Double Ds: Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown joins the Double Ds

Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown is an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego. His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including, The American Poetry Review, jubilat, Oxford American, Ploughshares, A Public Space, and 100 Best African American Poems. His first book, PLEASE (New Issues), won the American Book Award.

Denise Asks:
Why the scarecrow and not Dorothy? (Nicely played, sir.)

Jericho Answers:

Is this a two-part question?
Is it rude to answer a question with a question?
If so, I apologize.
I felt ugly.
Dorothy is pretty.
Persona means mask.
A poem in the voice of Diana Ross had already been written.
Poems in the voices of Diana Ross and Dorothy by a black gay man is too much camp for even a girl scout.
Also, Eliot’s “Hollow Men.”
I love Eliot’s “Hollow Men.
When I said ugly, I meant broken…I mean barely put together.
I mean that I could see other people see ugly when they looked at me, when they put me together, and I believed them enough to need a vehicle that could properly carry all the ugly I was.
And of course, “Keeping Things Whole.”
What else might be in Mark Strand’s field where he is the absence of field?
I love “Keeping Things Whole” almost as much as I love my love-hate relationship to Mark Strand.
Leviticus 19:32.
Eliot and Strand.
And a Southern Black Baptist Church.
And now that I’ve used the word “black” twice…