Jericho Brown Reads Elizabeth Alexander - The New Yorker: Poetry

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[00:01]
Kevin Young
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
[00:24]
Jericho Brown
We the People shape our country's story.
[00:27]
Kevin Young
America250 is gearing up to celebrate the.
[00:30]
Jericho Brown
250Th anniversary of the founding of America's democracy by collecting and preserving diverse stories.
[00:37]
Kevin Young
From across the nation. Nominate any living person you think has a story to be preserved and celebrated for generations to come. Help tell our American story, every unique version of it.
[00:51]
Jericho Brown
Visit america250.org nominate to submit hello, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker Magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archives to read and discuss. Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine this year in honor of the New Yorker Centenary. All the poets we're featuring on this podcast also appear in the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker Store or wherever you buy books. My guest today is Jericho Brown, who received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his Colle the tradition. He's a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Welcome, Jericho. Thanks for being here.
[01:44]
Kevin Young
Hi. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Kevin. I really appreciate it.
[01:48]
Jericho Brown
Always good to see you. So the first poem you've chosen to read is when by Elizabeth Alexander. What drew you to this particular poem while you're looking through the archives and the anthology?
[01:59]
Kevin Young
I think it's the first New Yorker poem that I understood as a New Yorker poem. It's really the poem that introduced me to the fact the magazine that I was reading in doctor's offices and other kinds of waiting rooms was indeed the New Yorker. And I remember I had only recently when it come out, met Elizabeth Alexander and she had been so kind to me and there used to be this entity called the Cave Canum Liserve and on the listserv everyone there was excited. All these black poets were excited that Elizabeth Alexander had this poem in the New Yorker that was a very black poem at that time. I think it was the year 2000, maybe 2001, if I have it correct.
[02:41]
Jericho Brown
2002, in fact.
[02:42]
Kevin Young
2002. Okay, good. It would be the same year that I entered my PhD program. So it was really a time of transition, a time of beginnings, and a time that I was really 100% deciding that I was going to follow this life and become a poet. And one of those little spurs that pushed me on was finding this poem in the New Yorker.
[03:05]
Jericho Brown
Well, why don't we hear the poem? Here's Jericho Brown reading When by Elizabeth Alexander.
[03:12]
Kevin Young
When in the early 1980s, the black men were divine Spoke French, had read everything Made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce Listened artfully to boyfriend troubles Operatically declaimed boyfriend troubles had been to Bamaco and Bahia Knew how to clear bad humors from a house had been to Baldwin's villa in St. Paul drank espresso with Soyinka and Senghor Kissed hello on both cheeks Quoted Baraka's Black Art Fuck poems and they are useful. Tore up the disco dance floor Were gold lit, Photographed well Did not smoke, said Chow Then all the men's faces were spotted.
[04:06]
Jericho Brown
That was when by Elizabeth Alexander, which was published in the April 15, 2002 issue of the New Yorker. That's such a powerful poem, isn't it?
[04:16]
Kevin Young
Something.
[04:16]
Jericho Brown
And a sonnet. No one can sonnet like Elizabeth can. But then also just those sounds when you were reading it, you brought them out, those B sounds, starting with black men, but then also boyfriend troubles, Boyfriend troubles, Bamako and Bahia, bad humors from a house. I mean, suddenly you're in this music and you get swept away, which I think is one of the points. And then what do you make of this horrible gap, let's call it. And then that last line, which is so powerful.
[04:45]
Kevin Young
I saw the death. I saw that death of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s, which really took so many men away from us, but really completely wiped out an entire generation of black gay poets who. Otherwise I probably would have been getting on their nerves and they would have been getting on mine. You know, they are here for me in word, but I never got to know them in presence. When I think in particular of a poet like Melvin Dixon, who I think this poem really centers on. Elizabeth Alexander and Melvin Dixon had a pretty famous friendship with one another. And I think he was in many ways mentor to her, or she saw him that way. But poets like him, filmmakers like Marlon T. Riggs, poet performers like Essex Hemphill, you know, these are the people that are like my fathers and my grandfathers, but they weren't necessarily here. And yet I have them on video and I have their books and I have their poems, and that has always meant the world to me. So coming across this poem, which ultimately is an elegy for an entire generation of black men, coming across this poem really assured me that what I was reaching toward and what seemed to be reaching after me was a real thing, was a real piece of literature that had happened and was a fine influence to have in the world. I'm really taken, actually, you know, when you think about this as a sonnet, about how the second half of the poem is really a syllabus, go look these people up. Read them.
[06:26]
Jericho Brown
Right.
[06:26]
Kevin Young
And that bibliography seems to me to be created by this generation of men who are saying, go see who these people are. And Elizabeth Alexander is, in a way, disseminating that message to the rest of the world through a platform like the New Yorker. So that was very. It was just very important to me. Can I just tell you this one other thing that I love about this? Please. I love that in spite of the fact that this seems a kind of free verse sonnet, it rhymes. This is not a free verse sonnet. You know, spotted rhymes with gold. Lit, obviously. Troubles rhymes with troubles. Sauce rhymes with house. Baraka rhymes with bahia. Do you know what I mean? Right, right.
[07:13]
Jericho Brown
It's a sonic wonder. I mean, it absolutely is.
[07:16]
Kevin Young
And so throughout this poem, she has thought of ways that in spite of the fact that the rhyme is scattered in ways that we do not expect, which might be one way of thinking about the queer life, in spite of that, there is a oneness that we associate with the sonnet. And that oneness is driving this poem forward through sound and through rhyme. It's just a gem. It's really brilliant. It's a poem that I know is good because when first I read it, I felt pride. You know, that feeling when you read something or you see something, you know, we have that feeling also when we see Simone Biles do flips. Right. It's as if we have done. I did those flips. Do you know what I mean?
[07:58]
Jericho Brown
Right.
[07:59]
Kevin Young
I remember when Serena Williams would win yet another match, you would feel like you had won the match. And that's the similar feeling that I had to this poem. And maybe a barometer by which we can talk about the efficacy of poems, period. Right, right. It's something we don't get to talk about in classroom is what kind of feeling can come through a poem in terms of pride? And I'm always very proud of this poem and very proud of Elizabeth for having written it. Elizabeth Alexander is just a very special person in our world. And I do Think at the core of her being a poet but also leading the Mellon foundation at this point in her life. But also, as you have, having been in the academy and chaired departments of African American studies. It's a really big career. But it's also a career that mimics the careers we used to read about that black people had where, you know, you read about Maya Angelou being a trained conductor and.
[08:58]
Jericho Brown
Busboy and the poet.
[09:00]
Kevin Young
Or Langston Hughes, like Langston Hughes literally seems to have had every job that anyone could ever have.
[09:05]
Jericho Brown
A plunger. That's my favorite one in Paris. You know, like a dishwasher.
[09:10]
Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I really. I get excited about her as a figure because she is with us presently. But that career is a historical one. And not just for black people, but for black women in particular. And I always appreciate her announcement of herself as a race woman. At that time, during that period, I had never heard anyone. It was a phrase you read, but you didn't hear anybody say that they were a race man or a race woman, you know? And I remember when I first met Elizabeth Alexander, she had given a talk in which she said that she also. The day I met Elizabeth Alexander, introduced me to all these black poets that I had never heard of. Because of her, I knew who Forrest. I knew who Melvin Dixon was already. But because of her, I knew who Forest Tamer was. Another black poet who became so important to me and whose work I love. And that's who she is as a person. She's always spreading and introducing and giving. Which is why the job she has now is such a great job for her in particular.
[10:15]
Jericho Brown
Sure. I wanna linger over the poem just a hair more because I think you nail it with this bibliography idea. It does both. It name checks people in that way that I think is so powerful. But she also manages to embody them. And the black men break. We're divine. And that divinity that she's saying in both the vernacular way, which I love, but then also in this kind of afterlife way. I think that tension there is so powerful. And I can point to moments throughout the poem knew how to clear bad humors from a house. There's more happening there, right, than just that thing that I know that they knew how to do. But also, these bad humors have taken over. They are in that gap in the line that we're talking about those deaths. I wonder how you see that as well.
[11:07]
Kevin Young
Well, what I'm really taken by early on in this poem is that if we look at this poem as a sonnet Right, let's say the first quatrain, things are personal, right? Things start in this way where obviously the speaker is saying, I had these experiences with the black men, the divine black men. So already in the first two lines of the poem, she's made black men heavenly. Isn't that something that lovely to read in a poem? Oh, thank God, you know, she makes black men heavenly. And you're right, things get as specific as that green peppercorn sauce sort of pointing to their ability, right? The clearing bad humors from the house, of course, I imagine the opportunity to have someone smudge your home, right? Or get the bad spirits out. That these people had all of that ability and that it got as personal as I could tell them about my boyfriend troubles, which I really love about the first four, five lines in this poem. And then the poem begins to move across time and space. It's gotta go to Bahia, it's gotta go to the Baldwin Villa in St. Paul. And then once we get Baldwin's name, we begin to get those names, the Baldwin, the Soyinka, the Senghor, and even the Baraka, which for me becomes very important because she ends up setting these queer black men in the same position as these more known, probably straight historical figure black men, including Nobel laureates, Do you know what I mean? And so suddenly set with them, they drink with them, they eat with them, they go to their homes. I also love just how community oriented that part of the poem becomes and how it speaks to the ways in which black art is always connected. And then after that moment, things turn again to the party tore up the disco dance floor where gold lit, photographed well, did not smoke, said Chile. I was just mentioning to you before we started this podcast, the first time I ever heard somebody say the word chow, I didn't think people really said it. I just thought it was something people did to say goodbye on a TV show like Dynasty or something. So. And this poem encapsulates the fact that people really did say chow.
[13:29]
Jericho Brown
And it's a kind of moment in the poem where it's so artful. They did not smoke. So there's a kind of moment of health. And then they say ciao. They say bye, goodbye. And then, oh, that.
[13:43]
Kevin Young
And that's why the epiphany in this poem is not just with the last line, but also with the strophe break, the stanza break. Right after that 13th line, there's this break where that child, that goodbye becomes embodied through the white space in the poem. And then we get that single line Then all the men's faces were spotted, which tells us so much of what we need to know and what we already know. And it sort of checks our memory and our love and our understanding of history. There is a 100% illusion made in that moment, and yet it's not an allusion to a particular piece of literature. It's an allusion to a time that if you don't know, you ought to know. You ought to know what we lost, and you ought to know that what we lost was in relationship to these other things, including the clearing of bad humors to your house, to the learning of Amiri Baraka's poem. Isn't it lovely? Also, you said, I think, 2002, and New York has got this poem quoting Amiri Baraka's poem Black Art. And it's got this nice little cuss word in it in that note. It's like, wow. They published that in the New Yorker in 2002. So she becomes also a vehicle for all of language, including the profane.
[15:04]
Jericho Brown
Right, right. Well, it's the divine and the profane. It has a whole of a life.
[15:09]
Kevin Young
Yeah.
[15:09]
Jericho Brown
And I was wondering if you think of it as a love poem.
[15:12]
Kevin Young
Oh, I do. I mean, but that's sort of cheating. Cause I think every poem's a love poem.
[15:17]
Jericho Brown
You think every poem's a love poem?
[15:19]
Kevin Young
I think, yeah. What poem? Have you read a poem that's not a love poem?
[15:22]
Jericho Brown
I want to hear more about this.
[15:24]
Kevin Young
Really. Oh, I don't even think it's. I think that if I were to say every poem is a political poem. We take that much easier nowadays, I think. But every poem's a love poem because somebody just had to wr. Somebody just had to get it right. And it was out of love of that moment of writing, out of love for that poem itself. And the back of every poem is love is a desire to get it right, to convey it, to embody clarity, to make music out of words. That's all love stuff right there. No matter whether or not you're crying while you write the poem. And in this particular poem, while there is a great deal of sorrow at the end, this poem is a part poem. In the early 1980s, the black men were divine, spoke French, had read everything. Had read everything. Do you know what I mean? Made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce. Like, there's this way that this poem is just a good time until you get to that last line. And that last line is, I miss you. I love you. And I really love how that I miss you, I love you, rather than getting told to us in the abstract, is told to us through image. Then all the men's faces were spotted, and we have to imagine that. And some of us have to remember that when all the men's faces were spotted. So, yeah, it's definitely, no doubt about it, 100% a love poem. And I have to say I love this boyfriend troubles moment in this poem and that she repeats. She knows I love it, so she repeats it.
[17:04]
Jericho Brown
Yeah, she gives it to you twice, like someone's telling them and someone declaring, declaiming. I love declaiming, which is, you know, there's a performative quality. Not that it isn't true, but that it's like larger than life.
[17:16]
Kevin Young
I mean, singing it right operatically declaimed, you know, singing boyfriend troubles. I just, I love that and I love the intimacy of that and the understanding of that. There are only so many situations under which you are telling someone your boyfriend trouble. That has to be a certain kind of intimacy. And she knows that and employs that information in this poem. That's the kind of thing I'm after when I'm reading and writing poems. I want to say intimacy by showing you intimacy. And I think Elizabeth Alexander manages that.
[17:58]
Jericho Brown
More from my conversation with Jericho Brown after the break.
[18:07]
Richard Lawson
Working at Vanity Fair, our entire lives revolve around press screenings, premieres, film festivals, Q&As, set visits, award ceremonies. Not that we're complaining, it's pretty great. But you know that feeling when you see a new film or show and you want to talk about it with everyone immediately? We feel that all the time. Yes, we sure do. I'm Richard Lawson. I'm David Canfield. And I'm Rebecca Ford. On Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's flagship entertainment podcast, we discuss today's most exciting films and TV shows. David and I are fresh off attending the LA premiere last night. Break down the latest developments in the awards races. Gomez and Grande split the pop girly vote and catch up with Hollywood's biggest movers and shakers. Demi Moore, welcome to the show.
[18:49]
Jericho Brown
Thank you for having me.
[18:50]
Richard Lawson
Whether you're a casual viewer or an industry buff, this is the podcast for you. New episodes are published every Tuesday and Thursday. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.
[19:08]
Jericho Brown
Welcome back.
[19:09]
Kevin Young
Thank you. Glad to be back.
[19:11]
Jericho Brown
Now, in our May 27, 2013 issue, the new Yorker published your poem Coliseum, which we'll hear you read momentarily. Is there anything you'd like to tell us about the poem?
[19:21]
Kevin Young
First, I'll Just say that. It was the first poem that ever got in the New Yorker that I wrote. And it was completely engineered by my good friend and my colleague at Emory, Tiffany Yannick. She created this world at Drew University, where she was teaching at the time, where rather than a poet and a fiction writer, Reid, she had convinced her colleague to allow two poets to read. Tiffany, by the way, is a fiction writer, and she invited me to read with Paul Muldoon. And she told me, if Paul Muldoon, who was the poetry editor at the New Yorker at the time, if he hears you read, you'll get a poem in the New Yorker. I promise. I'll never forget. She said that. I said, okay, Tiffany, whatever. I'll come do the reading. And I gave the reading and I met Paul, and we had a good time. We had dinner. You know, all the things that happen at a reading at a university happen. And then the next day, Paul Muldoon sent me an email saying, I would love to see one of your lovely poems for the New Yorker. And I remember he said, lovely poems. And I was so flattered by that. I was so happy. And I said, tiffany, look, it worked. And then he proceeded to reject poem after poem after poem that I sent him.
[20:35]
Jericho Brown
And then one day, they were lovely enough, one day. It sounds like he did take this poem.
[20:40]
Kevin Young
So this is Coliseum. You know, it just has some really personal excitement for me because I remember sending Paul Muldoon poem after poem after poem until he took this one and feeling some pride in it because he finally took this one. I'll read it, Coliseum. I don't remember how I hurt myself. The pain mine long enough for me to lose the wound that invented it. As none of us knows the beauty of our own eyes until a man tells us they are why God made brown. Then that same man says he lives to touch the smoothest parts, suggesting our surface area can be understood by degrees of sadden. Him I will follow until I am as rough outside as I am within. I cannot locate the origin of slaughter, but I know how my own feels, that I live with it and sometimes use it to get the living done. Because I am what gladiators call a man in love. Love being any reminder we survived.
[21:50]
Jericho Brown
That was Coliseum by Jericho Brown. Well, one of the things I love about this poem is it, too is a love poem.
[21:57]
Kevin Young
Definitely.
[21:58]
Jericho Brown
But you say all poems are love poems, but this one I haven't seen. The one that's not makes it explicit, because I am what gladiators call a man in love. Love being Any reminder we survived. Tell me about this gladiator.
[22:13]
Kevin Young
Well, you know, I just think the love thing, the erotic thing, there is something about it that always includes the feeling of war, the feeling of conquer. There is something about it where you want to achieve, you want to make it. You want to go the long haul, you want to get where you're going. And I'm not just talking about through the sex act. Right. One of the things that I say all the time is. And one of the things that I have. I have this poem called Stand. And one of its lines, or part of the poem suggests that when you're cuddling with your lover, you feel like you're doing something. You know, it's as if you. I think in the poem, I say it's as if we planted a garden, but in actuality we were only lying in bed. But that doing, that feeling of making it. That feeling of long as we together, baby. Which makes you feel like you have sort of overcome the world in order to be with your beloved. Do you know what I mean? Or that in any situation, if I am with my beloved, that situation doesn't matter because I am with my beloved. Right. And I think that is part of why the gladiator shows up earlier in the poem, really, in terms of just the way I write earlier in the poem. I say, long enough for me to lose the wound that invented it. And I imagine that me, although I don't remember the actual act of writing this poem, me as a poet, the kind is if I have a wound earlier in the poem. Later in the poem, you're gonna get a gladiator. And I think, to be honest with you, I should also say that at some point, maybe that word gladiator was a word like captain or commander. But then the word gladiator, I think, creates more of and better of an image and more archetypal of an image. So that's the word that I settled on. Yeah. So that's the kind of thing that that word does.
[24:10]
Jericho Brown
Well, I'm interested in form as well, because this has a kind of naturalistic form. And sometimes your work has a more inherited or, you know, in the wonderful case of the many forms, you've invented a kind of invented form, right?
[24:26]
Kevin Young
Yeah.
[24:26]
Jericho Brown
But this feels a little more, like, loose in that way. I wonder about that.
[24:30]
Kevin Young
Yeah. This poem is very much a free verse poem, which is what I was working in at the. I'm still working with a kind of internal rhyme. I'm always interested in sound and interested in making music. But My goal when I was writing this poem and many of the poems in my second book, was making use of free verse in order to reach what I thought of as the sublime. I wanted to make really small poems, and I wanted those really small poems in the way of Dickinson, all the way to a figure like Lucille Clifton. I wanted those really small poems to make us feel that we had somehow reached a point of transcendence or to have in them a feeling of revelation. By the time you get to the end, there's a way that you can read a poem and by the end of the last line, you sort of feel. Even if your eyes didn't open anymore, physically, it's as if your eye has been opened. Like, oh, I see more. And I wanted to do that in that book, throughout that book. I wanted to do that through the free verse poem, really, as a kind of a homage or a modeling after so many poems that I like by people like Emily Dickinson, by Langston Hughes. I love the short poems of Langston Hughes.
[25:42]
Jericho Brown
Sure.
[25:42]
Kevin Young
And so I wanted to do something where it is a free verse poem. But certain things about the music lulled us. Right. Or woke us up. And so that was really my goal with this poem, Colosseum, and that title came after I wrote the word gladiator. So there's a way, you know, and I tell my students this all the time. The beginning of the poem will tell you the end of the poem, and the end of the poem will tell you your title. So the oneness of a poem is always about resonance and ricochet. And so, you know, you ricochet back and forth, up and down the poem. Everything's gotta matter. Nothing gets said in a poem once. If it gets said in an abstraction, it's going to get said in an image another time. If there's a sound that's made once, then you gotta make that sound again at least once. So that's something that I was really working toward in this poem.
[26:30]
Jericho Brown
And those are from the New Testament. Is that the book we're from?
[26:33]
Kevin Young
Yeah, the New Testament.
[26:34]
Jericho Brown
Yeah, I know. My Bibliography of Speaking Bibliographies.
[26:37]
Kevin Young
Yeah. You know, this book, when it came out, I got the copies. And the first thing I did was drive by Natasha Trethewey's house, my colleague at Emory at the time. And I put the book in her mailbox. And the next day she sent me a text message. She said, jericho, you left a book in my mailbox and you did not knock on my door. And then she sent another text message saying, I Love. This made me cry. I never told her this. She said, I just finished it. I had put it in her box the night before. She said, I just finished it. It's beautiful. But, Jericho, how are you gonna read any of these poems in front of people? And at the time, it seemed like was so risque in its queerness. And one of the ways I know it's a love poem, and one of the reasons why this is the opening of the book is it was the first book where beginning to end, first poem, the last poem. I was a black queer poet, you know what I mean? And I was also in love at the time. So it was very easy for me to write these poems, these very, like, loving, erotic poems. And so I think I figured out how to read from it. But it was very difficult at first reading from that book, the New Testament, because audiences were not used to it at that time. Even when this book came out, you know, and that book came out in 2014. Kevin, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. There really wasn't a lot of that going on in the New Yorker, for instance, do you know what I mean? And I feel this way very strongly about myself and other poets, James Allen Hall, Randall Mann, black queer poets who I don't always agree with, like Reynaldo Wilson. Like, I really feel like we ushered in something and we made something very acceptable and very normal in this world and for this genre that was not necessarily so. In the same way, it's not that there weren't queer poems. It's not that there weren't graphic queer poems, but we were putting these poems in places that they had never been. And we were reading these poems aloud in spaces where they had never been read aloud. And we were people who were, in many ways, publishing poems that were being used in a movement for black art. We were writing the poems that of that time were the black poems and were included in that idea of the black poem. And before that moment, black queer poets were not always included in the whole of the thought of black poems. And we created that, and I'm very proud of that. You know, coming on this show talking about people like Melvin Dixon, talking about Essex Hemphill, talking about Marlon T. Riggs. I can be very proud of myself and my compatriots, my comrades, that we actually changed this world. And so now you read poems by people like Philip B. Williams and Danez Smith and Ricky Laurentiis, trans people, you read these poems and you sort of take for granted what, even in 2014, seemed racy. And I know it seemed racy because those younger poets were sending me emails like, I can't believe you got this poem in the New Yorker. Do you know what I mean?
[29:52]
Jericho Brown
Well, we all didn't have the luxury of you putting it in our mailbox. So the New Yorker helped with that quality, I think. One last question. Cause I could talk to you all day, you know, Jericho Star. And we have all night, all day. I wonder about the Southern nerd that circles all this, because some of the things you're talking about are so tied to that, whether it's sonically or the language in Coliseum has this kind of Southern, if not language, then outlook. Him I will follow until I am as rough outside as I am within. I cannot locate the origin of slaughter, but I know how my own feels that I live with it and sometimes use it to get the living done. That is a Southern sentiment to me. It is a survival. It is taking that thing and turning it around and making hog maws into.
[30:48]
Kevin Young
A delicacy and use it to get the living done is the kind of improvisation in Southern speak that lifts the language. Right. It is somehow both country and dignified, which is always sort of something that I noticed in my grandmother speaking and my grandfather speaking away of being who you are, but also letting the world know, I am human. I am a grown man. Do you know what I mean?
[31:20]
Jericho Brown
Being grown is a thing.
[31:21]
Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a thing in the South. Yeah.
[31:24]
Jericho Brown
And being divine. Divinity, which ties us back to Elizabeth's poem, I think, also is coursing through there, too. And, you know, love, in the way that Baldwin talks about it, I think he reminds us that love is the thing that gets you through. It's the thing that binds us, and it's the only thing that can make us. Whether he's talking about being a nation or being a people or being a citizen or being alive and human. That's where he turned to.
[31:55]
Kevin Young
Yeah. Yeah. That's who Baldwin was. That's for sure. 100%. When I got the Whiting, you know, when you get the Whiting, they give you these books.
[32:03]
Jericho Brown
I wouldn't know that, Jericho, but tell us about winning a widening award.
[32:07]
Kevin Young
They give you these Library of Congress books, and the book is sort of suggesting who you are in the tradition of. And I remember I got James Baldwin, which was completely, like, maybe the biggest compliment at that time that I had ever gotten. And I had read everything in that book, but I sat down and I read it again because they had given it to me. And I think there is something in my world, a certain belief in God that is tied to the fact that I am from the south. And a certain belief in black people and our resilience. You know, this might have been my hardest Black History Month ever. It was really lovely that you published that poem that was an elegy to Nikki. But it's also sort of hard seeing it. Cause I miss her so much. And I think of her as a figure so important. You know, Nikki Giovanni is the poet, the contemporary poet that we were reading when we were 6 and 7 years old.
[33:10]
Jericho Brown
That's right.
[33:10]
Kevin Young
And you might have gotten some Paul Laurence Dunbar and you might have gotten some Langston Hughes. But you also got Nikki Giovanni's ego tripping when you were in elementary school. And that kind of work means she was literally transforming our people. She was making us further illiterate people. And making us think about poetry and poems and line, break and line. And. I don't know, thinking about her and her role in that and how she maintained that role as a people's poet throughout her life brings me back to somebody like Baldwin, who understood the writer as a figure for the people. And I love him for that. You know, I never met the man, but I've always loved him and I appreciate him. He probably would have wanted to beat me up or something, but I like him a lot.
[34:05]
Jericho Brown
No, I think that what you said about Nikki is so powerful because I think it was always there. But I think when she passed away and you read the poem that we were lucky enough to publish, Black Dictionary, as a eulogy for her at her funeral, I think people you saw online came to understand something they might have not understood, unfortunately, the day before. And I think having met her and known her a little bit, not as well as you, but to see how people finally got it. And I saw this with Lucille Clifton, who I did know well. And I've seen the ways that people are understanding some of the tradition. Just to name check your most recent book that is still being. Still being established. And we don't always fully know. And that poems, anthologies, they rewrite the past and help us place this. I'll give you one last example that's actually in the anthology is the poem Gwendolyn Brooks by Anthony Walton, which is this elegy for Gwendolyn Brooks, where he talks about how there was something that she saw that he didn't see till he read her about these black men on the corner, you know, and that he both talks about and praises her. But Also kind of says, I didn't understand until Gwendolyn Brooks. And there was something in your black dictionary that was celebratory, but also about kind of what happens after, I guess. And then understanding I'm, you know, trying to describe a huge thing in small words, but how we kind of can celebrate while alive, but then also the duty we have after and the black dictionary that we're all in.
[35:50]
Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah. And, Kevin, what you're talking about and the reason why it's hard to find words is because you're talking about the value of poetry. You know, we live in a society that likes to put a dollar sign on everything. I mean, and by everything, I mean even our emotions, you know?
[36:08]
Jericho Brown
Sure, sure.
[36:09]
Kevin Young
When I talk to my students about this, what I tell them is poems are like trees. And, you know, we walk by trees all the time, every day. We pay them absolutely no attention. We definitely do not think of them as oxygen providers. You know what I mean?
[36:25]
Jericho Brown
Yeah.
[36:26]
Kevin Young
If the trees were gone, if I walk out of this room and all the trees that I walked by were not here, I would notice and I would miss them. I would understand that they were adding value to my life, that they were changing me, that they had something to do with my survival and my ability to see beauty in the world. But I would not be able to recognize that until they were gone. Because all day long, I am taking trees for granted. And that's what I believe about the power and the value of poetry, that we don't always know. Even poets, even the way poets treat poetry, even the way poets treat one another, we don't always know just how valuable, just how important poetry is to keeping this world turn. And yet, when a poet passes, we very quickly find out. We remember. We know.
[37:18]
Jericho Brown
Thank you so much for talking with me today.
[37:21]
Kevin Young
Thanks for having me. This was fun.
[37:29]
Jericho Brown
Coliseum by Jericho Brown, as well as Elizabeth Alexander's win, can be found on new yorker.com Elizabeth Alexander's most recent book is the Traitor on Generation. Jericho Brown's latest collection is the Tradition.
[37:44]
Richard Lawson
You may subscribe to this podcast, the Fiction podcast, the Writer's Voice podcast, and the Politics and More podcast by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. You can hear more poetry read by the authors on new yorker.com and the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is the Corner by Chief Zion Otunde Adjua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope a Dope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Chloe Persinos with help from Hannah Eisenman, hi there. I'm Lale Arakoghu, host of Women who Travel. At the start of this year, I spoke to my friends and colleagues at Conde National Traveler, Megan Sparel and Arti Menon, who've masterminded a bumper list of where to travel in 2025. It was fascinating to hear the places they're excited about, like Kodiak island in Alaska.
[38:45]
Kevin Young
The thing that I'm really excited about is the native owned Kodiak Brown Bear center.
[38:51]
Jericho Brown
And if you stay in one of.
[38:52]
Kevin Young
Their lovely cottages, there's the opportunity to.
[38:55]
Richard Lawson
Share space with the largest subspecies of.
[38:58]
Kevin Young
Brown bear in the world. And. And this both terrifies me and makes me all warm and tingly inside. In 2025 there's gonna be like banya style steam baths and saunas and whatnot.
[39:09]
Richard Lawson
So you can come face to face with a bear and then go to your steam bath to. If I come face to face with a bear, I better get a steam.
[39:15]
Kevin Young
Bath or share the steam bath with a bear.
[39:18]
Richard Lawson
I mean, stranger things have happened. Join me on Women who Travel for More Adventures wherever you get your podcast.
[39:27]
Kevin Young
From PRX.

Summary5 min read

Podcast Summary: The New Yorker: Poetry – "Jericho Brown Reads Elizabeth Alexander"

Release Date: February 26, 2025
Host: Kevin Young, Poetry Editor of The New Yorker
Guest: Jericho Brown, 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry

1. Introduction

In this engaging episode of The New Yorker: Poetry, host Kevin Young welcomes acclaimed poet Jericho Brown to discuss and explore the intricacies of poetry within the New Yorker’s esteemed archives. The episode delves into Brown’s selection of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem "When" and features Brown’s own poignant work, "Coliseum." Throughout the conversation, both poets share deep insights into the craft of poetry, the legacy of black queer poets, and the enduring power of poetic expression.

2. Jericho Brown's Selection: "When" by Elizabeth Alexander

At [02:41], Jericho Brown introduces the poem "When" by Elizabeth Alexander as the first New Yorker poem that profoundly resonated with him. He recounts how encountering this poem during a pivotal time in his academic journey solidified his commitment to pursuing poetry.

Jericho Brown:

"It was really a time of transition, a time of beginnings, and a time that I was really 100% deciding that I was going to follow this life and become a poet." [02:42]

3. In-Depth Analysis of "When"

Jericho Brown reads the sonnet "When" at [03:05], highlighting the poem's powerful imagery and musicality. He praises Elizabeth Alexander’s mastery of the sonnet form, noting the seamless integration of rhyme and rhythm that evokes a sense of movement and emotion.

Jericho Brown:

"And a sonnet. No one can sonnet like Elizabeth can. But then also just those sounds when you were reading it, you brought them out, those B sounds..." [04:15]

Kevin Young elaborates on the poem's significance, discussing its role as an elegy for a generation of black men lost to AIDS. He emphasizes the poem's function as both a personal tribute and a broader cultural remembrance.

Kevin Young:

"This poem ultimately is an elegy for an entire generation of black men, coming across this poem really assured me that what I was reaching toward... was a real piece of literature." [04:37]

The conversation further explores the poem's structural elements, including its unconventional rhyme scheme and the poignant final line that encapsulates loss and memory.

Kevin Young:

"This is not a free verse sonnet. You know, spotted rhymes with gold. Lit, obviously. Troubles rhymes with troubles. Sauce rhymes with house..." [07:12]

Jericho Brown reflects on the emotional impact of Alexander's work, comparing the pride elicited by the poem to the triumph felt during a significant athletic achievement.

Jericho Brown:

"It's something we don't get to talk about in classroom is what kind of feeling can come through a poem in terms of pride." [07:58]

4. Break – Skipped

Note: The segment between [17:58] and [37:28] includes promotional content and interviews unrelated to the podcast’s main discussion. This section has been omitted from the summary.

5. Jericho Brown's Original Poem: "Coliseum"

Upon returning from the break, Jericho Brown introduces his own poem, "Coliseum," published in the May 27, 2013 issue of The New Yorker. He shares the personal significance of the poem, recounting his journey to having it accepted by the magazine after persistent submissions.

Jericho Brown:

"It was completely engineered by my good friend and my colleague at Emory, Tiffany Yannick..." [19:20]

Jericho Brown reads "Coliseum" at [20:40], a deeply personal piece that intertwines themes of pain, resilience, and love.

