![]() Where queer Black people love one another radically and ferociously. I have made it part of my own personal goal to revert that narrative and find the places where that is not true, where I do have a home. Supposedly, the church don’t want you, the Black folks don’t want you, and even the queer folk don’t want you. I grew up in a church, and more widely, we grow up on a planet where the worst thing you can be is queer. No matter how many prizes I win, if I start writing horrendous poetry, people are going to be happy to let each other know “oh he is writing horrendous poetry.” Now more than ever, it is important that I maintain my discipline and my craft as a poet.Īs a Southern queer Black person, how has your spirituality evolved over time and how has that evolution influenced your poetry, particularly in The Tradition?īlack people, even the most atheist of Black people, believe in the word “ancestors.” We are from a people who naturally lean in the direction of gratitude. Because the truth is no matter what, you still have to wake up the next morning and endure the tyranny of the blank page. What I tell my students is that you either need to write like you have already won every prize, or you need to write like you know for a fact you will never win any prize. Hopefully I can write without the spectre of looking for that kind of acceptance. Now that I have won the Pulitzer Prize, I’m hoping that this desire is no longer in my subconscious mind. Poetry allows us the opportunity to say whatever the hell we wanna say and not worry about anybody seeing it! But you know, if you’ve won a Pulitzer Prize, somebody out here is gonna see it! That indeed is going to get back to your mama. I don’t want to stop doing that for any accolade. My job is to write the poems of my heart and soul. That means I can’t be beholden to any institution or prize. My job as a poet is to be as free as possible. What I love about this book is that you can’t pin it down. They don’t like the fact that it is about all of the things. In the past I have been told that when I didn’t get certain, it was because certain juries or committees had a hard time pinning me down. Honestly, I think that was something that most surprised me about winning. I’m glad that the Pulitzer people recognized that something special was happening. I invented a form - who has that kind of time? I had just started a new job that required me being at work much earlier than I had before, and I didn’t expect to be doing that at the same time that I was being overtaken by these poems. Did I know that something special was happening? Yes. So did I know they were going to win a Pulitzer Prize? No, it’s like a one in 300 chance. That scared me a lot actually because you want your poems to have a proper kind of incubation so that they’re good forever. I had never really faced poems that were as contemporary as these poems are: there are poems in this book about mass shootings, about unnecessary ass police brutality, etc. I was saying things that I had never said, I was speaking in such a direct way about my own sexual assault. ![]() It’s my third book of poetry, and as I was writing it, it was the most exhilarating and exhausting experience I have ever had because I was overtaken by poetry. Well, I knew it was monumental for me because I never had an experience like it. ![]() Below, we spoke with Brown following the announcement of his award about invention, subjectivity, and the complicated, multifaceted identities we all possess. It both challenges and embraces structure in a way that is thoroughly innovative, leaving the reader breathless after every line. Brown’s work interrogates the roots of evil as it exists against Black people in America. “ some of us don’t need hell to be good.”īrown’s own artistic greatness was affirmed earlier this week when The Tradition was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, making him one of two Black, queer men recognized in this year’s awards. “ I begin with love, hoping to end there” writes Brown in his “duplex” form, which combines elements of the sonnet, the ghazal and the blues. In his third collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), Brown speaks with a veracity and tenderness akin to Southern gospel, condemning the normalization of terror on a personal and national scale while simultaneously exalting the divine that exists within all of us. Nobody is writing poetry the way Jericho Brown writes poetry.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |