The Jericho Brown Tapes

The following is a transcription from an wide-ranging interview with the poet and professor, Jericho Brown, who was gracious enough to sit down with Dom. It was conducted just before the COVID-19 crisis landed in full force, and upended everyone’s lives, including ours. As a result, it has been delayed until now. We apologize for this, but we hope the thoroughness and variety of topics covered will make up for that.

Some portions have been excised from the transcript at Dom’s discretion, or condensed for clarity and content. The full audio of the interview is also presented here.

A Conversation with Jericho Brown

Jericho: So, I was living in New Orleans. I left New Orleans and got a PhD in Houston, TX. Then I went to San Diego, CA, which was my first job. First full-time job. I had been teaching before that, but that was my first full-time job as an assistant professor. Then I left there and came here, to Emory. All these years later.

Dom: Did you go to school to become a teacher? How did that happen?

J: Well, you know, it’s a weird thing, because no. I knew I would be a teacher, given what I was going to school for, but I went to school because I wanted to be a better poet. When I went to school as an undergrad, I was lying to myself as if I was going to go to law school, but I knew I wasn’t. I kept looking for something to happen to keep me from having to go to law school. And then over time, I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I can do public relations.’

That’s what ended up getting me into speechwriting, working in the office of communications. I always knew that I wanted to write, I just didn’t know how to go about it. You know, I was a very young person and the first job I had was working for the mayor, and I hated it. My title was Junior Writer. But the turnover was so high at the mayor’s office that I eventually, and pretty quickly, became the Speech Writer.

But what was funny to was, you know, when I finished school and I started working, what I noticed about people—and I thought it was wild, because you know, I hadn’t grown up around these people—they all had hobbies. You know, people would get off work and they would go to yoga, or they would go to tango dancing classes, you know what I mean? I thought it was so, like, wow. You know, like I’m supposed to be doing something. I just want to go home and watch TV and go to sleep.

D: So, what did you figure out, what were your hobbies?

J: I knew that I liked poetry. And I knew that I had been writing it since I was a kid. So, I sort of had this plan. Like, ‘What I’ll do is I’ll take a few classes in poetry at the University of New Orleans, take some Creative Writing classes. Then I also had it mind, if I take enough classes I’ll end up with a degree. If I end up with a degree by the time the mayor goes out of office, I’ll just teach at Dillard [University]. I didn’t really think it through, I thought it was that simple. When I had gone to Dillard, I understood that if you have, you know, whatever degrees, then you can teach at a college. And I was like, ‘Oh, everybody at Dillard likes me, so if I want to teach at Dillard, sure, of course they’ll let me.’ You know, I didn’t think of how difficult it would be to get a job somewhere or anything like that.

But then while I was actually studying poetry—and writing, you know, taking workshops and taking all these other kinds of poetry and literature classes—I was falling in love with it all over again. I thought it would be like playing around in water, but then it got deep. You know what I mean? It was like suddenly the water is coming up to my waist, now it’s up to my neck, oh my God.

D: Had to learn how to swim.

J: And all I was doing with all my time at that time in my life was reading and writing poems on the side. So, my job was first and then, you know, poetry was second. Then partying and having a good time was the only other thing.

D: So, were you submitting poems to publications at this time?

J: Not really, no. I was doing things that were, in a way, adjacent to that. Because I was becoming a member of various poetry communities. I got into Cave Canem, which was very important to me because there was this national Black community of poets that I knew and was somehow a part of. And I was learning from them—how to go about reading and what to read. And then I was also a part of a workshop called the NOMOO Literary Society, which used to meet in Tremé, which is the oldest Black neighborhood in the country.

We would meet there, and people would bring whatever they were writing and we would talk about it. You know, fiction, screenplay, play, essay, poem. And we would literally hear people read whatever they were working on, and critique it right then and there. It was led an old Black Rights Movement poet named Kalamu ya Salaam. And Kalamu was really a huge mentor for me and gave me a lot of training in how to think and how to write. And already in undergrad I was thinking about these things; I had been a UNCF Mellon fellow, so I had come here. Actually, my first experience with Emory was coming here for that fellowship program, and I worked with a man named Rudolph Byrd and with Beverly Guy-Sheftall who teaches at Spelman [University], and other people as well.