6. Analysis of "Coliseum"

Following the reading, Jericho Brown and Kevin Young delve into the poem's themes and stylistic choices. Brown discusses the metaphor of the gladiator as a symbol of enduring love and survival, illustrating how personal and historical narratives converge in his work.

Jericho Brown:

"There is something about it that always includes the feeling of war, the feeling of conquer... the feeling of long as we together, baby." [22:12]

He also explores the poem’s form, highlighting his intention to achieve a sense of transcendence through free verse while maintaining musicality and resonance.

Jericho Brown:

"My goal when I was writing this poem and many of the poems in my second book, was making use of free verse in order to reach what I thought of as the sublime." [24:26]

Kevin Young offers insights into the interplay between form and emotion, praising Brown’s ability to convey intimate experiences through structured yet fluid poetic forms.

Kevin Young:

"Elizabeth Alexander is just a very special person in our world... because of her, I knew who Forrest. I knew who Melvin Dixon was already." [10:14]

7. Reflections on Poetic Form and the Role of Poetry

The discussion shifts to the broader role of poetry in society. Jericho Brown shares his perspective on poetry's often underappreciated yet vital role, likening it to trees that silently sustain life.

Jericho Brown:

"Poems are like trees. We walk by trees all the time, every day. We pay them absolutely no attention." [36:07]

Kevin Young concurs, emphasizing the transformative power of poetry and its ability to resonate deeply, often recognized only in its absence.

Kevin Young:

"We don't always know just how valuable, just how important poetry is to keeping this world turn..." [36:25]

8. Conclusion

The episode concludes with heartfelt acknowledgments of poets who have shaped the landscape of black queer poetry. Kevin Young and Jericho Brown reflect on the legacy of poets like Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin, underscoring the collective effort to elevate and normalize diverse poetic voices within mainstream platforms like The New Yorker.

Jericho Brown:

"We actually changed this world. And so now you read poems by people like Philip B. Williams and Danez Smith and Ricky Laurentiis..." [29:52]

Kevin Young:

"Poems are like trees... they add value to my life, that they were changing me." [36:25]

Notable Quotes

Jericho Brown on the impact of "When":
"It was really important to me... Can I just tell you this one other thing that I love about this?" [06:25]
Kevin Young on the sonnet form:
"Do you know what I mean? Right, right." [07:12]
Jericho Brown on form and transcendence:
"I wanted to make really small poems, and I wanted those really small poems in the way of Dickinson..." [24:26]

Final Thoughts

This episode of The New Yorker: Poetry offers a profound exploration of poetic expression through the lenses of two distinguished poets. Jericho Brown and Kevin Young provide listeners with a rich tapestry of literary analysis, personal anecdotes, and philosophical musings on the role of poetry in cultural and personal identity. Whether you're a seasoned poetry enthusiast or new to the genre, this conversation illuminates the enduring significance and emotional depth that poetry brings to our lives.

For more poetry and episodes, visit newyorker.com or access The New Yorker app available on the App Store and Google Play.

