The Pulitzer-prize winning poet and professor of creative writing at Emory University visited Jyväskylä as a keynote speaker for Queer Tentacles seminar, arranged by Society for Queer Studies in Finland (SQS) and the University of Jyväskylä. Brown has published three collections of poetry (Please, 2018; The New Testament, 2014; The Tradition, 2019). Doctoral researcher and critic Joonas Säntti interviewed Brown on 22.9.2022.
JS
I suggest we begin with rhythm. Your poems seem to have a sort of natural progression, so that the line breaks often coincide with the rhythm of natural speech. So it might take more than one reading to appreciate the complexities and different resonances of the words – for example the words at the end of a line. So how do you as a writer approach this relation between the potentiality of the form and the semantics (or “content”)? And is there an element of surprise for you when writing?
JB
Well it’s all a surprise because I have no idea what I’m going to say next and if I did know, I wouldn’t work on the poem. I want, when I’m writing, to be surprised simultaneously by what I say, and, by how I say it and how I make it musical. Not just “how do I say it” in terms of how I characterize or articulate something, but more literally: how do I create music. I think that when we hear a poem, even if we cannot understand the words, we should have some understanding of being in the midst of the lyric moment.
So musically, one of the things that I try to do, is I have what I think is a law of accumulation. I want the person reading the poem, to feel the poem taking off, to begin to feel like something you’re in the midst of and cannot get out of. There’s a song that I like, called “Now that there’s you” by Diana Ross (early 1970s, it’s on the first solo album). At the end of it, you realize that she has been modulating the entire time she’s been singing, until at the end of the song you find that she’s singing very high…and there’s something in my poems that I always want to do that. By the end of the poem I want you worn out (laughs) like OH MY GOD, like WOW (laughing) do you understand what I’m saying?
JS
Yes, more intensity building up…
JB
Yeah, and I’m not even speaking classical music or jazz, just the popular music I was listening to as a kid. I noticed that what I was really attracted to in music is this feeling of drama: it’s mounting, getting bigger and bigger as the song goes, it’s asking more of the musicians and of the singer. Yeah I like that, does that answer your question?
JS
I love that answer, thank you!
Maybe we could talk the duplex a bit, because it’s your formal innovation. Often it’s depicted as a mix of earlier genres: there’s the sonnet, which can be very strict, and there’s the ghazal with it’s couplets. Also blues gets mentioned (like in the book cover). Our issue is publishing some translations, so it would be interesting to hear your own take on these resonances. How do these very different genres play out and against each other in the writing?
JB
I didn’t set out to invent a form. That was never one of my goals as a poet. I think what I do is that I have the same questions that any other poet has. We have questions…We have questions about poetry, how poetry works, and then we try to enact those questions, or answer those questions through the poems we make. Questions like “is it possible to end in abstraction”, “is it possible to make a list in the middle of a poem”. Or: is it possible for a poem to have a conceit and will it work if you leave that conceit at some point in the poem?” Sometimes the questions are about music, about form, or rhythm.
I was asking myself: is it possible for a poem to exist if it’s completely made up of repetition. Can I make a poem that’s only repetition? And I started thinking about forms that make use of repetition, not just literal refrain but also rhyme, because it’s a kind of repetition in sound. Or rhythm, because if you have many lines of iambic pentameter, that’s a kind of repetition. I was thinking about all the kinds of repetition that exist. Can I say the same thing nineteen times with some variations and make a poem? These were questions that I had at the time. And as I was thinking about these, I started putting the form together in my mind, so before I actually wrote a duplex, I had an idea…”Oh maybe if I did this, it might work”…and at some point, I realized I had an opportunity, because of what I know and have studied about poetry, to look at poetry across time and space through the questions I was asking.
So for example, I love ghazals, I have deep affection for them and I’m always interested in how and why do they work? Why does juxtaposition work? It’s so weird and crazy to me, to take two things that have nothing to do with each other and put them together, and then suddenly everybody wants to cry. I’m fascinated by that!
And the sonnet, the sonnet always appears in what poets do, whether they like it or not. The Elizabethan sonnet is the imperialist form. When you’re a poet, particularly a poet in the English language – but in the romance languages too – even if you don’t think so, you’re being led to believe that you’re being rebellious by not thinking about it, right? The sonnet in itself is the accomplishment for a poet, if you write a sonnet you’re the real thing!
JS:
Even in contemporary poetry?
JB:
Yeah, I think the sonnet carries a weight of accomplishment, or a weight of oppression. A lot of poets see a sonnet coming and they’re running…They aren’t running from anything else so why are they running from the sonnet? Or they’re angry. I think I am, I think I have a very deep love-hatred relationship with the sonnet.
And the blues is attractive for me as an American form and more specifically a black American form. While I was considering repetition, I started thinking how these forms from very different times and places (like ghazals are 6th Century BC, in Persian), in spite of their differences, still live in me as a part of my passion for poetry. Something about this reminds me of how I’m always called to do math about my identity in the United States. People want me to be 60 percent black, 12 percent queer, 6 percent Southern…For me it’s important to be all of me, because you need to have integrity. No matter the situation, you got to be all that you are. So as a poet I began thinking about this amalgamation of forms, trying to make it happen in a poem, where I was answering the question about poetry as a form of repetition. I wanted to make the duplex to be a kind of representation of the way I’m feeling in the world. That I am indeed just as much blues as I am sonnet as I am ghazal.
JS:
When I think about your poems in terms of repetition, it still flows…I mean it’s not like Gertrude Stein or that kind of extreme repetition. It still feels like running on very smoothly.
JB
Yeah, it progresses. I think that progression really has a lot to do with who I am as a poet. A poem should progress. As a reader I’m interested in that which climbs or ascends or stretches forward.
JS
Is there a narrative element?
JB
When I began working on the duplex poems, it became clear to me that I needed to try different kinds of tones and modes with each duplex. For example the duplex at the beginning of the third section, “I begin with love, hoping to end there.” That’s a very lyric poem. But some of the duplexes are much more narrative and also funnier, like the one beginning “Don’t accuse me of sleeping with your man / When I didn’t know you had a man.” I wanted to see if I can make humor happen, terror happen, if I could get different kinds of things into this form, and several kinds of emotion, so it can be as lyric as it can be narrative. I’m still working on duplexes too.
JS
Are you working on fourth collection?
JB
I hope so, but I do all I can to not think about a book, because when I think about a book, I cannot write.
But if I think about a poem, I’m always interested, alive, I’m always wanting to work a poem. I think what we fall in love with is the one poem, as a unit. I mean, you’ve got a poem over the mirror in your dresser, or the refrigerator, you know, that’s the poem. And you are carrying it around all the time. It can remind you of something, to make you feel again. I like to write poem by poem. I decide on a collection after that, looking at what they have and don’t have in common.
JS
So surprising, because The Tradition feels so well-crafted and pre-thought…
JB
Yeah, yeah…all my three books maybe seem that way. But I will say this: when I try to make a book, I do make changes to the poems, so that they begin to sing to one another. When I read a poem two years later, and I write another poem, that later poem can tell something that helps the first poem out. And sometimes it’s just changing the title that makes the poems talk to and sing to one another. The books may seem project oriented but that comes later, through making the poems thematically interesting to one another. Before that, in writing, I go little by little.
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who nobody has ever heard of, her name’s Claudia Rankine (laughs)…She told something, that I’ve always been grateful for and that I try to tell my own students, which is: you really only have so many mature thoughts in a short period of time, like in four years you don’t really think about very many things. So instead of worrying about thematic concern coming together, I just imagine that it will. If I was writing a book, I’d be bored!
JS
A writer’s block waiting to happen, I suppose?