And I had been in love with poetry since I was a kid. So no, I wasn’t sending stuff out, but I was beginning to take on the identity. I was beginning to think of myself as a poet; as a part of the sea—you know, all these poets in this sea, all these fish, and I was one of those fish. You know what I mean? But was I sending poems to magazines? Not really. And if I was, I was being rejected.

So that’s how it started. Then by the time I finished the MFA, it was clear to me that I was going to get a PhD, mostly because I had been parading around with poet-as-hobby, but I needed to fully immerse myself. So I moved to Houston because I really wanted to start my life over as a poet. And I wanted to begin that life where the only thing I had to do was read and write poetry, and I believed the PhD program would make that possible for me.

But then, that didn’t really work out. Because you start school and you still got to eat. So I had all these little side jobs, you know. I was teaching at a community center here, teaching with a program called Writers in the Schools there, doing editorial work for this group or that group. I was doing all these little things, so it was like I was always adding the money up so I could make money and live, eat, and pay my rent. School would sort of cover things, but you know, after the school covered it, it was like ‘you better eat half of the sandwich.’

So, when I was getting the PhD, that’s when I really started sending work out. And I understood that when I had this PhD, I would probably teach, so I wanted to get better at teaching as well. So, I got a job, and I always think about it like Debbie Allen’s character in Fame. That character taught at that very special artists’ school, she taught dance. But she didn’t teach dance because she was a teacher, she taught dance because she was a dancer. So, I think of myself as a poet, but as a poet who teaches. And I also think of myself as someone who, because I’m a poet, I spread the good news about poetry. You know what I mean? I think you doing this [the interview] is an example of that. I don’t think poets work in a vacuum where they just write poetry and that’s all they do. Poets are always, in one way or another, being ambassadors. And they’re always trying to get other people who don’t know poetry to see how good it is so they can catch the drug too, or poets are trying to make the world more comfortable for themselves or other poets.

D: Teaching what’s been taught to them.

J: Yeah. That took a long time to answer, but your question was did I go to school to teach. And no. I went to school to be a poet and to work on my book, what turned out to be my first book. I did not go to school to teach, but I knew teaching would be a byproduct.

D: You first book was released in 2008, if I’m not mistaken?

J: Yeah, Please came out in 2008. And I was very proud of that.

D: It’s interesting that you didn’t really send out too much of your work until you got into your PhD program. But that’s because you were a little more well-rounded as a poet, a little more comfortable with your work.

J: Yeah. I had a teacher, Reetika Vazrani, at the Callaloo Writers Workshop at Texas A&M. Charles Rowell was holding the workshop and Reetika was our teacher, and I went up there because I was in Houston, so it was easy to go. And she made it very clear—she was like “Why are y’all sending poems and y’all haven’t finished anything?” And a lot of people, like my friend the poet James Allen Hall, you know, he really believes in that. That poems should always be out. And I know that’s sort of the philosophy of a lot of people. I don’t believe in that. I actually think you should finish a manuscript and then send out poems from it. Because by the time you are at 40, or I think even 50 pages of poetry then you’re going to get some yesses for the poems that you send out, because you’re a better poet than you were when you were working on one or two pages of poetry.

And when you have a bunch of poems, your poems tell you how to write your poems. So, by the time you’re writing the 37th poem, the work you do on that one tells you how to fix the first through the 15th poem. Because when you wrote those, you weren’t as good a poet as you are working on your 37th poem. You understand what I mean?