Loading summary

Transcript94 lines

[00:01]
Kevin Young
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
[00:24]
Jericho Brown
We the People shape our country's story.
[00:27]
Kevin Young
America250 is gearing up to celebrate the.
[00:30]
Jericho Brown
250Th anniversary of the founding of America's democracy by collecting and preserving diverse stories.
[00:37]
Kevin Young
From across the nation. Nominate any living person you think has a story to be preserved and celebrated for generations to come. Help tell our American story, every unique version of it.
[00:51]
Jericho Brown
Visit america250.org nominate to submit hello, you're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker Magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker archives to read and discuss. Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine this year in honor of the New Yorker Centenary. All the poets we're featuring on this podcast also appear in the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker Store or wherever you buy books. My guest today is Jericho Brown, who received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his Colle the tradition. He's a 2024 MacArthur Fellow and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Welcome, Jericho. Thanks for being here.
[01:44]
Kevin Young
Hi. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Kevin. I really appreciate it.
[01:48]
Jericho Brown
Always good to see you. So the first poem you've chosen to read is when by Elizabeth Alexander. What drew you to this particular poem while you're looking through the archives and the anthology?
[01:59]
Kevin Young
I think it's the first New Yorker poem that I understood as a New Yorker poem. It's really the poem that introduced me to the fact the magazine that I was reading in doctor's offices and other kinds of waiting rooms was indeed the New Yorker. And I remember I had only recently when it come out, met Elizabeth Alexander and she had been so kind to me and there used to be this entity called the Cave Canum Liserve and on the listserv everyone there was excited. All these black poets were excited that Elizabeth Alexander had this poem in the New Yorker that was a very black poem at that time. I think it was the year 2000, maybe 2001, if I have it correct.
[02:41]
Jericho Brown
2002, in fact.
[02:42]
Kevin Young
2002. Okay, good. It would be the same year that I entered my PhD program. So it was really a time of transition, a time of beginnings, and a time that I was really 100% deciding that I was going to follow this life and become a poet. And one of those little spurs that pushed me on was finding this poem in the New Yorker.
[03:05]
Jericho Brown
Well, why don't we hear the poem? Here's Jericho Brown reading When by Elizabeth Alexander.
[03:12]
Kevin Young
When in the early 1980s, the black men were divine Spoke French, had read everything Made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce Listened artfully to boyfriend troubles Operatically declaimed boyfriend troubles had been to Bamaco and Bahia Knew how to clear bad humors from a house had been to Baldwin's villa in St. Paul drank espresso with Soyinka and Senghor Kissed hello on both cheeks Quoted Baraka's Black Art Fuck poems and they are useful. Tore up the disco dance floor Were gold lit, Photographed well Did not smoke, said Chow Then all the men's faces were spotted.
[04:06]
Jericho Brown
That was when by Elizabeth Alexander, which was published in the April 15, 2002 issue of the New Yorker. That's such a powerful poem, isn't it?
[04:16]
Kevin Young
Something.
[04:16]
Jericho Brown
And a sonnet. No one can sonnet like Elizabeth can. But then also just those sounds when you were reading it, you brought them out, those B sounds, starting with black men, but then also boyfriend troubles, Boyfriend troubles, Bamako and Bahia, bad humors from a house. I mean, suddenly you're in this music and you get swept away, which I think is one of the points. And then what do you make of this horrible gap, let's call it. And then that last line, which is so powerful.
[04:45]
Kevin Young
I saw the death. I saw that death of AIDS in the 1980s and 90s, which really took so many men away from us, but really completely wiped out an entire generation of black gay poets who. Otherwise I probably would have been getting on their nerves and they would have been getting on mine. You know, they are here for me in word, but I never got to know them in presence. When I think in particular of a poet like Melvin Dixon, who I think this poem really centers on. Elizabeth Alexander and Melvin Dixon had a pretty famous friendship with one another. And I think he was in many ways mentor to her, or she saw him that way. But poets like him, filmmakers like Marlon T. Riggs, poet performers like Essex Hemphill, you know, these are the people that are like my fathers and my grandfathers, but they weren't necessarily here. And yet I have them on video and I have their books and I have their poems, and that has always meant the world to me. So coming across this poem, which ultimately is an elegy for an entire generation of black men, coming across this poem really assured me that what I was reaching toward and what seemed to be reaching after me was a real thing, was a real piece of literature that had happened and was a fine influence to have in the world. I'm really taken, actually, you know, when you think about this as a sonnet, about how the second half of the poem is really a syllabus, go look these people up. Read them.
[06:26]
Jericho Brown
Right.
[06:26]
Kevin Young
And that bibliography seems to me to be created by this generation of men who are saying, go see who these people are. And Elizabeth Alexander is, in a way, disseminating that message to the rest of the world through a platform like the New Yorker. So that was very. It was just very important to me. Can I just tell you this one other thing that I love about this? Please. I love that in spite of the fact that this seems a kind of free verse sonnet, it rhymes. This is not a free verse sonnet. You know, spotted rhymes with gold. Lit, obviously. Troubles rhymes with troubles. Sauce rhymes with house. Baraka rhymes with bahia. Do you know what I mean? Right, right.
[07:13]
Jericho Brown
It's a sonic wonder. I mean, it absolutely is.
[07:16]
Kevin Young
And so throughout this poem, she has thought of ways that in spite of the fact that the rhyme is scattered in ways that we do not expect, which might be one way of thinking about the queer life, in spite of that, there is a oneness that we associate with the sonnet. And that oneness is driving this poem forward through sound and through rhyme. It's just a gem. It's really brilliant. It's a poem that I know is good because when first I read it, I felt pride. You know, that feeling when you read something or you see something, you know, we have that feeling also when we see Simone Biles do flips. Right. It's as if we have done. I did those flips. Do you know what I mean?
[07:58]
Jericho Brown
Right.
[07:59]
Kevin Young
I remember when Serena Williams would win yet another match, you would feel like you had won the match. And that's the similar feeling that I had to this poem. And maybe a barometer by which we can talk about the efficacy of poems, period. Right, right. It's something we don't get to talk about in classroom is what kind of feeling can come through a poem in terms of pride? And I'm always very proud of this poem and very proud of Elizabeth for having written it. Elizabeth Alexander is just a very special person in our world. And I do Think at the core of her being a poet but also leading the Mellon foundation at this point in her life. But also, as you have, having been in the academy and chaired departments of African American studies. It's a really big career. But it's also a career that mimics the careers we used to read about that black people had where, you know, you read about Maya Angelou being a trained conductor and.
[08:58]
Jericho Brown
Busboy and the poet.
[09:00]
Kevin Young
Or Langston Hughes, like Langston Hughes literally seems to have had every job that anyone could ever have.
[09:05]
Jericho Brown
A plunger. That's my favorite one in Paris. You know, like a dishwasher.
[09:10]
Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so I really. I get excited about her as a figure because she is with us presently. But that career is a historical one. And not just for black people, but for black women in particular. And I always appreciate her announcement of herself as a race woman. At that time, during that period, I had never heard anyone. It was a phrase you read, but you didn't hear anybody say that they were a race man or a race woman, you know? And I remember when I first met Elizabeth Alexander, she had given a talk in which she said that she also. The day I met Elizabeth Alexander, introduced me to all these black poets that I had never heard of. Because of her, I knew who Forrest. I knew who Melvin Dixon was already. But because of her, I knew who Forest Tamer was. Another black poet who became so important to me and whose work I love. And that's who she is as a person. She's always spreading and introducing and giving. Which is why the job she has now is such a great job for her in particular.
[10:15]
Jericho Brown
Sure. I wanna linger over the poem just a hair more because I think you nail it with this bibliography idea. It does both. It name checks people in that way that I think is so powerful. But she also manages to embody them. And the black men break. We're divine. And that divinity that she's saying in both the vernacular way, which I love, but then also in this kind of afterlife way. I think that tension there is so powerful. And I can point to moments throughout the poem knew how to clear bad humors from a house. There's more happening there, right, than just that thing that I know that they knew how to do. But also, these bad humors have taken over. They are in that gap in the line that we're talking about those deaths. I wonder how you see that as well.
[11:07]
Kevin Young
Well, what I'm really taken by early on in this poem is that if we look at this poem as a sonnet Right, let's say the first quatrain, things are personal, right? Things start in this way where obviously the speaker is saying, I had these experiences with the black men, the divine black men. So already in the first two lines of the poem, she's made black men heavenly. Isn't that something that lovely to read in a poem? Oh, thank God, you know, she makes black men heavenly. And you're right, things get as specific as that green peppercorn sauce sort of pointing to their ability, right? The clearing bad humors from the house, of course, I imagine the opportunity to have someone smudge your home, right? Or get the bad spirits out. That these people had all of that ability and that it got as personal as I could tell them about my boyfriend troubles, which I really love about the first four, five lines in this poem. And then the poem begins to move across time and space. It's gotta go to Bahia, it's gotta go to the Baldwin Villa in St. Paul. And then once we get Baldwin's name, we begin to get those names, the Baldwin, the Soyinka, the Senghor, and even the Baraka, which for me becomes very important because she ends up setting these queer black men in the same position as these more known, probably straight historical figure black men, including Nobel laureates, Do you know what I mean? And so suddenly set with them, they drink with them, they eat with them, they go to their homes. I also love just how community oriented that part of the poem becomes and how it speaks to the ways in which black art is always connected. And then after that moment, things turn again to the party tore up the disco dance floor where gold lit, photographed well, did not smoke, said Chile. I was just mentioning to you before we started this podcast, the first time I ever heard somebody say the word chow, I didn't think people really said it. I just thought it was something people did to say goodbye on a TV show like Dynasty or something. So. And this poem encapsulates the fact that people really did say chow.
[13:29]
Jericho Brown