JB
Yeah, I would rather look back at poems and say, “Oh, sixteen of these are about television. It seems I’ve been thinking about television, so maybe I should keep my eyes open to that the next time I’m writing.” I’d like the poems to lead me, I don’t want to be the leader.
JS
So could we go back to what you said about titles in your poems. They have interesting temporalities. You refer to earlier authors, like James Baldwin and Avery R. Young. The title can read for example “After Another Country”, so as a reader one considers what that after might mean. After reading? Or in a similar way to? In a poem like “Cakewalk”, the title makes me expect something about slave plantations or maybe something like late 19th century popular US culture. But it turns out to have a speaker talking HIV, and also doing that in a way that brings a lot of humor, as you mentioned earlier. I was wondering does that element of humor have something to do with a kind of uplifting, positive sense of rebellion?
JB
Maybe but honestly, I can say that it is important for me that poems are like real life, like people. If poems are not real life, and only show us ONE kind of emotion, they aren’t poems but hallmark cards. They have their use, like on Mother’s Day but they all say the same thing, they all say “I love you mom”, and love is made of many colors. What I believe a poem does, it gets on every side of those emotions on a single or several topics. Humor is important to me because I like to laugh and make the people around me laugh. Many of my poems seem dour but every poem that I’ve written has a funny line in it (laughs).
You can be completely depressed and still have moments where you laugh. I want my poems to reflect what my life is like. Given some of the subject matter I wanted to make clear that the people the book is about, including the poet, and the book itself, that all of those are survivors. And I think the more you read the book, the more the poems turn toward joy, celebration and self-love, lovemaking, toward humor.
I do not want anybody to think that the police will win. Not in my book. (laughs) My life is not only being concerned for my very being, when I encounter police in the US.
JS
Still though, the title poem (“The Tradition”) does end up with names of the black people killed by police…
JB
Yeah, they’re there but they’re not all that’s there. And it’s important to me that the book be a living organism.
JS
Are you worried that the reception focuses too much on expectations of Black poets? That you are read as someone only writing about identity?
JB
I’m sure I a am but I don’t care. I mean I can’t help it really, if someone does not want to see that I write about all kinds of poems about all kinds of things. I cannot be limited, I’m going to be interested. Being black in the USA, with that horrible history of racism, it’s going to come up, but I also like to make love, so that’s going to come up. I also like to dance. And to eat fried chicken and then complain about the fact that I ate it ‘cause I shouldn’t have. My ancestors were literally slaves. So that’s gonna come up!
The fact that somebody else can only see the slaves is not something I can help. I mean I can’t help other people to read, if they are so blinded by blackness that they can’t see that the blackness is still also in every part of life, and not only in oppression. I would be black had racism never happened. Racism is not what makes me black.
JS
I recently read your prologue to a publication of Harlem Shadows by Claude McKay. In that introduction you suggest that McKay managed to create space for different tones and subject matters in the genre of the sonnet. Feelings like hate, and a very direct, personal expression. There’s something very interesting in this notion of returning to a long-standing form, how it works as a questioning of the canon and also as a way to intervene in the present. Would you say this applies to your poetry as well?
JB
There is something I figured out from McKay in particular, and how he handled the sonnet, that let me figure out how I wanted to do it. Countee Cullen has beautiful sonnets too, but even when he is saying something that you don’t expect the sonnet to say, Cullen does seem to me to be more in line with the expectations of how the sonnet sounds. Whereas McKay always seems making the sonnet sound like him. He wanted it to sound like he was.
And I hadn’t seen that happen before I read McKay. There were others but for me, he was the first. And I was really taken by that, and also by the love/hate relationship that he espouses in so many poems about the USA in and of itself. I understood that the feeling that I had that I was not able to explain, that I could not articulate, can be articulated in a poem. The poetry is the space where it makes sense that I am a citizen in a country that doesn’t want my citizenship.
Other than that, how do you talk about this? (laughs) You need poetry to talk about it!
