Black on White, White on Black. Jericho Brown’s Poem
Jericho Brown. The Tradition. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2019
If you were raised as a black man in Mississippi, if you were a gay man in the south, if you had HIV in a conservative state, and if you were a poet in a blue collar community, you would think that, faced with all those daunting challenges, you’d be lucky just to survive. But if you are Jericho Brown, that’s not the problem. The problem is how to shape the language in such a way to impart the wisdom and joy he has come to understand by living a life on the margins. His poetry is spellbinding. I was fortunate to hear him read his poems. He captured the crowd by asking us if it was okay to read a few of his poems. As he read, he invited us into his poems as someone who would invite someone into his home. Each poem wove its magic spell over us, letting us into the rural Mississippi landscape, into his bedroom as a gay man, into his dread of being shot as a black man, into the wounds of someone who knows what it’s like to be an outsider. As I listened to him I was struck by how, even as he was reading dark material, some dealing with the police violence, that he was able to reach out to us, to walk us through the experience without demeaning anyone because his underlying proposition is that we’re in this struggle, this rage to name what is happening to us, together. He managed to let us into each poem with what often isn’t in the poems themselves: his sense of humor, his intimacy, and his grace. He’s able to poke fun at himself. He’s willing to let us in on his own quirks, his own idiosyncrasies, his own struggles as a writer. He talks openly about being a black, gay writer so that the poems become offerings, something he extends to us. Depending on our own capacity to empathize or to let go of our biases and our world views, he let us see what it’s like to be who he is and to find, as we do so, what it’s been like throughout history for anyone who’s been marginalized. We readily saw his literary range and appreciation of the Western canon as well as the African history that is infused in his poems.
As I read his poems, I noticed that what made them so inviting was Brown’s ability to speak about a subject from multiple points of view. It was as if he were taking me by the hand and saying, “Look here, see that?” and then turning me in another direction and saying, “Now look at this,” and finally putting his arm around my shoulder, adding, “Look how they’re alike,” or in some cases, “Look how different they are.” In reading his poems, I found that he’s able to take any subject—love, loss, racism, homosexuality, fear, dread—and speak to it though correspondences, though taking an image, an idea, a situation and coming at it from multiple perspectives. Jack Myers, in his book The Portable Poetry Workshop, defined how a poem can extend its content by using correspondence. He explained “correspondences can be in the form of repetition, variations, or enhancements that create forces of attraction tension and cohesion to help give the poem a sense of depth, fullness, shapeliness, and self- sufficiency.” Myers noted that the writer Flannery O’Conner called this an “analogical vision, “which is “a double or triple kind of layered seeing that runs through all arts, that allows the writer to perceive different levels of reality in an image or situation.” Brown does this repeatedly in his poems. But each time he does it, he’s able to make each correspondence, each shifting trope or figurative association, evoke something unique.
For a poet who has such a capacity to layer his poems, it’s difficult to pin down and name exactly what he’s doing as his poems range from free to formal verse, from tight to sprawling stanzas. Clearly, he’s doing many things while crafting a poem. But he’s intent on making the form and shape of the poem reflect its content and emotional trajectory.
Let’s see how these correspondences work in some of his poems. In the poem “Dear Whiteness,” he begins with what seems an invitation to a lover.
Come, love, come lie down, love with me
In this king-size bed where we go numb
For each other letting sleep take us into
Ease, a slumber made only when I hold
You or you hold me so close I have no idea
Where I begin—where do you end?—where you
This seems quite lovely yet it abruptly ends mid-adverbial clause. And instead of love, he gives us something antithetical, an invitation to lie:
Tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies.
We realize that this isn’t an ordinary love poem. This is a poem about whiteness, about a black man coming to terms with whiteness. He shifts gears, segues to concerns about what one person thinks about another, letting doubt enter the poem:
About what I mean to you when
I’ve labored all day and wish to come
Home like a war hero who lost an arm.
That’s how I fight to win you, to gain
Ground you are welcome to divide
And name. . . .
By using a deft simile, comparing himself to a hero whose lost his arm, he captures how the narrator of the poem wants to play on sympathy, on his woundedness, to sustain the relationship. No longer about two men holding onto one another, the poem has swerved and delved into the power differences, the need of one to win, to gain ground over the other. This stanza ends with the same coda about lies.
The last stanza exposes an even greater divide, having the narrator “ brush you from my own/teeth,” and saying, as if the love affair is a one-night stand, “I won’t stay/too long. . . .”and concluding with the other lover looking in the mirror “content/seeing only yourself. Was I ever there?”
Instead of being only a love poem, it’s has become an exposition of race, of black and white, of two men who, at first have seemingly broken though the divide, but, by the end, are separated by it because the white man can only see himself in the mirror. Inevitably, the poem ends with the same coda, “Tell me lies. Tell me lies.” Early in the gay liberation movement, gay poets, if they wrote poems about their lovers, disguised them, hiding the gender. But later, once they felt safe admitting the same sex liaison, the poems celebrated the joy of loving someone of the same sex, including explicit images of the body. But Brown has moved beyond that celebratory notion and shown, as in all relationships, the complex layers of emotions that can ruin the best of relationships, especially the lies told by lovers who feign commitment, who think they’re beyond the “race thing,” but who are hopelessly mired in it and unable to get past it.
