Brotherhood, Constraint, Resolution: An Interview with Jericho Brown on The New Testament
Interview w/ Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. 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. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Erin Armstrong: First, I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to speak with us. I was introduced to your work when you were a visiting author for a writing weekend at Georgia Regents University a couple of years ago, and I was struck by how musical it is. You mentioned in a July 2014 interview for the Loggernaut Reading Series, “I literally refused to write the words “song, ” “voice, ” “tune, ” etc., in anything on which I was working.”
In your new collection, The New Testament, how difficult was this constraint on yourself? Since you do use these words (pages 18, 19, 21, 29, 41 etc.) was it a conscious decision to add them? After giving yourself this limitation towards sound, did you find yourself trying to use words that might mimic or bring to mind sound in some way?
Jericho Brown: Thank you for asking me to do this, Erin. I love answering questions as it gives me the chance to better articulate for myself what I’m thinking. I sometimes don’t know what is on my mind until I’m asked a question that leads me to see the truth of my own thoughts. Constraints, formal and otherwise, can work this way as well when composing. Constraints can point us toward saying truth we may not otherwise have the chance to say.
As an artist, I’ll always be inventing constraints for myself that allow me to turn toward knowledge I have but don’t know I have. Then, to test the value of that knowledge, I’ll break the constraints here and there that I’ve set for myself.
Though I didn’t want to write as directly about sound in The New Testament as I did inPlease, I do believe that every poem is—and should be—about sound.
EA: There is a seeming absence of female figures in the book. Of course, there’s Angel and the narrator’s mother, but otherwise they’re sparse. What role did these women play in your writing, and how large are their roles meant to be?
JB: The New Testament is a book about brotherly love in a nation that criminalizes brotherhood and love between men. In order to discuss these things, the poems also had to ask question about what masculinity and manhood are or are not. I’m concerned that we live in a world where one’s manhood is so often measured by what kind of dominance that one has over women. The women in the book are central to its making and the proper reading of it. I don’t know that there are more than five main characters in the book. Two of them are women. Two to three doesn’t seem “sparse” to me, especially if they are two strong black women who aren’t as confused as the male characters in the book seem to me to be.
EA: One thing that struck me was the shame throughout–– the shame the reader feels at times and the shame the characters feel. What I found to be one of the most interesting things about this, and I loved the work more for it, was that homosexuality didn’t come off as one of those shamed aspects. It had this celebratory, triumphant tone in most of your references that, while reading as a possible negative for the narrator in the beginning, comes off as strong and accepting in the end. As a gay author, how did you decide to present this in The New Testament?
JB: So far, when I organize poems for a book, I do so as if I’m writing a single Shakespearean sonnet but over the course of several poems. I present a problem, then complicate that problem, then offer various possible outcomes, and then offer some sort of resolution. I imagine any gesture toward resolution after so many turns may feel quite celebratory indeed.
Also, I think it’s a good idea for me to be all the things I am. I actually recommend being gay. I’m having a great time of it and won’t allow anyone to impose their tragic assumptions on my life. The book is probably reveling in some of that feeling.
Connor Fisher: In The New Testament, I noticed that your poems use language in many different registers / capacities, whether as prophesy, as narrative, as a re-writing of Biblical passages, or as (psuedo)-confessional. How do you see these different textual functions working together to make The New Testament a unified, cohesive work of art?
JB: I think I’ve answered some of this in the last questions about structuring the book. But there is one other thing: trust. Trust, Connor. Faith. EX FIDE, FORTIS as we used to say back at Dillard.
I’m a poet, and I believe that I’m a poet and that I’m capable of all that comes with being a poet.
Hugo famously puts it this way: “Make the subject of the next sentence different from the subject of the sentence you just put down. Depend on rhythm, tonality, and the music of language to hold things together. It is impossible to write meaningless sequences. In a sense the next thing always belongs. In the world of imagination, all things belong.” And he later continues, “…when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.” So it is with what you call “different registers/capacities.”
CF: In the poem “Heart Condition,” you write: “I only want / African sense of American sound” (68). Earlier in the poem, you wrote, “I wander like any other African American, Africa / with its condition and America with its condition.” My mind initially goes to William Carlos Williams and his endeavors to typify an American lexicon and cadence, but I think that your collection refers to a different “American sound.” I’m curious about what those terms mean and how they interact with one another.
If the desire for “African sense of American sound” inhabits the collection beyond this single poem, could you explain how these terms work with one another and how they present themselves throughout the rest of the collection?
JB: Considering the context of every trap this nation sets for black people, I’m ultimately curious about how it is possible to be a black citizen without going insane enough to kill oneself or kill someone else.
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Jericho Brown is the author of two books: Please (2008) and The New Testament (2014). He is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute at the Harvard University. Jericho holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. Prior to his doctoral work, Jericho worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans. He now works as an Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing at Emory University.
Erin Armstrong Ramírez is the Managing Editor and Fiction/Creative Nonfiction Editor at GASHER Journal. Her works have appeared in or are upcoming in Haunted Waters Press, SmokeLong Quarterly, A-Minor, New World Writing, Banango Street, and The Fem. She holds an MFA from the University of Colorado-Boulder in Creative Writing.
Connor Fisher was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and currently lives in Denver, Colorado. He has an MA in English Literature from the University of Denver and an MFA in Creative Writing—Poetry from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Issue 5.1