I think there’s another thing I got from McKay: it seems to me that I am made more tender and also more rebellious in my poems than I am in real life. And because of that, when I read the poems, I can literally become more tender and more rebellious. The poems teach me as I am writing them about how I feel.
So if I feel something like [in the poem] “Bullet points”, I don’t know it before I write the poem. And after writing, I can say, that’s how I should live. The poems make it possible to articulate to myself how I feel. And there’s something about McKay, particularly when he’s being really sexual and flippant in his poems, that let me know that poems could make me more who I am.
JS
That reminds me a lot about aesthetic theories of expression, the idea that you come to know and understand your emotions through writing, that the work gives form to your feelings.
JB
Yeah.
JS
You also work in Emory university, where you are teaching creative writing as a professor. I’m wondering how do you see your own position there in relation to minorities and the different registers of language. The rules for good writing are maybe a bit racially coded? I mean what passes as good writing, the good English…
JB
Yes, I think…a great question that I think about all the time, so I do have an answer. I understand why I speak English. Because the English were an imperialist people. And you speak English for the same reason! (laughs) and I am very aware that when I am teaching English I’m teaching the language of empire. Do I want empire? Hell no! And yet, that’s the language I got and the language that I fell in love with when I fell in love with poetry, as a little kid…
JS
In Louisiana?
JB
Yeah…I couldn’t read any other language, and I didn’t know that English was imperialist language, I just knew that I was falling in love with it. I also knew that I wanted to master it. I knew that there was something about it that turned me on when it was good, and I wanted to figure out why does that sound so well and why is this poem wearing me out. I wanted to be a master of it, and still do.
So I think there’s a big difference between theory and practice. In practice, we’re speaking English. You’re Finnish and I’m an American and here we are speaking English, because we want to own the thing that means to own us. What you are doing now for this journal also means trying to overcome that which means to be imperial towards us.
It’s like “You’re not going to oppress me? I’m gonna have it!” Like we were talking about Claude McKay earlier: “You think this sonnet is better than my ability…Let me see what my ability can do to your fucking sonnet.”
So when I’m teaching my students, I’m teaching from that perspective, that standpoint. How language is indeed power, and I would rather you have it than the people who used to it enslave my ancestors. You know, my university owned slaves? My university is a part of that. My job, then, is to take advantage. My university owned slaves and therefore could never pay me enough…
Another thing, about poems. I also tell me students that they can use the language as they know it to make poetry. For me, one of the accomplishments that I feel about my work, particularly The Tradition, is the use of vernacular, Black English, the language that I’m excited about, which isn’t the Queen’s English, or the Kings. For me it’s actually very different. I think I’m teaching how the take this language over and become the way to speak it. Do you follow?
JS
Yes, yes. I also want to bring up the word queer, because you are visiting us for a queer studies conference. What does that word mean for you?
JB
I like that but I notice that in Finland a lot of men, gay men, don’t like the word because they tell me, it feels like it’s leaving them out. But I like it, and maybe because I’m black, because in USA gay seems to always mean white. White gay men can be as racist as anybody else. So it’s very difficult for black men to feel comfortable being named in that community when they have been made invisible by it. But I don’t mind gay either, I’ve just recently started saying queer. I think queer opens up more, and it tells more the truth about people’s real sense of desire, and the sense of sexual possibilities. I’m interested in the word, and I use it more and more.
I don’t know if gay works for me. If you think about, for example having sex with trans men, or trans women, they don’t want me calling myself gay. There’s a way that me calling myself queer also allows me to open myself, and be honest about my past and present, sexually, but it also reminds me that I can be queer about other things, that it doesn’t have to be about sex. That I can build and re-create.
JS
In Finnish usage, queer usually doesn’t have the same connotations than for US users. In Finnish, for example ‘gay’ (homo) is more directly naming a certain group of people while queer remains more ambiguous. The sense of slander inherent in that word ‘queer’, historically, does not really exist for Finnish speakers. For some that lack of history and also the broadness of the term is a bit of a problem.