So, I actually think it’s good to be in cave, or a cottage, or a tunnel, some sort of small space, writing your poems and making it a thing that’s really just yours. And if you perfect your poems in that sort of Emily Dickinson way of ‘I want to perfect my poems for me’ you can make you poems such that they’re really just yours, so that when you’re done and you send out from that manuscript, you’ve got a couple that are says these are from a competed manuscript titled ‘Blank,’ and I think that changes the response you get back. Because then you've made submitting—and you may see poems in print about poetry as opposed to about the poetry business. Do you know what I mean? Like, where your name is supposed to pop up every once in a while. More people take more poems, and you end up with poems in more places at once. So, for me, people always feel like, “Oh, I see your name all the time.” And you actually don't see my name all the time. You see my name in journals over the course of a year. And it seems like I publish a bunch of poems. But then it's like three or four years, two to four years, that you don't see my name at all, not in journals. Because what happens that next year is a book comes out. And that book comes out with some expectation because all of these journals have been publishing poems at the same time.

D: Absolutely.

J: Do you see what I mean? And then when the book comes out, the people who have been seeing that hopefully, they're like, “wait, I've been seeing his poems all over.” You spend the next year publicizing the book, but hopefully you can get some writing done. After that, there's a low period where you're not seeing new poems in journals. You're working on your poems. And so that, for me at least, has been the cycle that I've been on. I mean, to be quite honest with you, I like having my poems in magazines, but it's not the priority for me. When I think about being a poet, you know, it's very important to have my poems in certain places, but not because I think about those places as much as I think about the other poets who have been in those places. You know, I always wanted a poem in The Nation because “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes first came out in The Nation. I've always wanted a poem in Crisis Magazine, which I haven't had, because it's Crisis Magazine. Langston Hughes published his first poems and W.E.B. Dubois published some of his first articles in Crisis. So, I think about it that way. I think about it in terms of history, much more than I think about like, “Oh, I need to be famous,” because I'm not a pop singer.

D: Yeah, there’s a bigger purpose to it.

J: Well, I don’t know if it’s any bigger, I think pop singers are doing great work. You know, Prince is a pop singer.

D: I get what you’re saying, and in a way your rollout reminds me of music. Before somebody releases an album, they drop a couple singles.

J: Yeah, that's how I've always thought about it. Yes, exactly. That's the model.

D: It’s interesting how poetry and music coincide with each other so much. You were talking earlier of how you've always loved poetry. Do you think that stemmed from your interest in music at a young age?

J: I think a lot of it has to do with music because when I was a kid, I would hear lyrics. I would impress my cousins because I actually knew the words to songs, and they thought that was crazy. This sounds like it's not true, but I knew the words, I don't now, but I knew the words to “Candy Girl” by New Edition. And I was my cousins’ little cousin. So, if I'm singing the words to Candy girl, they're like “Trey!” They called me Trey. “Trey, what?” After I figured out that was a big deal, I would literally get close to the radio so I could hear the words to songs that I knew my cousins liked. And I would try to figure out what people were saying and write the words down. There's a song by Minnie Riperton called, “Loving You.”

D: [hums the tune]

J: Yeah, you know that song.

D: I got it on vinyl, come on now.

J: These young people know everything. So anyway, that part of the song when she says, “no one else can make me feel the colors that you bring.” Like, if that ain't poetry.

D: That’s poetic.

J: I remember being a kid and hearing that and being like, “What, what?” So those are the kinds of things that I was attracted to as a kid.

D: So, were you into to that Motown sound back in the day when you were a kid? The soulful type—

J: Yeah, because my mom and dad could only get the old school channel on the van they had. So, I had no choice but to know these songs. I would go to school thinking The Temptations was the lick because I had been listening to The Temptations in the van, you know, listening to The Supremes, listening to Stevie Wonder, because that's the only channel. Which was fine for me, and then, you know, with my cousins, that's where I probably got music that was more contemporary. Yeah, I knew a lot about what was thought of as old school music. I mean, even as a kid, going back to big band and jazz and stuff from the 50s. I remember having a little Walkman and being in middle school listening to Nancy Wilson, I mean, Nancy Wilson. [Jericho laughs].

So, I liked a lot of stuff. In terms of my musical taste, that wasn't necessarily just contemporary pop. I liked contemporary pop at the time. I remember Mary J. Blige’s first album came out, and I remember literally learning all the steps to “The Real Love” video. So yeah, so music was very like, I mean, it's quite influential to me and to the way I think about getting writing done. I think it's a good idea to have a metaphor for what you're doing. And if I can think about music and the little that I know about how a song is made in a studio then I can also think about, well, how do I make this poem in the studio of my mind on this computer? You know what I'm saying? I recently visited the Motown Museum in Detroit, which was really great for me. I sort of had this reminder of what I thought but hadn't really seen. And I got to see how they went through this whole process of before even a song comes out, before we hear a song. It's been through this whole process of how to be made, and how to be heard, and how to decide what's best, and what should go out, and what should go in which version. It’s so interesting.

D: Motown speaks to the Blackness of the creative and how it applies to any art form. So, Louisiana, that was your start. With Louisiana being within the Bible Belt, did you grow up Baptist?

J: Yeah. We went to Mount Canaan. I mean, we went to Mount Olive at first. And but my parents weren't really going consistently then. But then when they really got to be church-ified people, we were going to Mount Canaan Missionary Baptist Church where Reverend Harry Blake was the pastor. He was a great pastor. He had been a Civil Rights leader in Shreveport in relationship to SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and Martin Luther King. That was really good growing up for me. Because I had, I had the church influence with all of that hollering and singing and just people speaking in this really ultra-dignified way, which I think has a lot to do with, being able to think about the power of the word, the power of voice. You know, when you're a Black kid growing up in the Black church, you don't really get the opportunity to be shy. So, people are always sticking a microphone in your face. I mean, if you grew up in a Black church, there's a holiday every two weeks [Jericho laughs]. But I mean, we would find one, right? I thank God for it every day that we had a really active children's and youth ministry at that church, and there were always all these women who went above and beyond. They would do stuff like take us, you know, Dreamgirls would come to Shreveport, we would go see Dreamgirls in the theater, little stuff like that. But they were always putting us up in front of people. You know, we always had to recite Scripture recite even poetry. And so, you learn pretty quickly what words can do to people because Black people let you know they are worn out by your words. They’re gonna holler or grunt or “Mmm.” And, um, and yeah, so growing up in the church was a really, I think a really important part of that. So, there's the music, there's the church, I think those are definitely huge influences. Yeah.

D: Speaking of a communal environment, for Blacks to fully express themselves: we were talking about the barber shop, as well. How the barber shop is like a refuge or safe haven for the Black community. And also, how within the barbershop you have the freedom to say what you want to say and express yourself. I remember as a kid growing up in a barber shop, you were put on front street. You were forced to give your opinion on a certain topic as a young kid, older guys are listening to you because it's in conversation, you know. The barber, being the neighborhood therapist, is speaking to everyone and asking how you're doing and genuinely wanting to know. So, the church, the barber shop, I feel like those are two staples in Black community that influence the way we grow up. I can relate to that.

J: Yeah. But I think for me, I mean, I agree with you completely. But I also think that when you're a kid growing up in those environments, Yes, they do create a kind of a refuge or a place where you get a greater understanding of Blackness and of your people and of what our concerns are in the moment and what they have been in the past. I mean actually barber shops are probably not like this now, but I’ve probably read every Jet magazine there ever was, because you sit in a barber shop and that’s the only thing there: the music you hear, the conversation you hear, and the Jet magazines sitting around. So, I do think that's true. But I also think that when you're a Queer kid growing up, you come understanding that at the church or at the barber shop, you can't say everything that you think, or every you can't say everything that you see, you can't. You can't reveal everything you know, even about the relationships you see at the church or at the barber shop. I also think it’s very difficult to have an understanding at a young age, that there are things you see and sort of intuitively know you should not be talking about.

