Pulitzer-winning poet recounts his reinvention in Houston
On Monday, Jericho Brown learned he had been awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book “The Tradition.” Now a professor at Emory University, Brown earned a Ph.D. from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, and lived here from 2002 to 2008. In announcing the award, the Pulitzer Prize board noted the range and power of the poet’s work: “From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police, Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither — or survive.”
The day after the big announcement, Raj Mankad, his former classmate at UH and the Houston Chronicle op-ed editor, caught up with Brown to talk about his poetry and his time in Houston. Brown spoke to Mankad from his home in Atlanta.
When you give readings and talks, you challenge everyone in the audience to write and send you poems. Do you believe everyone has the capacity to be a writer?
What I tell students on the first day of school is that everything they think they do well, the first time they did it poorly. It can be as specific as baking lasagna. The first time everybody made lasagna, it was nasty. Everybody thinks they can drive. Tell me about the first time you drove. In the case of lasagna and driving, people keep getting up and trying. That’s what I think about writing.
It’s so nice to say stuff like that having a Pulitzer Prize. Every time I said stuff like that when I didn’t have a Pulitzer, they looked at me like I was crazy.
How do you remember your time in Houston, long before your Pulitzer?
New Orleans was the city of my youth — from when I was 18 to 27. I worked for the mayor as a speech writer. I knew too much about the people. People there knew too much about me. I couldn’t become a different person. When I moved to Houston in 2002 I changed my name. I had a name no one had called me.
That this city in Texas had elected a black mayor had meaning to me. The diversity of the city, I didn’t know how important it was going to be to me.
When we were in school there were factions among the students. I didn’t feel I was in any of those factions. There was another world for me — underground black gay culture.
Like at the juke joint in Third Ward you took me to? Nick’s.
I loved Nick’s. I thought that
was my life. Because of that, I left Houston kicking and screaming. I lived near Hobby Airport. I thought it was a great apartment. The rent was cheap. I didn’t want to leave the diversity of Houston. When I think of Houston, I don’t think of the creative writing program. I think of all the fun I had. A party city. When I go back, the places I went to aren’t there any more.
Same for New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I never got to see it again.
Let me tell you this other thing. Inprint would bring huge writers to Houston. I went to a craft talk with John Updike. We would go to the Alley Theater for the reading. Afterwards they would have these receptions. If you didn't go you were missing out on a meal. We would go to these in our rinky-dink cars, to homes in River Oaks. One time I was there with a friend. He is visibly getting red-faced. “What’s wrong?” He tells me what is hanging on the wall, a painting by an artist from a particular period, and it costs a ridiculous amount of money. I said, “Don’t get me thrown out.” He says, “Jericho, that is wrong. It would be like you owning the Pacific Ocean.” I had this weird feeling because I wanted to eat and I wanted to be around the writers. That kind of thing is what I remember about Houston.
When you are in a graduate program, you are broke but you are also privileged. Less likely to get arrested.
Did you get arrested in Houston?
I had a ticket that I couldn’t pay for. I thought, I have to raise this money over time. The over time was the ticket turning into a warrant. I got pulled over and I got arrested. Another time I didn’t get arrested. These police threw me — I was at a Montrose gay bar called JR’s — threw me over the hood of my car and patted me down. It was humiliating and violent. The experience that my friend was having over the painting, I felt he was overreacting. That was the life we had to live and that was the end of it. I felt the same way about the police throwing me over the car. I am black, I hope they don’t kill me. When I went to San Diego, that’s when I changed my thinking about what people should put up with and what is OK.
In “The Tradition,” violence is constantly right next to beauty. You invented a new poetic form of couplets, two lines. It mixes elements of the sonnet, the ghazal and the blues — forms developed by Europeans, South Asians and African Americans. You are operating at the highest levels of poetry, but you gave your invention an ordinary name. The duplex. Why?
There are a lot of duplexes in New Orleans and Houston. I was thinking about form and content that had to do with the couplet and the repeated line. Whether or not the people on either side of the wall are aware of one another, how they are aware. Duplex is such a vernacular word and a contemporary sounding word. When you write a poem called a duplex, you are thinking about daily life and what holds up daily lives. Whenever there is a plex, you get really modern. You think about metal and machines. I build poems that do what machines do, poems that seem to have an aim in the way they move forward. That’s why I chose that term.
We talked about your poem “Foreday in Morning” — a great poem to read on Mother’s Day. What would you tell someone who hasn’t read a poem since they were assigned one in school?
You know what I think that happens with poems? People approach the poem expecting it to hurt them. They want it to mean something other than what it says. This is ultimately people’s difficulty. I do think in a second or third or fourth reading, you can begin to extrapolate things. But nobody needs to do that to read a poem. Poems are read from left to right like everything else you read in the English language. We read in chunks, we allow periods, commas, semicolons, to tell us how to receive information and when to pause. We do it all day. We do it with signs when we are driving. We do it with pamphlets. If we can do it with other things, we do that with fiction and newspapers, we can do it with poetry and believe what it says.