JB
Yeah, for me, I feel that the word includes me, and it rhymes too. “We’re queer, we’re here”. You know, same-gender-loving, for example, SGL, that some people use in the States, is just too long (laughs) and not always accurate. I also think that when it comes to men, queer means gay, or bisexual. If you’re a cisgender man and you say you’re queer, you have to like dudes, you know?
JS
I’m not sure about that actually. Maybe something like S&M practices, fetishism…
JB
Really? Are we including S&M or spanking in queer?
JS
I think some do, perhaps it’s a minority. And there’s genderqueer…
JB
Yes, that’s different, if you say genderqueer. I But generally, men in US who practice S&M don’t call themselves queer. I think that they don’t want anyone to think that they have anything to do with dick. My sense about cis-gender men is that when they say they are queer, they are saying “I might have something to do with dick…”
When taking on an identity, we generally want to feel pride in what someone else has made shameful, so when you’re saying queer, it’s about something that you might otherwise be ashamed of.
JS
Yes, and I think people can feel shame about so many different sexual practices that aren’t supposedly “normal”. And maybe this relates to S&M too.
JB
Yes I get that. You might feel ashamed about being tied up. It’s just that I haven’t met anybody, or at least any guys, that likes S&M to use the word queer because they would be worried that someone might think they like dick. That’s a big thing! That’s what men generally feel to me to be ashamed of. People will tell you that they went to prison rather than say they like dick.
JS
How about queer in a very large sense, as a question of style, or textual ways of writing. What’s a queer voice like, in poetry? In my research area, narrative theory and narratology, questions have been asked about what makes a queer voice in fiction, when there are no direct references to certain acts or desires. So what about poetry? In the USA, for example, how can a contemporary poet connote queerness without mentioning sexuality directly?
JB
I suppose there are certain styles but I wouldn’t be able to really identify why that is the case. The same thing happens with blackness, sometimes. When I read D.A. Powell for the first time, I thought surely this is a black guy. But he’s not. He’s queer (laughs). But when I think about someone like Frank O’Hara, it was so clear to me that he was queer.
JS
But how?
JB
I do not know. I’ve never been able to say how exactly, but there was something about the way he was chatty in the poems, the way he was himself in the poems, that I felt I was getting some kind of brazen femininity from a man. The way of writing poems that sound like he spoke…and I was right about O’Hara. I hear it, even in the poems that are not sexual. He’s the example that comes to mind. But I don’t know if you can name why that’s so, other than a quality, that queer people are interested in identifying in one another. We don’t know why. We can’t say why the cultural markers are what they are.
JS
I’d like to discuss whiteness. In your poems, it often becomes related to disappearance and death. For example, “Dear Whiteness” seems to me to be about the power in non-perception. As a black man you are both highly visible, even fetishized, but at the same time you are kind of disappearing in that gaze, in your particularity, so that you become othered.
Do you think that poetry can work as an option to this kind of visibility? Is that something that poetry that oppose to, teaching us alternative ways of looking?
JB
Yeah, the thing about poetry though, it’s always one-to-one. So it can’t in that sense teach the people anything because it’s not…
JS
Yeah, I don’t mean as an instrument. Or maybe I did? (laughs) But in a more general sense, do you think that poems can do this, to re-affirm the humanity of the speaker and in that way challenge the ways that you are being culturally seen and perceived?
JB
Yeah, definitely! Yes. Poems can do that. But the problem is, you don’t really know why you love the poems you love. The thing that you get from a poem, the love that you have for a poem, is not the same that others feel for it, and not for same reasons. As a matter of fact, nobody learns from a poem what you learn from a poem, Joonas. So the answer I think is yes, but the poems cannot work in the way that you can say, “here’s what this poem does”.
I mean, at school I wasn’t the only kid reading those poems. The Harlem renaissance was being taught to white people sitting right next to me. And those people did not become less racist for it. They had to learn those poems by heart and write papers on them, just like I did. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich: I’m sure those poets have influenced how men think about women, and I’m sure that their work has made for less misogyny among many men. But I’m also sure that many men read their work and are still just as misogynous.