And I think for me, that knowledge had a lot to do with why I'm a poet and not a fiction writer, and not a memoirist, or essayist, or nonfiction writer. I think I had that whole experience that we think of, maybe I can even say that we take for granted, you know, from the barbershop, to the church. And at the same time, I needed to make use of the language that I was hearing at church and make use of the language that I was hearing at the barber shop. I think I'm a poet because I knew, that while I was making use of that language, I would have to say things that you don't say in small talk, you don't say in the line when you’re checking out and you talk to the people in front of you and behind you, maybe, but that's not the same language as the language of poetry because the language of poetry is like, I don't think it's secret, but I do think it's internal. You know, I think when I'm reading poems I really love, it's me, and one other voice in the room, you know. When I make my poems, I want it to be me and a reader.

D: So, speaking of that reader, how much weight you put on the audience when you create? Is the audience a big factor?

J: Well, the audience is a big factor, but not because I'm thinking about them. It's because I think my audience is me. When I'm making poems, I just want to make the poems I haven't read that I wish I was reading. You know, I read a lot of poems, Dom. I mean, definitely when I was

in school, I was reading poems all the time. When I was in graduate school, I was reading a book of poetry a day, no exaggeration. Me and Roger Reeves, the poet, we were talking about this how, you know, now there are all these books by Black poets that come out in a year's time. But me and Roger, we would read all the time. There was a time recently, where you could read all of the books by all of the Black poets. You could read all the Black books in a year, and we would. We would literally be like, “Oh, you check out that new Terrence Hayes? No, I'm still on that Natasha Trethewey.”

D: Just like albums and music.

J: Yeah! I mean, still today I read poems and I get brokenhearted. I'd be crying. I love it. You know, poets.org comes up. I'm reading for magazines. This Chris Kondrich book that I just read is called Valuing. I think it’s a great book. So, I have that experience of reading those books and reading those poems, and yet I know I'm a poet, because that's not satisfying to me. Right? There's still something out there that I'm looking for. Part of the reason why I'm reading all these poems isn't just because I like poetry. It’s because I'm trying to find something, and I keep looking, and it's not there. So, when I'm writing my poems, I'm trying to make that poem. I'm trying to make those poems. I'm trying to write that book. I'm trying to over and over again, put in this world, the poems I wish existed. So yeah, I think about audience, but I think about me as the audience. I think, why isn't there a poem that does this? Why don't poems do that? Why aren't there poems about this subject? Why don't poems start this way? Is it possible to have a poem end this way? So, I don't think about like people buying books or I don't think about people in an auditorium watching me read a poem. I only think, “has this poem been a poem I've never seen before.” And that's what I'm thinking about when I'm writing and revising poems.

D: Let me add that extra piece of the puzzle that's missing, and only I can provide.

J: Exactly, because subjects, themes, and emotions are not really going to change. Joy is going be joy. You know, happiness is happiness. Sadness is sadness. I can make a list of traumatic experiences that I know about and that I have experienced, but none of them are secret to anybody. No matter how traumatic those experiences are, to me, they are not unique to me. So, when I write a poem, yeah, I'm making use of all those things, it's got to be the way that only Jericho Brown could do it.

And that's what I think makes the difference. Often, I'll go and I'll hear people read poems, and they're fine poems, but they ultimately say what I already know. And the question I have is, how do I say what even I don't know? I'm trying to surprise myself. I'm trying to say things when I'm writing where I'm like, “Whoa, where'd that come from? Is that true?” So that's, that's really my goal. It’s real discovery and real investigation. It's a real sense of not knowing for me.

D: So, when you’re creating, is there a certain type of ambiance that you need to create within your creative space? Do you have a certain routine that you go through when you’re in the creative process?

J: I think I'm better at making poems when I have a routine about my life. Lately, I haven’t. Right now, it's not so great because I'm still on tour. Generally, yeah, I have a way of living. The only thing I need in order to write poems is quiet. I just need to be quiet. I don’t need a bunch of noise. I don’t need the TV on. I don’t need any music. I just need to be quiet, but other than that, I don't have a thing. I mean, when I'm at my best, although I haven't been, I like to know I'm eating right, and I like to know I'm exercising. If a day went as I would have it, I would wake up and eat and then work on my writing. Well, depending I mean, you know, I wake up, do burpees, eat, and work on my writing until I get hungry again, which is usually two hours for me. Then when I get hungry again, I eat again. Then I do whatever else the day asked me to do.

