Jericho Brown Discusses Black Masculinity, Love, Atlanta With Atlanta Magazine

Elizabeth Wolfe spends a moment in conversation with Jericho Brown in advance of his reading as part of Atlanta's Decatur Book Festival. "Brown’s poetry allows him to shore up the delicacies of love with the inescapable terror of existing as a gay, black man in the South," writes Wolfe. Picking up from there: 

The concept of home is undeniably present in most of your poems. What and where is home for you?
Right now, it’s right here. I have a library downstairs where I can get a lot of reading and work done. So I always feel like I’m trying to get back to here so I can sit comfortably and learn to properly take care of myself—and properly waste my time, and properly do stuff [impulsively]. Because you can’t really live your life like that on the road, or even at the university where I work.

What does the Atlanta poetry community look like in your eyes?
It’s changing so much. Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky moved here recently and they’re teaching at Georgia Tech, and Beth Gylys, who’s a great poet, is over at Georgia State now. [Emory] just hired two new poets: Robyn Schiff and Heather Christle. But, you know, beyond the academics, there is a huge scene in Atlanta in terms of all kinds of genres of poetry—Collin Kelly, Teresa Davis. I would like for my involvement in [the Atlanta scene] to be more regular than it has been. I think now that this book has come out, I’ll be able to be more a part of it.

Why do you do what you do?
The more I do it, the more it’s really completely selfish, to be quite honest with you. For me, it’s become part of my self care, part of me being able to live in this country. It’s how I talk to myself. It’s partially how I pray. Being able to work on poems helps me walk around in the world. Being honest with myself in this room helps me deal with what I have to deal with in other rooms where I’m asked not to be honest. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

I know I’ve been changed by people’s poems, so I know there’s a possibility for people to be changed by my poems. I know that could happen, but I can’t write trying to make that happen. I don’t know what the magic is that makes that happen. I only know the magic that I can do to myself. I can do some self-sorcery.

So my job, then, is to write the best poems that I can write. Then, because I want to participate in the conversation, and because I love poetry so much, I put those poems in the world for people do with whatever they want. But once I put them in the world, my hands are off; I can’t monitor them. You have to let the poems go and really compartmentalize.

Read more at Atlanta Magazine.