, like, nine kids?”

“Just four,” I laughed.

Always the arranger of words, Brown observed, “That might be the only time you could put ‘just’ in front of ‘four,’” he teased. “Remember when the COVID is over, when the pandemic is over, y’all are gonna come to church with me.”

“Yeah, I do remember that, I’d love that.”

This is a small sample of the genius of this man, his ability to remember people, to be fully present, to be sincerely not tired of people.

I ask him to come visit my place in the country, my little sanctuary of animals and plants in northeast Georgia. An awkward pause. He gets more invitations than he can honor. Also, the city is where he feels most alive and most safe. He has happy memories of summers out in the country with his mother’s family: outside all day with cousins, playing volleyball using the ditch as a net, singing songs, only coming in when it grew dark. But when I ask him if he, like Alice Walker, had a patch of land in the country that stirred his childhood imagination and made him feel most whole, I learn it was a vacant lot in Shreveport where he learned to fly.

When he was 6 and 7 years old, his parents owned a dry cleaning business that ended up failing to the point that the family was living there at the cleaners. “There was a field on the side of the cleaners where I began to pay attention to the natural world for myself. I felt like I was a part of the nature that was all around me, that I was no different from the wildflowers that were growing at that time. When you’re a kid and you imagine flying and you cast yourself as a bird. It would really just be me with my arms out running, as if I were flying.” 

Soon thereafter, he got to know the land as a place to work when his father began the lawn and landscaping business that continues to this day. “I had to work the land quite literally, which was passed down from me, on both sides of my family. My grandparents were sharecroppers. And so because they were farmers in that way, there was something about how to work the land that was always passed down to me and to my sister. And then there was always a value for what kind of contribution you made to your community, into your neighborhood with how your yard looked, and just a value for beauty.” 

In “The Tradition,” the book’s title poem, those planted flowers of his childhood are named: Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. Brown was settling into his new home in Atlanta, planting flowers, when a neighbor came over and rang the doorbell to meet the man or woman of the house, not considering that the Black man kneeling in the beds was caring for his own land. What starts as a poem about flowers becomes a poem about history, landscape, belonging and violence:

Where the world ends, everything cut down.
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown. 

I ask Brown about the parallel emergence of his poetic career with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I’ve been thinking and writing about this from before because it’s been my entire life. There is a way that technology allows more people to see and the fact that we hold space together in new ways that we didn’t before, it allows other people to know more about that experience of being Black in this nation but that doesn’t mean that the experience is new. I understand that what I write has social and political implications, but when I’m writing it I’m not thinking about social and political implications. I’m thinking about my life and I’m looking at my own childhood.”

Jericho Brown was born Nelson Demery III on April 14, 1976. People born in the United States that year, 200 years from the signing of the Declaration of Independence,  were called Bicentennial Babies, a symbolic hope that our nation might move toward the democratic equality writ so long ago. “Foreday in the Morning,” talks about that myth of the American dream.

I thank God for my citizenship in spite
Of the timer set on my life to write.

Young Demery always wanted to be a poet. “Poetry was still taught a lot in the schools. I was very aware of a line and a line break. We learned iambic pentameter.” Between the ages of 7 and 10 he would spend hours in the library devouring poetry, which he admits may have been slightly unusual for a kid of his era. When Rita Dove won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1987, his teachers at Caddo Heights Elementary School made an enormous deal about it because she was the second African American person to win the Pulitzer in poetry since Gwendolyn Brooks in 1950. His teacher, Mr. Porter, announced Dove had won the prize in April, somewhere around Demery’s 11th birthday, and it seemed like an important gift to him. “I wanted what I have now, I wanted that for a long time.” 

Although Jericho knew he wanted to be a writer, he learned early on to say that he wanted to be a lawyer. Professors at Dillard University in New Orleans saw his love of language and helped him convince his parents that an English major would help him score high on the LSAT. “I mean, I never wanted to be a damn lawyer.”  By the time he graduated, he had cast off all illusions of law school and had taken the name Jericho Brown. He earned an MFA at the University of New Orleans followed by a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Along the way, Brown racked up fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Award. His first collection of poems, Please, won the 2009 American Book Award. He lived and taught in San Diego before putting roots back down South in Georgia.

As he settled into his home, just between Atlanta and Decatur, he realized he had developed allergies so bad that he couldn’t spend enough time outside to tend properly to his plants. Although flowers are prominent figures in his latest poetry collection, the process of gardening itself is not his passion, but he feels an urgency to bring about beauty in the world. “It's sort of like what the Bible says about a good steward. Do you know what I'm saying? Like that if I own something I need to take care of it.” Since he couldn’t do it himself, he hired people to bring out the beauty in the roses and the crape myrtle and was shocked at how fanatical he became. “I felt myself turning into my father because I was being really particular and ridiculous about the front yard.” After eight years, he is learning to be less severe. “I'm not as much of a freak about it as I used to be. You know, the rose bush came back on its own without my help this year.”

Jericho Brown confesses how guilty he feels that quarantine created a needed respite for him. Three cities a week for most of 2019, two cities a week in 2020 — on top of a full-time teaching schedule — was wearing him out. He was exhausted when we met last July, and by March he was spent. As a self proclaimed “ethically gregarious” person, he finds it hard to say no. But all kinds of physical problems were manifesting. “The truth about health problems is that you need time to fix them, but I didn’t have the time. I wasn’t brave enough to cancel things. When this [pandemic] happened — not that I would want it — it gave me a chance to sit my ass down somewhere and figure out what my body needed.”

Brown says he’s been able to pay attention and adjust to his physical needs, able to get back to a more regular spiritual practice of prayer and meditation. “The first thing I wanted to do in the morning is pray, but if your flight is at 6 a.m., good luck.”