And it's a kind of moment in the poem where it's so artful. They did not smoke. So there's a kind of moment of health. And then they say ciao. They say bye, goodbye. And then, oh, that.
[13:43]
Kevin Young
And that's why the epiphany in this poem is not just with the last line, but also with the strophe break, the stanza break. Right after that 13th line, there's this break where that child, that goodbye becomes embodied through the white space in the poem. And then we get that single line Then all the men's faces were spotted, which tells us so much of what we need to know and what we already know. And it sort of checks our memory and our love and our understanding of history. There is a 100% illusion made in that moment, and yet it's not an allusion to a particular piece of literature. It's an allusion to a time that if you don't know, you ought to know. You ought to know what we lost, and you ought to know that what we lost was in relationship to these other things, including the clearing of bad humors to your house, to the learning of Amiri Baraka's poem. Isn't it lovely? Also, you said, I think, 2002, and New York has got this poem quoting Amiri Baraka's poem Black Art. And it's got this nice little cuss word in it in that note. It's like, wow. They published that in the New Yorker in 2002. So she becomes also a vehicle for all of language, including the profane.
[15:04]
Jericho Brown
Right, right. Well, it's the divine and the profane. It has a whole of a life.
[15:09]
Kevin Young
Yeah.
[15:09]
Jericho Brown
And I was wondering if you think of it as a love poem.
[15:12]
Kevin Young
Oh, I do. I mean, but that's sort of cheating. Cause I think every poem's a love poem.
[15:17]
Jericho Brown
You think every poem's a love poem?
[15:19]
Kevin Young
I think, yeah. What poem? Have you read a poem that's not a love poem?
[15:22]
Jericho Brown
I want to hear more about this.
[15:24]
Kevin Young
Really. Oh, I don't even think it's. I think that if I were to say every poem is a political poem. We take that much easier nowadays, I think. But every poem's a love poem because somebody just had to wr. Somebody just had to get it right. And it was out of love of that moment of writing, out of love for that poem itself. And the back of every poem is love is a desire to get it right, to convey it, to embody clarity, to make music out of words. That's all love stuff right there. No matter whether or not you're crying while you write the poem. And in this particular poem, while there is a great deal of sorrow at the end, this poem is a part poem. In the early 1980s, the black men were divine, spoke French, had read everything. Had read everything. Do you know what I mean? Made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce. Like, there's this way that this poem is just a good time until you get to that last line. And that last line is, I miss you. I love you. And I really love how that I miss you, I love you, rather than getting told to us in the abstract, is told to us through image. Then all the men's faces were spotted, and we have to imagine that. And some of us have to remember that when all the men's faces were spotted. So, yeah, it's definitely, no doubt about it, 100% a love poem. And I have to say I love this boyfriend troubles moment in this poem and that she repeats. She knows I love it, so she repeats it.
[17:04]
Jericho Brown
Yeah, she gives it to you twice, like someone's telling them and someone declaring, declaiming. I love declaiming, which is, you know, there's a performative quality. Not that it isn't true, but that it's like larger than life.
[17:16]
Kevin Young
I mean, singing it right operatically declaimed, you know, singing boyfriend troubles. I just, I love that and I love the intimacy of that and the understanding of that. There are only so many situations under which you are telling someone your boyfriend trouble. That has to be a certain kind of intimacy. And she knows that and employs that information in this poem. That's the kind of thing I'm after when I'm reading and writing poems. I want to say intimacy by showing you intimacy. And I think Elizabeth Alexander manages that.
[17:58]
Jericho Brown
More from my conversation with Jericho Brown after the break.
[18:07]
Richard Lawson
Working at Vanity Fair, our entire lives revolve around press screenings, premieres, film festivals, Q&As, set visits, award ceremonies. Not that we're complaining, it's pretty great. But you know that feeling when you see a new film or show and you want to talk about it with everyone immediately? We feel that all the time. Yes, we sure do. I'm Richard Lawson. I'm David Canfield. And I'm Rebecca Ford. On Little Gold Men, Vanity Fair's flagship entertainment podcast, we discuss today's most exciting films and TV shows. David and I are fresh off attending the LA premiere last night. Break down the latest developments in the awards races. Gomez and Grande split the pop girly vote and catch up with Hollywood's biggest movers and shakers. Demi Moore, welcome to the show.
[18:49]
Jericho Brown
Thank you for having me.
[18:50]
Richard Lawson
Whether you're a casual viewer or an industry buff, this is the podcast for you. New episodes are published every Tuesday and Thursday. Follow and listen to Little Gold Men wherever you get your podcasts.
[19:08]
Jericho Brown
Welcome back.
[19:09]
Kevin Young
Thank you. Glad to be back.
[19:11]
Jericho Brown
Now, in our May 27, 2013 issue, the new Yorker published your poem Coliseum, which we'll hear you read momentarily. Is there anything you'd like to tell us about the poem?
[19:21]
Kevin Young
First, I'll Just say that. It was the first poem that ever got in the New Yorker that I wrote. And it was completely engineered by my good friend and my colleague at Emory, Tiffany Yannick. She created this world at Drew University, where she was teaching at the time, where rather than a poet and a fiction writer, Reid, she had convinced her colleague to allow two poets to read. Tiffany, by the way, is a fiction writer, and she invited me to read with Paul Muldoon. And she told me, if Paul Muldoon, who was the poetry editor at the New Yorker at the time, if he hears you read, you'll get a poem in the New Yorker. I promise. I'll never forget. She said that. I said, okay, Tiffany, whatever. I'll come do the reading. And I gave the reading and I met Paul, and we had a good time. We had dinner. You know, all the things that happen at a reading at a university happen. And then the next day, Paul Muldoon sent me an email saying, I would love to see one of your lovely poems for the New Yorker. And I remember he said, lovely poems. And I was so flattered by that. I was so happy. And I said, tiffany, look, it worked. And then he proceeded to reject poem after poem after poem that I sent him.
[20:35]
Jericho Brown
And then one day, they were lovely enough, one day. It sounds like he did take this poem.
[20:40]
Kevin Young
So this is Coliseum. You know, it just has some really personal excitement for me because I remember sending Paul Muldoon poem after poem after poem until he took this one and feeling some pride in it because he finally took this one. I'll read it, Coliseum. I don't remember how I hurt myself. The pain mine long enough for me to lose the wound that invented it. As none of us knows the beauty of our own eyes until a man tells us they are why God made brown. Then that same man says he lives to touch the smoothest parts, suggesting our surface area can be understood by degrees of sadden. Him I will follow until I am as rough outside as I am within. I cannot locate the origin of slaughter, but I know how my own feels, that I live with it and sometimes use it to get the living done. Because I am what gladiators call a man in love. Love being any reminder we survived.
[21:50]
Jericho Brown
That was Coliseum by Jericho Brown. Well, one of the things I love about this poem is it, too is a love poem.
[21:57]
Kevin Young
Definitely.
[21:58]
Jericho Brown
But you say all poems are love poems, but this one I haven't seen. The one that's not makes it explicit, because I am what gladiators call a man in love. Love being Any reminder we survived. Tell me about this gladiator.
[22:13]
Kevin Young
Well, you know, I just think the love thing, the erotic thing, there is something about it that always includes the feeling of war, the feeling of conquer. There is something about it where you want to achieve, you want to make it. You want to go the long haul, you want to get where you're going. And I'm not just talking about through the sex act. Right. One of the things that I say all the time is. And one of the things that I have. I have this poem called Stand. And one of its lines, or part of the poem suggests that when you're cuddling with your lover, you feel like you're doing something. You know, it's as if you. I think in the poem, I say it's as if we planted a garden, but in actuality we were only lying in bed. But that doing, that feeling of making it. That feeling of long as we together, baby. Which makes you feel like you have sort of overcome the world in order to be with your beloved. Do you know what I mean? Or that in any situation, if I am with my beloved, that situation doesn't matter because I am with my beloved. Right. And I think that is part of why the gladiator shows up earlier in the poem, really, in terms of just the way I write earlier in the poem. I say, long enough for me to lose the wound that invented it. And I imagine that me, although I don't remember the actual act of writing this poem, me as a poet, the kind is if I have a wound earlier in the poem. Later in the poem, you're gonna get a gladiator. And I think, to be honest with you, I should also say that at some point, maybe that word gladiator was a word like captain or commander. But then the word gladiator, I think, creates more of and better of an image and more archetypal of an image. So that's the word that I settled on. Yeah. So that's the kind of thing that that word does.
[24:10]
Jericho Brown
Well, I'm interested in form as well, because this has a kind of naturalistic form. And sometimes your work has a more inherited or, you know, in the wonderful case of the many forms, you've invented a kind of invented form, right?
[24:26]
Kevin Young
Yeah.
[24:26]
Jericho Brown
But this feels a little more, like, loose in that way. I wonder about that.
[24:30]
Kevin Young
Yeah. This poem is very much a free verse poem, which is what I was working in at the. I'm still working with a kind of internal rhyme. I'm always interested in sound and interested in making music. But My goal when I was writing this poem and many of the poems in my second book, was making use of free verse in order to reach what I thought of as the sublime. I wanted to make really small poems, and I wanted those really small poems in the way of Dickinson, all the way to a figure like Lucille Clifton. I wanted those really small poems to make us feel that we had somehow reached a point of transcendence or to have in them a feeling of revelation. By the time you get to the end, there's a way that you can read a poem and by the end of the last line, you sort of feel. Even if your eyes didn't open anymore, physically, it's as if your eye has been opened. Like, oh, I see more. And I wanted to do that in that book, throughout that book. I wanted to do that through the free verse poem, really, as a kind of a homage or a modeling after so many poems that I like by people like Emily Dickinson, by Langston Hughes. I love the short poems of Langston Hughes.
[25:42]
Jericho Brown
Sure.
[25:42]
Kevin Young
And so I wanted to do something where it is a free verse poem. But certain things about the music lulled us. Right. Or woke us up. And so that was really my goal with this poem, Colosseum, and that title came after I wrote the word gladiator. So there's a way, you know, and I tell my students this all the time. The beginning of the poem will tell you the end of the poem, and the end of the poem will tell you your title. So the oneness of a poem is always about resonance and ricochet. And so, you know, you ricochet back and forth, up and down the poem. Everything's gotta matter. Nothing gets said in a poem once. If it gets said in an abstraction, it's going to get said in an image another time. If there's a sound that's made once, then you gotta make that sound again at least once. So that's something that I was really working toward in this poem.