Consciousness of race is never far from Brown’s poems. In the poem “Foreday in the Morning,” he captures the hard-working ethic of his mother by contrasting her daily schedule with the notion that blacks are lazy. His mother tells him that he “could have whatever I worked for,” which, to him, meant “She was an American,” one who believed work equaled success. In a series of short sentences, he spills out a mixed bag of feelings
I am ashamed of America
And confounded by God. . . .
I thank God for my citizenship in spite
Of the timer set on my life to write
These words: I love my mother. I love black women. . .
His broadening his perspective to look not just at his mom, but black woman, triggers a long riff that in much longer lines becomes rebuttal to the notion of black people are lazy and with the word “Blue” sets off another long riff which takes a jab at white people, at those who rarely, if ever, use public transportation, and who think that work means a nine to five job
. . .black women
Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blossoms
Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them
Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie we
Are lazy.
But I’d love to wake that bastard up
At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under
God
Past every bus stop in American to see all those black folk
Waiting to go to work for whatever they want.
Having grown up in an upper middle class suburb and having gone to college, I never worried about what I’d do for work because I knew with a good education and with my being a white man, I didn’t have to worry about getting a good job. I never stood at a bus stop early in the morning or late at night. But few years ago when I was at a Gala Concert in Miami, I had to take a bus to a house where I was staying, catching it early in the morning and late at night. What struck me was the people were mostly people of color, people who had finished work at eleven p.m., having cleaned an office building or guarded a corporate headquarters, or people who would early in the morning open a fast food operation or drive one of the buses. I was often the only white person on the bus. Brown knows that, having lived it. He lets his poems redress such stereotypes. He confronts the way our commercial society doesn’t value people for what they do as much as it values what they have.
In the poem “Riddle” he insists we hear and see what it’s like to be black in America. The poem jumps right into the history of racism.
We do not recognize the body
Of Emmet Till. We do not know
The boy’s name nor the sound
Of his mother wailing. We have
Never heard a mother wailing.
Brown uses anaphora, the repeating of a phrase through the book to emphasize what he’s saying, almost like a parent giving a child an admonition, making sure that she has been heard. He also likes to repeat in twos a line or phrase or whole sentence, piling it on, letting it sit in the mind, making it a riff, some trigger to another phrase like a saxophone picking up a chord in jazz and playing with it, wearing it out. Listen to him do it in this poem.
. . .We believe
We own your bodies but have no
Use for your tears. We destroy
The body that refuses use. We use
Maps we did not draw. We see
A sea so cross it. We see the moon
So land there. We love land so
Long as we can take it. . . .
Then he turns back to the wailing, asking “What is/a mother wailing?” and drives home his point about selling anything and everything as long as it gets a good price, which, as the poem closes, leads only to silence, to being drowned, immersed in what’s been sold that, given what he says in his other poems, is our soul.
. . .we do not
Recognize music until we can
Sell it. We sell what cannot be
Bought. We buy silence. Let us
Help you. How much does it cost
To hold your breath underwater?
Although “Tradition” is the title of the book, defying tradition seems to be what Brown does best. An example is this defiance is the love poems which couldn’t be labeled “romantic” or “sensual”, certainly Hallmark would not approve. His love poems have woven into them deep strands of hurt and loss. In the section of love poems, he has a poem “Correspondence,” that dedicated to Jerome Cija, an artist and provocateur who transgressed the conventional boundaries of gender, performance and art in the nightclub scene in San Francisco during the AIDS crisis. It’s a poem about the body, about violation, and about love. Brown speaks of his body—or, perhaps, the body of Jerome who dressed often in drag, as if it weren’t his body, as if it belonged to someone else, as if it could be taken from him at any time.
I am writing to you from the other side
Of my body where I have never been
Shot and no one’s ever cut me.
He unravels the poem by using the rule of twos, teasing out in pairs a series of declarations that, as they are built one on the other, create a frantic intensity as if he’s pleading with someone to hear him, to know he’s been violated.
. . .You can trust me
When I am young. You can know more
When you move your hands over a child,
Swift and without interruptions
We associate with penetration.
Note how the repetition of “when,” and “you can” builds up dramatically his insistence that we understand what he’s saying. Keeping in mind this is a love poem, he expands on the vulnerability and neediness of the young along with the threat that is always there for a young black boy.
The young are hard for you
To kill. May be harder still to hear a kid cry
Without looking for a sweet
To slip into his mouth. Won’t you hold him?
Won’t you coo toward the years before my story
Is all the fault of our imagination?
He ends the poem with an invitation for whomever is his lover—be it a Jerome who died of AIDS or someone else— to join with him in bed.
I’ve dressed my wounds with tar
And straightened a place for you
On the cold side of this twin bed.
