One of his duplexes ends: Jericho Brown is a harvester of sounds. 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. 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. Fueled by the coffee, which did not kill him, he read several poems that danced between violence and tenderness, eros and terror. Nasturtium. Just one sentence, “Poetry can change the fabric of your soul.”. When he was around 14 or 15 his mother began a ritual that was so tender and natural he didn’t even notice it. 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 probably would have visited his colleagues at Emory University and celebrated at his favorite Southern-Caribbean fusion restaurant in Decatur, Ms. Icey's Kitchen & Bar. 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. From the release of The Tradition in March 2019 until Thanksgiving, Jericho Brown was visiting three cities a week. GENERAL STOREPODCASTFOODWAYSCOCKTAILSPHOTO ESSAYS, CUSTOMER SERVICE PRIVACY POLICY SUBMISSIONSMEMBERSHIPS. Let them stand with placards that tell the truth: “Traitor, Slaveholder, Rapist.”. “It’s how the initiation of race goes on in this nation.” Brown recalls, “It’s something that has fascinated me. Delphinium. Copyright © 2019 by Jericho Brown. 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 want to see all of it: Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa. I dug through my old journals to see what I wrote during the 15 minutes that he had the stage. I’m thinking about my life and I’m looking at my own childhood.”. The Tradition examines the normalization of evil and of its history, from a perspective at once political and individual, societal and intimate. When his food arrived, we realized he had wanted the scallion pancake, not the crab cake. 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 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. 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. We met just before the reading, and he asked if I could do him a favor. Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown’s daring new poetry collection, despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday. Since the featured poets were new to me, I was weighing the time investment. 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. 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. 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.”. “Poetry was still taught a lot in the schools. There aren't a lot of Black people in America necessarily trying to make that trek to East Africa. 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. Instead, his words are prophetic and timely, speaking of a violence that has not yet met its end. For the sake of the story. “I understood it as something necessary.

Jericho Brown doesn’t read his poems, he delivers them — a master of both page and stage. 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. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY The Tradition by Jericho Brown, is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction. Thank you.” I felt honored that our conversation was interruptible, that we can continue it. An awkward pause. “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: 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.

Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown now lives, writes, and teaches in Atlanta at Emory University.

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. That feels like that's way beyond anything I could be able to do with my poems. “I had to work the land quite literally, which was passed down from me, on both sides of my family. The Tradition is a 2019 poetry collection by Jericho Brown. “Write into the deep dark wreck,” he told us. He was born in Fort Hood, Texas. Toni Morrison crossed over into the great cloud last August, just a few weeks after Jericho and I met. — Jericho Brown, "Bullet Points" from The Tradition. Just edit them, he suggested. 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. He was exhausted when we met last July, and by March he was spent. 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.

Darnell Wilburn is a a photographer, teacher, and gallery owner in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm shocked, but not surprised.”. 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. I wasn’t brave enough to cancel things. “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. He lived and taught in San Diego before putting roots back down South in Georgia.

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.

You're not sure where your ancestors are from. 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. 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? The prize for poetry is given annually to a “distinguished volume of original verse by an American author.”. And it's a cause of hatred.

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