[applause]

Krista Tippett: So here’s some of what Martin first wrote to us in the invitation he sent to be part of this. He said, “I think poetry evolved to save us from ourselves. It questions our understanding of what it means to be human, and in the process, deepens our humanity. History teaches us — and the daily news reminds us — how easily we forget what it means to be human. Probably no other art form is better than poetry at getting us directly inside another’s mind, experience, perspective. The ability to imagine someone else’s inner life is where compassion begins.” And he said, “We could certainly use more of that nowadays.” Amen. [laughs]

I am also personally grateful for this invitation because it has introduced me to Jericho Brown — to his person and his poetry. I have some poems that I think — that I’ve marked, but if you, in the course of the next hour, just feel called to stand up and read a particular poem, you are warmly invited to do so.

Jericho Brown: Do I have to stand up?

Tippett: No, you can sit. [laughs]

You grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana? So I begin many of my conversations with a question about the religious or spiritual background of someone’s early life, their childhood, and also the origins of the passions and questions that drive them. And it seemed to me, as I started exploring you, that some of the convergence of your story of growing up in church, in the Black Baptist Church, and also what becoming a poet meant to you — some of that story is wrapped up in the name you chose as an adult, that Jericho is not the name you were born with. And I wonder if you would reflect on that. Do you think that’s true, to say that those things come together in your name?

Brown: Maybe so. I think one thing that I love about being a poet is that I know that I was prepared for it in every way possible. And one of the ways that I was prepared for it is growing up in a Black church. And when I say “growing up in a Black church,” I mean people really went all the way toward pageantry and toward drama and toward what they were going to wear. And everything they could possibly give it, they gave to being in that moment.

And the energy in that church, the energy in that sanctuary was always high, and everyone was aware that they were doing it, that the energy was high energy because we were making it high energy with our song, with the way we spoke, with the way we moved.

Many of you have been to churches, and you know that when you go to a Black church, there is no — I mean, “Hello” is “Hello! And how are you this morning?” Everything was so grand. And a song where the note is “ahh” turns into “aaahaaahaaahaaah.” [laughs] You know, it’s always a little something more, where everything is being given an individual life — “this is what my individual self is bringing to it.”

And when I changed my name, I didn’t really think about it in a religious way, although obviously the name is biblical. It’s a city that is biblical …

Tippett: Yeah, I wondered what that name summoned up for you.

Brown: But I was thinking about something that I do associate with the church. I was thinking about, the other night, how I never had this problem where — people have this problem where they’re afraid to write about their family. But I always understood that in my poems, if I were to be writing about the father, because of the subject matter of my poems, if I say “father,” I’m not just talking about my dad. I’m also talking about that father, God, that I was taught in church. And if I say “father,” that also would have resonance with “fatherland” and “motherland,” thinking about America, thinking about the continent of Africa that is unknown to me in so many ways and yet a part of me, culturally.

And so I — when I first started publishing my poems, they came under the name Nelson Demery III. Can y’all believe that?

[laughter]

Tippett: And your father was Nelson Demery II?

Brown: “Jr.,” not “II,” and my grandfather was “Sr.” And when I would see my poems come out, they didn’t feel like they were — I wanted them to be mine. And so me changing my name had a lot to do with, like I was saying, trying to be the individual that emerges within the community.

Tippett: Do I understand it correctly, also, that you changed your name when you started writing — really pouring yourself more deeply into sensitive things like your relationship with your father, your earthly father, and also with being gay and how those things came together?

Brown: Well, when I was first writing, I wanted more than anything to be able to give all of myself to my poems. And I don’t know if I would think that I had to do this now, but at the time, I really believed I had to completely transform in order to do that. Adrienne Rich talks about this in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” one of my favorite essays. Please read it if you haven’t. Langston Hughes talks about this in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” T. S. Eliot talks about this in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” And it’s this idea that whatever we’re writing, we have to be free. You have to have at your access, in the midst of writing, all of your memories, all of your knowledge, all of your beliefs.

And all of those things could get turned on their head — that what you thought was most valuable comes into question, and you have to be willing to go there while you’re writing a poem. It’s a very dangerous place to be. It’s the reason why, if I’m on an airplane and somebody asks me what I do for a living, I very quickly tell them I’m a poet. Then I don’t have to worry about them talking to me anymore.

[laughter]

Do you know what I’m saying? Because people intuitively or instinctively, people know, “Oh, you’re dangerous. You’re hugely problematic. You’re asking yourself questions that I’ve been avoiding my whole life, and you think that’s a good time.” Do you understand what I’m saying?

So me giving myself that name was a way for me to become somebody who wasn’t connected to anything that would say to me that I shouldn’t be doing what I was doing. And I needed to be who I am now. I needed to be Jericho Brown, because I needed to have that freedom named. And that’s what I was going to call that freedom, was Jericho.