For a man with AIDS, Brown has reached out to Jerome who died in the early years of the epidemic and invited him to share his bed, share his shame and sorrow. His love poems ask us to put away our Hallmark cards, all the sweet notions of true love, and look at it more honestly. For who among us has not been hurt in a relationship? Who among us has not been afraid, if not of the other, but of ourselves and our feelings? Who among us has not doubted what might happen to us if the relationship ends? As he says in another love poem, “Candles are/romantic because/we understand shadows.” Since Brown is speaking of gay love, of love between two men, he’s also letting us see how two men raised in a fiercely heterosexual culture, one which thrives on men competing with one another, with men putting each other down, threatening each other, can sustain intimacy with such a personal history of competing against other men. It’s not pretty. It’s isn’t easy. There’s always the threat which he describes in “Trojan”
When the hurricane sends
Winds far enough north
To put our power out,
We only think of winning
The war bodies wage
To prove the border
Between them isn’t real.
But there is the love, hard as it is to find and keep; he finds ways without sentimentality to honor that in his poems.
In one of his duplex poems, a form he invented, he speaks to that love. It’s fitting that he uses the duplex form to capture his ambivalent first love. The duplex is a circular form, starting and ending with the same line. But it’s shaped like a villanelle, using repetition, but in this case, repeating the last line in each couplet as the first line of the next couplet. As a result, he does as I’ve noted in his other poems, he doubles up phrases or whole sentences, repeating them but varying them by having them paired with another line, quite different from the first. Using this form could certainly lend to monotony but in Brown’s adept turn of phrase, it sparks and elicits strange combinations that startle expectations.
In a poem aptly called “Duplex,” he starts the poem with a simple declarative statement about the poem as if letting us know as a good expository writer what he will do next. But the poem unravels unlike any essay I’ve seen.
A poem is a gesture toward home.
It makes dark demands I call my own.
We have “dark” paired with “home,” one seeming optimistic, a home coming, the other demanding something dark. But “dark” isn’t a negative word, not if your skin is dark. That is who you are, at least in appearance. And that is a history you live with regardless of how you regard yourself. In the next stanza, he jumbles the words around, shattering the meaning of the previous line.
Memory makes demand darker than my own.
My last love drove a burgundy car.
We have paired memory demanding darkness with a flat statement about a lover with a burgundy car, a collusion of seemingly unrelated statements that lead him back in his personal history to his first love.
My first love drove a burgundy car.
He was fast and awful, tall as my father.
The duplex thrives on juxtaposition, on pairing one thing with another, seeing what, if anything will come of it. In this case, we have his lover and his father paired. Is his lover like his father? What could that mean?
Steadfast and awful, my tall father
Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.
So his lover becomes his tormentor, leaving his marks. Or is he confused, pairing the father with the lover? Memory is working its way little by little back into his life. After his father, what is there in his memory that might be redemptive?
Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark
Like the sound of a mother weeping again.
From the short fricatives in the previous stanza (the s, d, t, h combinations) to the soft l, o, e sounds in this stanza, the mood shifts from violence to light rain and weeping. It becomes almost lyrical for a moment. Yet the poem has a relentlessness, driven downward by the repetition, delving deeper and deeper into memory like a vehicle with no brakes and the pedal pushed to the floor. The weeping, however, softens the charging repetition by simply shifting the general “a mother” to “my mother,” investing the poem with a heartful note in the next stanza.
Like the sound of my mother weeping again.
No sound beating ends where it began.
He pairs the memory of his mother weeping with a flat statement with no seeming reference. Does it refer to the rain? Or the beating by his father? The last stanza must resolve it if it is to be resolved.
None of the beaten end up how we began.
A poem is a gesture toward home.
The poem circles back to the beginning yet everything is changed because now we have context and history, now we know he’s been beaten, now we know his mother weeps. Yes, everything has changed for him and for us as readers. The magic of Brown’s poetry is that he can with one line break, with one repetition of a word or phrase or sentence veer off what’s been said previously and go headlong into something seemingly entirely unrelated, but, with a deft shift, come back to what he’s said before, elucidating it based on the detour. His poems circle, bob and weave, give head fakes, turn around, and shape shift but always, always come to speak to the angst and temerity and guts it takes to be alive in this time.
For any writer, the questions is often asked, who is his audience? I know that, as a white gay man, I can identify with his being an outcast because of his sexual orientation. But, as a white man, if I were to identify myself with the stereotypical WASP, which because of my background, I begrudgingly do, I think his poems are addressed to anyone who is white. If I were to use a phrase from the Jim Crow era, from the segregated south, FOR WHITES ONLY, it would apply to some of his poems because they demand that a white person sees the world though a black man’s eyes. Better than most writers who speak of race—and its insidious harm—he captures what it’s like and what whiteness means to him. For those of us who are white, his poems let us know that race does matter. But it matters because of the harm it has, and still, does to non-whites. He wouldn’t let whites off the hook. He insists we see from the inside what it’s like to be black in America. For a black man, a gay man, a minority, his poems come as a welcome testimony to what it’s like to be who they are. As he says in “A Long Way,”
We’d all still be poor. I’d end up drenched
Going around. You’d end remembering
What won’t lead to a smile that gleams
In dark places. Some don’t know
How dark. Some do.
Jericho Brown does. And he lets you know it.