Two single friends came to live with him when things started shutting down. “If I had been by myself, I would have made a series of poor decisions.” As an extroverted introvert Jericho knows he needs people and solitude and has been thankful for the balance this spring has brought.

Living with HIV has meant being vigilant on keeping doctors’ appointments, keeping up on medication and awareness of living with a tiny silent killer. The lines of “The Virus” ring with a terrifying prescience of the moment we find ourselves in:

To do the killing. I want you
To heed that I’m still here
Just beneath your skin and in
Each organ
The way anger dwells in a man
Who studies the history of his nation.

As COVID-19, like HIV, is disproportionately ravaging Black and already vulnerable communities I asked for his take on that.

“People are interested in making parallels to the ways in which these illnesses, these viruses, these diseases have made it clear who in our culture and who in our society is most vulnerable and who the society leaves vulnerable. I would actually prefer that we look at things not as a parallel, that we look at things as a continuum and that we understand that; whether it is by bullet, or by disease, or when I think about the murder of Troy Davis, by execution. People use diseases in order to somehow further the cause that they already have. And it's a cause of hatred. You know, there are many ways to commit violence, and you know, only one of them is our fist, right? It's par for the course. I wish I could say I was surprised. I'm shocked, but not surprised.”

Jericho Brown dreams of a pilgrimage to Africa whenever it is safe to do so.

“I want to see it and I want to know it, and I want to know its poems better than I know [them]. I want to see all of it: Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa. When you're a descendant of slaves you're not really sure … everybody sort of wants to easily make it Lagos, you know what I'm saying? You're not sure where your ancestors are from. And so I know they're from somewhere over there, right? I'd like to be able to put my foot — I mean, I don't have the time and I probably don't have the money — but I want to put my literal sole of my foot on every part of that continent, like east to west, you know. There aren't a lot of Black people in America necessarily trying to make that trek to East Africa. I don't know where that desire comes from other than I'd like to expand my knowledge and my being and I feel like making a trip there and spending some real time there in different cities, in different countries could help to do that, you know?  And then there are all these people in African countries who have been reading my poems for three books now, and that feels great. That feels like that's way beyond anything I could be able to do with my poems. Like, I didn't imagine touching people from so far away.”

Since winning the Pulitzer, Jericho Brown has been on the phone nonstop with reporters from across the globe both congratulating him and asking for his thoughts on the pandemic and the most recently publicized cases of violent white supremacy and the uprisings to end this violence. While he was telling me about his dream trips to the motherland he paused to say hello to his neighbor who was out walking her dogs, “Hey, I’m sorry, I was on the phone with a reporter last time when you wanted to say congratulations. Thank you.” I felt honored that our conversation was interruptible, that we can continue it. Jericho tells me that he wishes that his poems were not as timely and relevant at they are.  “I would love a day that they are footnoted, that someone is explaining to the reader what they are about because they are so far fetched. Right now, they are just not.”

He learns of another police killing when people post and repost bits of his poem “Bullet Points.”  It reopens a trauma that he wishes would not ever be reopened or revisited upon any individual or community anywhere, ever again.

I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will
Do it the same way most Americans do,
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we've been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.

— Jericho Brown, "Bullet Points" from The Tradition. Copyright © 2019 by Jericho Brown. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org

Instead, his words are prophetic and timely, speaking of a violence that has not yet met its end. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police, the lack of justice for Breonna Taylor, the decorated Kentucky EMT shot in her sleep when Louisville police broke into her apartment this spring, and the long litany of names of Black people killed by police for generations and just in the past few years: Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Tony McDade, Atatiana Jefferson, Amadou Diallo, Botham Jean demonstrations against police violence have spread to at least 75 cities across the country — and around the world.  

Toni Morrison’s imperative to be creative in times like these is quoted so frequently that I fear the power of her words may become cliché. 

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. 

When Jericho Brown writes poems he writes them primarily for himself, he is usually wrestling with three problems, a real life problem, like “I can’t afford to pay the water bill and the bill is due,” a spiritual problem like, “I don’t believe that I am worthy of light and water despite of the fact of all the water in the world,” and a poetry problem, “I’d like this poem to end with an abstraction.” He believes that that if he is completely honest in that poetic conversation and allowing his whole Black self and his whole queer self into his poems, then the poem will do its job. He hopes that by being as honest as he can be that his poems will be as accessible as they can be and that they will be put to good use. 

Toni Morrison crossed over into the great cloud last August, just a few weeks after Jericho and I met. She passed her mantle onto all of us who claim creativity as a path toward our own and collective healing. Brown talked about how people have sometimes taken Robert Frost’s poetry and tried to misuse it in a way that turns his poetry into a Hallmark card without honoring his grief.

I wish we didn’t need the deep grief of Jericho Brown’s poetry as desperately as we do right now. But, I’m thankful he keeps writing, line after terrific line. Like this final line from one of his Duplex poems:

I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.

Josina Guess is the assistant editor of The Bitter Southerner. She was born in Epes, Alabama, and raised in Washington, D.C. She lives outside of Athens, Georgia. She is a contributor to Fight Evil With Poetry and the forthcoming Rally: Communal Prayers for Lovers of Jesus and Justice.

Darnell Wilburn is a photographer, teacher, and gallery owner in Atlanta, Georgia. He was born in Fort Hood, Texas. He worked as a cartoonist for the Cincinnati Herald, an African American newspaper. He’s spent the last 16 years as a freelance photographer and his work has appeared in Essence, Ebony, Marie Claire Australia, “Shaq’s Comedy All Stars,” and in work for GoDaddy, among various other commercial clients.

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