Remix: Jericho Brown Mitigates Violence with Tenderness
"I realized I have to live the poems. I want to live like the work I'm making."
Hi friends,
I have a practice when I teach: I tend to start classes by asking my students to tell me about something that’s bringing them delight. It can be big and existential but mundane is even better. They made chocolate chip cookies for the first time and the cookies actually tasted good; they hit a traffic jam that sent them on a detour through a cool little town that they had fun exploring; it’s burger day in the dining hall. (Right now I’m teaching undergrads. Burger day is Thursday.) I tell them that we do this because despite the stresses, horrors, and heartbreaks that go on day-to-day in their lives and the world at large, delight is also hanging around— and we should cheer each other on when we get the cookies right.
My delight this week was that the poet Jericho Brown was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Grant (aka the “Genius Grant”), among many other fascinating and deserving people. I love to read the list of MacArthur grantees every year when it drops— it’s an almost absurd prize in terms of prestige and financial award, and it feels good to see people who (for the most part) work quietly for decades in their own spheres receive recognition and investment.
So this week, I listened again to the interview with did with Jericho in 2021. I was stunned all over again by the depth, humor and urgency of the ideas he introduces here. Like this:
I'm always trying to mitigate violence with tenderness. I'm always trying to look at the violence for what it really is, and the violence is there because of fear. All violence rises out of fear. If I can be honest about the fact that I'm fearful, then I can also be honest about the fact of why that fear comes up at all. And fear comes up because of love, because of our need for safety, because of wanting to stay with who we want to stay with that we love or wanting to be in love. And because we have these desires, they also come with fears. In my own poems, I'm not just thinking about that for myself, but I'm thinking about that for the world. I'm thinking about where love and violence intersect, and I keep doing that because I keep trying to talk to the guy in me that wants to blow stuff up. Which is normal, by the way: Baldwin said this, that to be conscious is also to be rageful.
Whew.
This interview also contains some of my favorite minutes we’ve ever recorded in the history of the show. Two of them happen about halfway through, when Jericho says, "I realized I have to live the poems. I want to live like the work I'm making." To explain what that means, he reads aloud a poem from his first collection— one of my favorites of all time. It’s not one he reads aloud much anymore, to my knowledge, and to hear him read it and then talk about living into it, was a gift.
Just for fun, we excerpted that part of the interview here.
Jericho Brown Reads “Another Elegy”
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-Jordan