I think about poems the same way I think about trees. I believe everybody has a tree. And when I say that, I believe you suddenly think about your tree. I think that the feeling that you get from your tree is similar to the feeling you get from a poem that you love. So everybody has a tree. But you don’t try and read your tree, you don’t give your tree a literary analysis. And yet, if your tree had not been there, there would be less meaning in your life. Somehow your tree is providing meaning but you can’t nail it down. You can’t say for sure what impact a poem has had on your life, but you just know that without the poem you’d have less of a life.
So the answer to your question is a hundred percent yes, and yet, I look at that same tree you’re thinking of as your tree, and I won’t feel a thing. And you look at the same tree I’m thinking of, and you just keep on walking RIGHT BY MY TREE! (both laugh)
This is where poems don’t work like pop songs. Because there we get to share something that was meant to be shared by masses of people. This is also why people don’t often know how to value poems, and capitalism values that which reaches more and more people. Poems are one-to-one. It’s between you and the page.
JS
I agree. So, just to be sure, not between reader and the author?
JB
No, not the poet. When I’m writing it’s between me and the poem. And then I lose it. And my experience in writing them, what my poems teach me, they possibly can’t teach anybody else. What poems do, they do at such an individual level…First, it is important that you get impacted. But even more important is what you do with that impact, and what your position is when that impact happens. I mean, I would love to believe they can make a change to how black folks are objectified. Sure, so get the right one in front of the right president (laughs). Sometimes we get the impact but it doesn’t mean we change, or that we spread it…
JS
Yes, there’s this general discourse about the “uses” of literature, how reading makes people more empathic. You read this and then you supposedly know how that person feels…Often that can be very simplistic (laughs). Yet still one wants to believe in that…
JB
Yeah, because it is true. It is true. It’s just not as true as people want it to be, for a nation. We are not set up for spirituality. And poems are not capitalist artifacts, you can’t give them functions. The same thing happens with ideas of what Black people can write about or what’s black poetry. “Here’s what you do…here’s your function…anybody wanna stop being a racist, read this poem…”
So sure, it’s one thing I suppose my books could do. But I like to believe I could write a poem that doesn’t mention race at all and yet somehow make you less racist. Me reading a poem about tenderness should make me a better lover. I don’t need to read a poem about sex! Or a poem about violence can make me a better lover.
How is it that something can be so big, yet so individual. We really can’t find the language to talk about that, because the language is so based on commodification. It’s difficult to talk about intimacy and vulnerability. Everywhere in the US, you get told against being vulnerable. That’s how you lose, when you become vulnerable. But without vulnerability, you won’t fall in love…
JS
…with poems either…
JB
Yeah, exactly. We know poems can do everything to us, personally, and that’s why we’re so frustrated with them. We want them to go on doing everything but it’s up to you, the reader.
More than in any other literature, people actually have very big expectations, very unfair expectations about poetry. People see a poem in a magazine, like New Yorker, between all that prose text, suddenly: “oh look a poem!” (laughs) and before they read it they approach it saying: “you’re a poem. by the time I get to end of you, I better be wise.” Nobody does that with other things they read!
JS
Yes, many people read novels just to escape from their lives…
JB
Yeah, they want to know the story. And the same people read a poem and expect to be made new. You have to take poems for what they are, and to respect that. Nobody’s mad about the music they don’t like. But with poetry, it’s like: people read three poems and say, I hate poetry! Compare that with how often people say they love music, when they love one or two artists. So poetry has all those expectations to bear. The reason people have those expectations, I think, is they understand that this poem could do something to me, but at the same they don’t want responsibility when it doesn’t. They don’t want to think it’s about them, that they don’t know how to read it!
JS
Also, it requires re-reading, right? I mean poetry especially does.
JB
Definitely, definitely. That’s why they are short you know (laughs). You take your time.