D: So you’re a morning writer.

J: Yeah, well, I think that's true, except that's only a first. I am a morning writer. That is true, but only when I am at the beginning of what turns out to be a project. I don't think about myself, like, I'm working on a project, but I just think I'm making poems. Then after a while, I will work on poems to a point where I have a certain number of pages. Yeah, first, I'm just playing and I'm playing to fail by the way. I'm not playing to win. I 'm playing with the hopes that I can't do something, because the ability to not be able to do something is actually what helps me try to do it. If that makes sense. It helps me figure out what I'm interested in. If there's a dish you can cook, that you think you cook well or better than anybody else—if you remember the first time you made it, it was not good, right?

And so, when I'm coming back to writing, and I'm first working on something, I'm patient with myself, and I'm just having a good time enjoying language. I'm not trying to make poems. I'm trying to figure out what poems will sound like now. Given whatever I've done most recently, or the entirety of my life: now, what are poems? What do you need Jericho? And failing actually helps you understand how to get to the point you are where you make that thing that you make better than anybody else. You know, you make a dish now that'll get you a ring. You know what I'm saying? And so that's what I'm trying to do. I want a proposal. But at first, I'm not thinking about that I'm sort of figuring it out. What am I interested in? Failing enough, lets me know, I'm interested in questions and poems. I'm interested in in abstractions. I'm interested in long lines. This is what I'm interested in now. And after I figure that out, then I'm trying to push to them. That means I made a lot of mess. Then I work on that mess and I try to push that mess toward real life poems. I try to turn mess into art.

Then, because I've been doing that for a while, I look up and I have 60 pages. Let's not even say 60, let's say 40, 30 pages of that. Then I started thinking, “Well, so what am I thinking about?” I've been writing these poems where I'm like, “what's a persona poem?” or, “what does it mean to have a poem make a list in the middle? Do you know what I mean? I'm sort of thinking about that conceptually.

But then after a while, sooner or later, I have to think, “What are all of these damn poems about? What is their subject? What is their theme?” That's when the morning thing goes away because then I'm writing all the time. Because then I'm like, I need to see this from every direction I can possibly see it. Then I’m up at four in the morning. I’m up at three in the morning or two in the morning, still writing.  I'm actually a night owl. I'm not a morning person in any way. No. I mean, I'm always fighting to get out of the bed. I'm always angry. I'm sort of grateful. Like, I wake up. I'm like, Oh, thank you, Jesus. I'm getting that out of the bed, and then I'm like, “There goes the floor. Whenever you're ready, Jericho. Hallelujah. There goes the floor.” By the time I make it to the kitchen, I'm rolling my eyes. [Jericho laughs].

D: So, when you’re in the process of creating, you said you don’t realize you’re in the process of creating a collection at the time? I heard somewhere that’s what you did with the The Tradition. It just came together.

J: All three.

D: All three books?

J: Yeah. I write poems. Yeah. I mean, I write books, as a result of having written poems. I think the weaknesses of people a lot of people's books is that they put the cart before the horse. They put the books before the poems. And if you put the book before the poems, then your poems are going to be boo. You'll have a lot of great ideas, but you're not going have any great poems in your book. No tea, no shade, I write individually. I mean, Barry Gordy is like, “here's a hit record. That's a hit record, no doubt about it. Let these kids buy that hit record. Let's sing our hit records on tour.” Do you know what I'm saying? So, when I'm giving a reading, I'm like, “Oh, here goes all of my poems.

