Meran Paul
Features Editor
Professor, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jericho Brown was awarded the Aikon Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry by Vice Chancellor Robert W. Pearigen at the Convocation Hall on November 11. Brown started the event by expressing surprise that the vice-chancellor is called the VC. He stated he was hearing that for the first time and then joked that in case the VC wanted to make a hip-hop album, VCP would be a very cool name. The author concluded by reading some very moving poems in his unique and powerful way. The next day, Meta Duewa Jones, associate professor of English and African studies at UT Austin, delivered a lecture about Brown’s work at McGriff Alumni House.
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1976, Nelson Demery III changed his name and graduated from Dillard University. He currently works as an Associate Professor of English at Emory University and is also director of the Creative Writing Department there.
Brown is the author of three published poetry collections, Please, The New Testament and The Tradition, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. All these collections explore overlapping themes of love, violence, violence in love, African American male identity and sexuality, the end of history and culture, police brutality, but most importantly, all these collections are about offering hope and believing in survival. (Canon Publishing House).
Brown has invented a form of poetry known as the Duplex. Poets.org describe the duplex as a gutted sonnet — that is, part ghazal, part blues poem. In a blog titled “Invention,” Brown described the Duplex as a house with two addresses and said “It is, indeed, a mutt of a form as so many of us in this nation are only now empowered to live fully in all of our identities. I wanted to highlight the trouble of a wall between us who live within a single structure.” Following is a portion of the duplex brown read at Sewanee:
Memory makes demands darker than my own:
My last love drove a burgundy car.
My first love drove a burgundy car.
He was fast and awful, tall as my father.
Steadfast and awful, my tall father
Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.
It is a poem about the authors belief that trauma is inescapable. A belief that stems from his life experiences from having to face physical abuse from his father to facing abuse in his first and perhaps his latest romantic relationship. The first and last line of the duplex is the same “A poem is a gesture toward home” and thus both the form and content of the poem point to the cyclical nature of abuse in the poem.
Brown’s poems are both personal and political. One of the most political poems he read was titled “Bullet Points” and related to police brutality against African Americans in the United States. The poem concludes with a striking example of his belief in the case “I promise if you hear/ Of me dead anywhere near/ A cop, then that cop killed me.” According to The Guardian, the poem was widely shared on social media platforms in the wake of the George Floyd case and the BLM movement.Brown also has a unique ability to link his personal life and experiences to the world’s broader horrors and politics. In his poem Stand he writes “I’m sure / Somebody died while / We made love. Some- / Body killed somebody / Black. I thought then / Of holding you / As a political act.” These are the kinds of poems that blend beauty and brutality, personal and the universal. Brown’s poetry is not an escape because he shuts you down in reality and forces language to confront you with a reality that one wishes to avoid and escape.