Tippett: I feel like something that you reveal and work with in your poetry, and it was certainly in that, is — somewhere, I don’t know whose phrase this was, but “where tenderness meets violence” and where love meets alienation, and yet they’re both in the same room at the same time, in the same bodies and in the same bodies touching.

Brown: Well, all of my work seems to go back to this place where love and brutality somehow come together. And when I say that, people are like, “No, they don’t. Love and brutality don’t come together.”

Tippett: Not in the abstract.

Brown: But you know, all you got to do is have kids or a parent, and you actually do know what it’s like to feel like, “Oh, I could actually kill you, [laughs] but I’m not, ’cause I love you.” Do you know what I mean?

We put ourselves through huge inconveniences that are like certain kinds of violence, when we fall in love. Is there somebody in this room who’s driven from Massachusetts to California to see somebody for two days? I’m willing to — I know somebody in this room has done that. Do you know what I mean? And so I’m sort of interested in where love goes awry or where people use violence as an excuse for love.

And I’m interested in seeing how that comes out in my poems, because it’s where I can keep asking myself questions. It’s something that I don’t understand. And I think poems are better built out of what we don’t understand, not what we do already know, but what we’re trying to figure out and better understand.

Tippett: And that’s an interesting way to say it. And they let what we don’t understand — they let that be in the room, they let that be real, and they don’t contain that urgency that when — the ways we converse and discuss and are in dialogue beyond poetry, there’s this compulsion to solve it or to simplify it or, then, if we can’t do either one of those things, to move away. Poetry lets you stay present to that — with the discomfort, but also with the mystery of it.

Brown: Yeah, I mean, it’s part of actually what we’re doing. This is part of why people have a hard time with meditation, because to truly be in the mode of meditation, you can’t have judgment on a thought. You just look at the thought. You can’t have judgment on a pain in the body. You just look at the pain in the body, and you register things without saying, “Oh, this is good” or “This is bad.” It just is. And then I think you come away from that thinking, “Oh, well, it must be good, because here I still am.” Do you know what I mean?

Tippett: Or, and also, “I can survive this.”

Brown: Yeah. I mean, poems have to make our lives clear. Poems have to make our lives real on the page. And nobody’s living an easy life. Nobody’s living a life that is anything other than complex. And there are things about our lives that TV’s not going to give us, that movies, even, are not going to give us. And poems are where I go for that. That’s where I go for the complexity, the thing in us that we don’t really understand. “Why would you act like that? Why would you say that thing? How could you commit that evil?” You know, every murderer’s got a mama. But we don’t like to think about that. But that’s true; they came from somewhere. So that’s the kind of thing I’m interested in.

Tippett: I feel like you are a natural-born conversationalist. I said this to you backstage — you’re easy; I’m not worried about this. [laughs]

Brown: I hope so.

Tippett: I mean, I feel like — when I was getting ready to interview you and I was looking at other interviews you’d given, and I felt like we could just sit down out here, and I could say, “Hi …”

Brown: Hey.

Tippett: … and then we could go for an hour.

Brown: I’m for it.

Tippett: And you were also a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans, is that right? So I was trying to figure out, how do I focus this? And I found this interview you did in the Kenyon Review. Do you remember this? And they had asked you at the end — they wanted to talk about what would your credo be? What core beliefs do you have about literature and books? And you gave — it was a beautiful, beautiful answer.

And I just want to pull a couple of those out, and this very much follows on what you were just saying, although the word you didn’t use is, we haven’t mentioned the word “politics” now. And here’s something you said: “Every poem is a love poem. Every poem is a political poem, so say the masters. Every love poem is political. Every political poem must fall in love.” You also said, “You can’t love me if you don’t love politically.” So tell us. Tell us.

Brown: [laughs] Tell you how to love me?

Tippett: [laughs] No, tell us — take us inside this very big thought.

Brown: No, I just — I think — I’m interested in all of people. And there’s something in us that wants to really take people down to some sort of census report, I guess. And I’m not interested in census reports. I’m interested in how you got here today and how you managed to do your makeup in the car in order to do it. I’m interested in that. Do you know what I mean? I’m interested in the fact that you got two kids, and you’re getting married, and now you’re pregnant, and you’re going to have another kid, and you’re trying to figure out how these kids are all going to call each other sister and brother.

I’m interested in that. I’m not interested in this idea that everybody is only an identity, and I’m definitely not interested in this idea that there are “blank” issues, like “women’s” issues or “Black” issues. If you are really good at hurting Black people, you will indeed hurt the environment, I promise you.

[applause]

It’s true.

[applause]

It’s true. If you are really good at hurting women, you’re probably also interested in war — I
promise you. Do you understand what I mean?

[applause]

So I don’t know why we think, in order to make narratives that somehow help us politically, we have to take people down to some kind of identity, as if that identity does not encapsulate the entirety of humanity and the entirety of humanity’s needs. And so when I say, “If you love me, you have to love me politically” — it’s easy to know Jericho Brown, because, you know, I’m cool. “Hey, how you doin’” — you know what I mean?