You know, I give readings the way Janet Jackson gives a concert–– here goes the catalog. Do you know what I'm saying? Let's remind everybody that I have had hit records since 1984. I think Janet Jackson is either ‘84 or ‘86 with Control. Anyway. So that's what I'm doing. So, if I can just make poem after poem? Yes, there's a point at which I have made poem after poem, and I've been working on poems like a crazy person I'm sort of looking at the poem as individuals. And if I can look at the poems as individuals, I can make them as complex as they need to be and let them have their life. And then I can say, what do these poems have in common? Oh, poems have in common the fact that I've been thinking about violence against Black people committed by the police. These poems have in common, the fact of sexual assault, sexual coercion, and rape. You know what I mean? So, I'm looking at what I've been thinking about––Greek myth. “I've been thinking about Greek myth? Oh okay.” Do you see? “Oh, wait the pastoral flowers, trees, rabbits. Why am I thinking about that?” So, I look at that, right? And I try to think, what do those things have to do with each other, right? And then I say, “wait, this poem is not about none of that stuff. This is just the poem about shoestrings. And it ain't got nothing to do with any of that stuff like that.” That girl goes. Bye. See you later. See you in the next book [Jericho laughs].

D: Yeah.

J: You must be from another direction. And I say, “Oh, well, I have a lot of poems about this one thing, but not enough. So maybe I need to look at that, and the next time I'm writing something, I'll push in that direction. Because that thing could be more filled out. It's got to be included in this thing that's starting to look like a book. You have to have poems to do that. Then I start thinking about order. Okay, well, what order do I put these in? And what do they have to do with each other? And how does that order show that these things actually do have that to do with each other?

D: Do you print out each poem and put them on the floor and then rearrange them?

J: I do that with each line. The line is the unit. The poem is not the unit. People think the poem is the unit, the line is the unit. The duplexes were made of lines. Like every Duplex in The Tradition is made of lines going as far back as 1998 or ‘99. You know, every line I ever wrote that was 9 to 11 syllables. I printed it out and put it on that table, that bench, and this floor, and that table in the kitchen. I literally, on that bench would say, “this is the line that's the beginning of this duplex.” I took all the other lines and put it under that line to see which one was going to be my couplet. Why not? I want the best couplet I can make.

D: Everything is intentional.

J: Yeah, so after I make the best couplet that I can make in a duplex. I know that the second line of that couple is the first line of the next couplet. Then I do it all over again. I take that line and I say, “Okay, let's make another couplet.” And I take every line from my line bank all over my house, and I put it under there. There are two poems in the book––one is “Foreday in the Morning,” one is “Hero.” Those poems were literally made by me taking every line that I had written, that mentions my mother and is more than 11 syllables. So, I took all those lines, and I put them all over the house, and I'm like, “Oh, I like this line is the first line. This is the best line I got. This is a last line.” If it’s the best line I have and it's about my mama in this major poem I'm making about my mama, that's the last line. Then I say, “Oh, this is the second-best line. This is the second most original. This is the second weirdest line.” That's the first line. All the other lines, I put down associatively. Now does that make sense when I've done that? No, but I put it in my computer, and I have something to work on. I work on that toward the poem.

D: So usually, you don't create one poem at one time?

J: No, I do. Okay, I do that too, but that's the thing—

D: It’s not one particular way.

J: Right, no. For me, if I think that my poems have to be made, because I sat at a computer, and I wrote a first line, and I wrote all the way down to the last line, I will be waiting on poems forever. I'm not going to wait on poems. In the Notes app on my phone, if I get a line, I write it down. I wrote a line in the wrong place the other night and I hope I saved it. If you're a poet, you have you overhear people saying stuff that sounds good. You think up stuff, and things come to you however, they come to you, if you just have a file, I have a file in this phone that literally says, “Lines.”

Actually, it says “new lines” because I used all my other ones in my last book. I write them down as I get them, and I don't care. And then when Sunday comes, I dump all those lines into a Word document. I, Jericho Brown, quite literally say to myself, “this line, over the last six days of my life, has been the line that is strangest and most unique.” And I put it at the bottom of that page. “This line has been second strangest and most unique over the last six days,” and I put it at the top of the page. Then I organized the rest of those lines associatively. Then after that, I have a piece of text that doesn't make sense, but I have something to work with. If you're looking at a blank page, and you're like, “now I'm going to write the poem about the time I—blank,” you're either going to keep looking at a blank page, or you're only going to write the poem about the time you—blank. You're only going to write the poem about the first time, you may love or the first time you drove a car. That's all you're gonna do, and you will say everything you know about it, which means you won't be surprised, you will not make a discovery, you will not do any investigation. So, then people reading the poem will find out an experience you had, but the people reading the poem won't have transcendence, because you didn't have it. You only had a memory, an anecdote. Do you see what I mean? But if I'm looking at a mess, I don't have to imagine I put the mess together. I can imagine I got the mess from whomever. So, when I'm looking at the mess, I say, “Who is your speaker?” I don't assume it’s me, because I've gotten these lines from all kinds of places.

There's a poem in my first book called “Summertime.” It's a poem in the voice of Janis Joplin. And one of the things that I say in that poem is, “I'm such an ugly girl, I'm such an ugly girl.” I got that line. And I kept because it sounded good to me. When I wrote that line down, I knew it wasn't me. But it was an opportunity. Who is this? Who do I know of who would say, “I'm such an ugly girl, I'm such a ugly girl?” Oh, all these lines, no matter what, all these lines must be in the voice of Janis Joplin. It’s the only person I know. So, then I take lines and I start finessing them. I take what I have in front of me, and I start finessing it. So, it's a persona poem, and she says those things, and then I can work on it, right?

Sometimes it is me. Sometimes I say something that turns out to be a very personal thing, and I know that experience in a way that I don't know that anybody else knows it. So, then I say, “okay, revise your poem because this mess—you need to fix it. Because it makes no sense. These are just some lines.” But then if I do that, then I always have writing to do. I always have something to work on. You know what I mean? So, for me, I'm very aware when I'm working on a poem, when I'm working on a book, when I'm working on an article, when I'm working on anything, I’m very aware of the fact that... don't think I'm writing because I get up and I have a poem. I think I'm writing because I show up every day to write.

D: So, I have a couple of words that I wanted to just throw out, just want to get your first response. Okay, the word I want to see your first response from it. Okay. First one is “Louisiana.”

J: Home

D: Nikki Giovanni

J: She’s like my big sister. Yeah. You know, Nikki Giovanni was saving my life. And I mean, ultimately, it must be wonderful to walk around and be Nikki Giovanni because you must have some idea of yourself as a fixture of the Black community. So, when I think about Nikki, I think, you know, Nikki Giovanni was saving my life when I was a kid when I was reading poems, and therefore she was saving hundreds of thousands of others. She saved a bunch of lives. When you look up Black poets, she’s gonna come up. I mean, living legend. And committed to us. A believer in us. I went to a school in New Orleans–– Dillard—I told you this, but when we lost our library, Nikki Giovanni sent books to Dillard after Hurricane Katrina when our school was flooded. She's very special to me, and she's been so good. She's so supportive of us. She's so supportive of my work, and of telling me how to go about doing things and you know, she's a wild person. She's a wonder, you know. She's not afraid, and she's encouraging in that way. Like she encourages me to, to not be afraid.

D: You had a discussion with her not too long ago, right?

J: Yeah, yeah, it was really for the students at Emory. So, they were all there. The people who are in creative writing workshops in classes now. They're were all there. So, it was really intimate. I don't know if you went, that Saturday she did a reading at Emory, and there were people who were there three hours before the reading, to make sure they got a seat. I mean, some people didn't get seats. She read to a packed house. I didn't get to go because I was at the NAACP Image Award because The Tradition was a finalist. I didn't get to go, but I did get to do this conversation with her beforehand, which was really great, because I felt like I was introducing this poet to my students who had been so important to me when I was a student. So yeah, Nikki Giovanni is the person who told me, “never say no.” I don't think it's the best advice now because I'm too old for “never say no.” But when I look back at my life, and what people think of as successes in my life, is because I was because I said yes to every experience I could. Yeah, you gotta do it for your poems, you know? Yeah. You have to be up most all the time for your poems.