[26:30]
Jericho Brown
And those are from the New Testament. Is that the book we're from?
[26:33]
Kevin Young
Yeah, the New Testament.
[26:34]
Jericho Brown
Yeah, I know. My Bibliography of Speaking Bibliographies.
[26:37]
Kevin Young
Yeah. You know, this book, when it came out, I got the copies. And the first thing I did was drive by Natasha Trethewey's house, my colleague at Emory at the time. And I put the book in her mailbox. And the next day she sent me a text message. She said, jericho, you left a book in my mailbox and you did not knock on my door. And then she sent another text message saying, I Love. This made me cry. I never told her this. She said, I just finished it. I had put it in her box the night before. She said, I just finished it. It's beautiful. But, Jericho, how are you gonna read any of these poems in front of people? And at the time, it seemed like was so risque in its queerness. And one of the ways I know it's a love poem, and one of the reasons why this is the opening of the book is it was the first book where beginning to end, first poem, the last poem. I was a black queer poet, you know what I mean? And I was also in love at the time. So it was very easy for me to write these poems, these very, like, loving, erotic poems. And so I think I figured out how to read from it. But it was very difficult at first reading from that book, the New Testament, because audiences were not used to it at that time. Even when this book came out, you know, and that book came out in 2014. Kevin, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. There really wasn't a lot of that going on in the New Yorker, for instance, do you know what I mean? And I feel this way very strongly about myself and other poets, James Allen Hall, Randall Mann, black queer poets who I don't always agree with, like Reynaldo Wilson. Like, I really feel like we ushered in something and we made something very acceptable and very normal in this world and for this genre that was not necessarily so. In the same way, it's not that there weren't queer poems. It's not that there weren't graphic queer poems, but we were putting these poems in places that they had never been. And we were reading these poems aloud in spaces where they had never been read aloud. And we were people who were, in many ways, publishing poems that were being used in a movement for black art. We were writing the poems that of that time were the black poems and were included in that idea of the black poem. And before that moment, black queer poets were not always included in the whole of the thought of black poems. And we created that, and I'm very proud of that. You know, coming on this show talking about people like Melvin Dixon, talking about Essex Hemphill, talking about Marlon T. Riggs. I can be very proud of myself and my compatriots, my comrades, that we actually changed this world. And so now you read poems by people like Philip B. Williams and Danez Smith and Ricky Laurentiis, trans people, you read these poems and you sort of take for granted what, even in 2014, seemed racy. And I know it seemed racy because those younger poets were sending me emails like, I can't believe you got this poem in the New Yorker. Do you know what I mean?
[29:52]
Jericho Brown
Well, we all didn't have the luxury of you putting it in our mailbox. So the New Yorker helped with that quality, I think. One last question. Cause I could talk to you all day, you know, Jericho Star. And we have all night, all day. I wonder about the Southern nerd that circles all this, because some of the things you're talking about are so tied to that, whether it's sonically or the language in Coliseum has this kind of Southern, if not language, then outlook. Him I will follow until I am as rough outside as I am within. I cannot locate the origin of slaughter, but I know how my own feels that I live with it and sometimes use it to get the living done. That is a Southern sentiment to me. It is a survival. It is taking that thing and turning it around and making hog maws into.
[30:48]
Kevin Young
A delicacy and use it to get the living done is the kind of improvisation in Southern speak that lifts the language. Right. It is somehow both country and dignified, which is always sort of something that I noticed in my grandmother speaking and my grandfather speaking away of being who you are, but also letting the world know, I am human. I am a grown man. Do you know what I mean?
[31:20]
Jericho Brown
Being grown is a thing.
[31:21]
Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a thing in the South. Yeah.
[31:24]
Jericho Brown
And being divine. Divinity, which ties us back to Elizabeth's poem, I think, also is coursing through there, too. And, you know, love, in the way that Baldwin talks about it, I think he reminds us that love is the thing that gets you through. It's the thing that binds us, and it's the only thing that can make us. Whether he's talking about being a nation or being a people or being a citizen or being alive and human. That's where he turned to.
[31:55]
Kevin Young
Yeah. Yeah. That's who Baldwin was. That's for sure. 100%. When I got the Whiting, you know, when you get the Whiting, they give you these books.
[32:03]
Jericho Brown
I wouldn't know that, Jericho, but tell us about winning a widening award.
[32:07]
Kevin Young
They give you these Library of Congress books, and the book is sort of suggesting who you are in the tradition of. And I remember I got James Baldwin, which was completely, like, maybe the biggest compliment at that time that I had ever gotten. And I had read everything in that book, but I sat down and I read it again because they had given it to me. And I think there is something in my world, a certain belief in God that is tied to the fact that I am from the south. And a certain belief in black people and our resilience. You know, this might have been my hardest Black History Month ever. It was really lovely that you published that poem that was an elegy to Nikki. But it's also sort of hard seeing it. Cause I miss her so much. And I think of her as a figure so important. You know, Nikki Giovanni is the poet, the contemporary poet that we were reading when we were 6 and 7 years old.
[33:10]
Jericho Brown
That's right.
[33:10]
Kevin Young
And you might have gotten some Paul Laurence Dunbar and you might have gotten some Langston Hughes. But you also got Nikki Giovanni's ego tripping when you were in elementary school. And that kind of work means she was literally transforming our people. She was making us further illiterate people. And making us think about poetry and poems and line, break and line. And. I don't know, thinking about her and her role in that and how she maintained that role as a people's poet throughout her life brings me back to somebody like Baldwin, who understood the writer as a figure for the people. And I love him for that. You know, I never met the man, but I've always loved him and I appreciate him. He probably would have wanted to beat me up or something, but I like him a lot.
[34:05]
Jericho Brown
No, I think that what you said about Nikki is so powerful because I think it was always there. But I think when she passed away and you read the poem that we were lucky enough to publish, Black Dictionary, as a eulogy for her at her funeral, I think people you saw online came to understand something they might have not understood, unfortunately, the day before. And I think having met her and known her a little bit, not as well as you, but to see how people finally got it. And I saw this with Lucille Clifton, who I did know well. And I've seen the ways that people are understanding some of the tradition. Just to name check your most recent book that is still being. Still being established. And we don't always fully know. And that poems, anthologies, they rewrite the past and help us place this. I'll give you one last example that's actually in the anthology is the poem Gwendolyn Brooks by Anthony Walton, which is this elegy for Gwendolyn Brooks, where he talks about how there was something that she saw that he didn't see till he read her about these black men on the corner, you know, and that he both talks about and praises her. But Also kind of says, I didn't understand until Gwendolyn Brooks. And there was something in your black dictionary that was celebratory, but also about kind of what happens after, I guess. And then understanding I'm, you know, trying to describe a huge thing in small words, but how we kind of can celebrate while alive, but then also the duty we have after and the black dictionary that we're all in.
[35:50]
Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah. And, Kevin, what you're talking about and the reason why it's hard to find words is because you're talking about the value of poetry. You know, we live in a society that likes to put a dollar sign on everything. I mean, and by everything, I mean even our emotions, you know?
[36:08]
Jericho Brown
Sure, sure.
[36:09]
Kevin Young
When I talk to my students about this, what I tell them is poems are like trees. And, you know, we walk by trees all the time, every day. We pay them absolutely no attention. We definitely do not think of them as oxygen providers. You know what I mean?
[36:25]
Jericho Brown
Yeah.
[36:26]
Kevin Young
If the trees were gone, if I walk out of this room and all the trees that I walked by were not here, I would notice and I would miss them. I would understand that they were adding value to my life, that they were changing me, that they had something to do with my survival and my ability to see beauty in the world. But I would not be able to recognize that until they were gone. Because all day long, I am taking trees for granted. And that's what I believe about the power and the value of poetry, that we don't always know. Even poets, even the way poets treat poetry, even the way poets treat one another, we don't always know just how valuable, just how important poetry is to keeping this world turn. And yet, when a poet passes, we very quickly find out. We remember. We know.
[37:18]
Jericho Brown
Thank you so much for talking with me today.
[37:21]
Kevin Young
Thanks for having me. This was fun.
[37:29]
Jericho Brown
Coliseum by Jericho Brown, as well as Elizabeth Alexander's win, can be found on new yorker.com Elizabeth Alexander's most recent book is the Traitor on Generation. Jericho Brown's latest collection is the Tradition.
[37:44]
Richard Lawson
You may subscribe to this podcast, the Fiction podcast, the Writer's Voice podcast, and the Politics and More podcast by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app. You can hear more poetry read by the authors on new yorker.com and the New Yorker app, available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is the Corner by Chief Zion Otunde Adjua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope a Dope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Chloe Persinos with help from Hannah Eisenman, hi there. I'm Lale Arakoghu, host of Women who Travel. At the start of this year, I spoke to my friends and colleagues at Conde National Traveler, Megan Sparel and Arti Menon, who've masterminded a bumper list of where to travel in 2025. It was fascinating to hear the places they're excited about, like Kodiak island in Alaska.
[38:45]
Kevin Young
The thing that I'm really excited about is the native owned Kodiak Brown Bear center.
[38:51]
Jericho Brown
And if you stay in one of.
[38:52]
Kevin Young
Their lovely cottages, there's the opportunity to.
[38:55]
Richard Lawson
Share space with the largest subspecies of.
[38:58]
Kevin Young
Brown bear in the world. And. And this both terrifies me and makes me all warm and tingly inside. In 2025 there's gonna be like banya style steam baths and saunas and whatnot.
[39:09]
Richard Lawson
So you can come face to face with a bear and then go to your steam bath to. If I come face to face with a bear, I better get a steam.
[39:15]
Kevin Young
Bath or share the steam bath with a bear.
[39:18]
Richard Lawson
I mean, stranger things have happened. Join me on Women who Travel for More Adventures wherever you get your podcast.
[39:27]
Kevin Young
From PRX.