But I have a history. I have an ancestry. And you gotta take all of that, when — if you’re coming with me, that’s what we’re taking with us. And I’m going to take that part of you, as well. And I think, if we could just love each other a little more whole, we all would be a lot better off. That’s what I want my poems to point to.

Tippett: It makes me think of — I’ve sometimes interviewed — I interview a lot of scientists. You talk to physicists and people who work with mathematics, and they say, “This thing we learn in school is” — I can see you’re saying, “Where’s she going with this?” [laughs] Yeah, OK. But this thing we learn in school is arithmetic. It’s equations. And that’s not — the people who work with mathematics, who are helping us understand the nature of the cosmos and help create all this technology we use, they say there’s “mathematical” thinking that is so thrilling, that is such a thrilling part of the human enterprise. And that’s not offered to us. And I kind of feel like what you’re doing is “poetic” thinking.

Brown: Yes, I hope so.

Tippett: So it’s not just a way of writing. It’s a way of approaching something, like putting love and politics in the same sentence.

Brown: Yes, yes, yes, and being honest about those things. People keep looking for this pure poetry, and people have these questions about the political in poems, as if poems were ever not political. I mean, as far as I know, the Iliad and the Odyssey are about a war. And from that point on, poems ask us to find a place where we can absolutely rupture within ourselves. And I know nothing more political than asking yourself questions, asking yourself, “Am I right about that idea, or am I really messed up?” That’s ultimately what it comes down to, and you have to take all of history and bring it down to one — one individual, one self — in order to do that.

Tippett: I think, unfortunately, we have to wind down, but —

Brown: Oh, that’s too bad.

Tippett: I know. See? I said, we could just keep nattering up here.

Brown: Well, you know, we laughed, we cried.

Tippett: We did. [laughs]

In the credo — so one thing I feel about the world right now is there’s a scarcity — there’s a fragility to hope right now. I experience a lot of people saying that it’s hard to know that what you do, what I do, can make a difference, although it feels like there’s so much we want to change. I want to read something you wrote in that credo. You said, “Hope is always accompanied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.”

Brown: Come on. Come on!

Tippett: Do you like having your words read back to you?

Brown: Say that again. That was good. Y’all heard that?

[laughter]

Now, that’s the Dodge anthem right there. I like that. That was good. I write that?

Tippett: You did, yeah.

Brown: Clap that, all right. Y’all know that was good. Say that again.

[applause]

Tippett: I’m going to.

Brown: That’s very good. Y’all listen. Y’all write it down. Oh, it’s online. I think it’s online. You can get some of the words and Google it.

Tippett: “Hope is always accompanied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.”

Brown: Come on, creative people. I got some creative people out there, yes, God.

[applause]

Y’all better go hope. I like that. Oh my God. I be writing.

Tippett: There’s something else — this goes together with that. I love this.

Brown: People should pay me way more.

[laughter]

Tippett: They should [laughs]

Brown: I’m serious.

Tippett: So here’s the other thing. It’s like people feel right now like it’s hard not to be captive to the loud voices, the loud stories, the bad stories, the catastrophes.

Brown: Yeah, oh my God.

Tippett: And also, what there is to — there’s a lot to worry about. You said this — “An event happening ten minutes or ten years ago matters if anyone can indeed feel the effects of it now.” That feels really important to me too, because — anyone. If you have something you did ten minutes ago, one person feels the effect of it, that’s a metric.

Brown: Yeah, I agree. This isn’t a question. You just want me to say something about that?

Tippett: [laughs] I’m just using the occasion of having you sitting across from me to affirm what you said.

Brown: I agree. We’re taught — I don’t know. I don’t know how y’all — I mean, I’ve been asking my friends this lately a lot: why are we doing all of this? Somebody introduced me as a “cultural worker,” and I feel like that, and I’m sort of like, but why am I doing all that? And then I realized that it was in the title — that what I do, I do for culture, that I create culture, that I live in and benefit from culture, and that art and that culture make my life worth living and that it pushes me on to see more art, to make more things, that I’m a person who believes in living as one would want to see a life, that I really do believe in making the poems that I want to be in the world, in teaching the classes that I would want to see if I were a student, in dancing the way I like to see people dance. Do you know what I mean?

And I think, for me, knowing that I can do that is what I have. And I’m hoping that for more people, that can be what you have in this moment, that instead of looking at the things that mean to hurt us that we can look at each other, that we can hold up in the opposite direction some poetry, that we can hold up in the opposite direction some song, that we can hold up in the opposite direction some belief we have in some community project, some play, something that we are doing, some child that we love, and that I think if we can concentrate on the best of one another, on the best of the best of us, if we can really make the world we want to live in — even if it’s only in our own heads or in our own homes or in our own cars on the way to work — then we’ll be doing the beginning of something new.

[music: “Simple Vale” by Blue Dot Sessions]