A poet of witness: Jericho Brown, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. (Source: Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard University News Office)
“IT’S FUNNY winning the Pulitzer Prize in the middle of the pandemic. You can’t go out to party and shake a bunch of hands,” says Jericho Brown, winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But even as he stays at home in Atlanta in the United States, Brown, 44, has suddenly found the world reaching out to him. Since the announcement of the award, he has been giving back-to-back interviews. “I have never talked to so many people from across the world in such a short period of time before,” Brown says, over the telephone.
Brown’s win — just like that of fellow Black gay winner, Michael R. Jackson for his off-Broadway musical A Strange Loop — seems to symbolise the triumph of a community. The first Black gay poet to win the honour for his third poetry collection, The Tradition (2019, Copper Canyon Press), Brown is also the director of the creative writing program at Emory University. Before the news of his win broke, he had been busy working on some essays about growing up in Louisiana and his work life. “There is a notion that in the United States you can get what you want if you work hard enough. In the essays, I wonder how true that is in a country where people work very hard but barely get by,” he says. If things were normal, he would have headed out for a drag show, a karaoke session or to a strip club to celebrate his Pulitzer win. But, in the new normal, Brown did the next best thing: introspect and meditate. “I did it with the same intensity that I would have partied with,” he says, bursting into a guffaw.
The interplay between the other and the self has been the hallmark of Brown’s poetry. Part of what he reflected on after the win was the significance of being a poet in this particular moment of history. “Poetry is about resilience. It holds out hope because it changes our minds. That can lead to a change of action,” he says. His win comes 70 years after the African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer for Annie Allen (1949). “Brooks’ works made way for the books that I am able to bring in this world,” says Brown, who dedicates one of his poems to her. Between them, six Black poets, including Rita Dove (1987) and Yusef Komunyakaa (1994), have won the award. Like Dove, Brown is interested in exploring “the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallised details we all hinge our lives on.”
Born as Nelson Demery III in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown’s landscaper parents did yard work. His childhood memories are of going to the Baptist church with his deeply religious parents and his father beating up his mother. Having discovered his sexual orientation early, Brown kept thinking of committing suicide. All of that is in the past. He has changed his name and learnt to live with his many identities — a Southerner, a gay and a Black man, blending them all into a single, cohesive identity: a poet. In his poems, Brown dwells on the contentious relationship with his father, the quiet submission of his mother, and the vulnerabilities of being a Black man in America. In As a human being, he writes about how he fought “your father and won, marred him/ He’ll have a scar he can see all/ Because of you/ And your mother/ The only woman you ever cried for…”
In his writing, he adheres to the tradition of American poets like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson in the same measure as he follows in the footsteps of Brooks or Dove. His poems in The Tradition — on a wide range of subjects like Blackness, queerness, fatherhood, legacy, worship, and trauma — capture the quests of survival and beauty amid cruelty and violence. There is also a deep undercurrent of politics that runs through them. In Stand, he writes, “I’m sure/Somebody died while/We made love. Some-/Body killed somebody/Black. I thought then/Of holding you/As political act.” “When I write, I am not trying to make political statements. But I do know that a political statement will be made because that’s the history of poetry all over the world,” he says. An ardent admirer of former US President Barack Obama, Brown is, however, quick to point out that there had been other Black people in the US who were “capable and smart enough” for the job. “He was the first Black President, but he was not the only one we could’ve had,” he says.
Brown grapples with his sexual identity, racial injustice, normalisation of terror and naturalisation of inequality in his work. The increasing number of hate crimes against Black men in the US comes up often in his poems. “I am a they in most of America,” he writes in Stake. “Sometimes you is everybody,” he writes in another poem. Brown’s previous collections include Please (2008), which explored the intersection of love and violence, and The New Testament (2014), which meditated on race, sexuality and faith. “There is an amount of tenderness in all my poems. No matter how much steeped in violence the poem might be, it restores tenderness because that, too, is a part of the human condition. If I am a poet of witness, then I can’t only witness a tragedy, I am a poet who can also see joy,” he says. Often, this joy is to do with love. “I begin, with love, hoping to end there,” reads one of his poems.
In The Tradition, Brown invents a new poetic form called duplex, which weaves together elements of the sonnet, blues and ghazal. Brown, who listens to a lot of ghazals, besides songs by Michael Jackson, Diana Ross and Stevie Wonder, says it was born of his interest in linking forms that could encompass different kinds o fidentities. “A poem is a gesture toward home,” reads one of such poem. Does his poetry take him home? “What a poem really should do is lend access to all our experiences. It should be honest about all the forms walking around in you,” says Brown, who has been living with HIV since 2012. In one of his poems, he refers to his body as “a temple in disrepair”, in another, he writes of being “consumed by a single diagnosis of health”.
His illness has long made him aware of the uncertainty of life but the pandemic has been an eye-opener. The US response to it, he says, has been “embarrassing and humiliating”. President Donald Trump has recently asserted that COVID-19 will “go away at some point without a vaccine” but Brown knows how far from truth that is. In the poem Virus, he writes, ““I want you/ To heed that I am still here/ Just beneath your skin and in/ Each organ/ The way anger dwells in a man/ Who studies the history of his nation…If I can’t leave you/ Dead, I’ll have/You vexed.”