After Winning The Pulitzer Prize, Jericho Brown Is In Demand And Prioritizing Laughter
These days, Jericho Brown is planning his laughter. Despite living through a pandemic, the last five months in the life of this Louisiana-bred, Atlanta-based poet certainly isn’t lacking for reasons to evoke joy, after all, he is the author of “The Tradition,” which earned him the 2020 Pulitizer Prize for Poetry—a historic moment in which Brown became one of two openly queer Black men to be awarded the prestigious honor in the same year. Much like his poetry, Brown’s laughter is infectious and unrestrained, soothing and measured, jarring and familiar; delivered with the intonation and cadence of a Kat Williams stand-up routine that leaves you bellowing over in laughter only to realize that he’s delivered a gut-punch that is simultaneously reflective and unrelenting. Jericho Brown is poetry in motion. He’s also in demand. One glimpse at the 326 text messages on his phone, many of which are congratulatory messages sent after his win, speaks to his impact on the world and the literary community. But despite the Pulitzer Prize elevating his career to unimaginable heights, Brown is embracing the journey and prioritizing laughter.
“I try to make sure I watch The Golden Girls every night before I go to bed,” said Brown. “It sounds silly but it’s actually quite helpful. I think it’s a good idea to plan your laughter. To know that you’re gonna laugh every day. And I do laugh every day,” he said. “But if I watch a show then I know this is my laugh time. And if I see something funny then I can go to bed knowing that I did what I was supposed to do for me and I got some laughter in at a certain time.”
Sleep may have been on the agenda the night before the winners of The Pulitzer Prize were announced, but in Brown’s case, it was poorly executed.
“The night before it was announced, I did not sleep,” he said. “The wonderful thing about the Pulitzer Prize is that they don’t make you wait to find out who has won in the way that other awards do. I’ve been fortunate enough to go to those [other] programs in my tuxedo and you sit there sweating for somebody to tell you that you lost (laughter). I was all excited about being a finalist. When I watched it, and she said my name as the winner, I was already crying. I was already emotionally built-up from the night before. I really fell out,” said Brown.
For many artists, winning the Pulitzer Prize is the pinnacle career achievement. Any award won thereafter, will most likely pale in comparison. But Brown tells The Reckoning that while the award itself is great, as a poet, it’s not where the real achievement begins or ends.
“A real-life achievement is not the Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer Prize is the recognition of an achievement. The Pulitzer Prize is the acknowledgment of an achievement. The achievements are the poems,” he said. “And if you wanna write poems, then you’re going to be after writing a good poem and changing your mind about what a poem is for the rest of your life. And if I want to live free and with integrity, then I’m going to be on that road for the rest of my life,” said Brown.
It’s this very same wisdom that he imparts with young writers who contact him for advice on how to find the freedom within their work that is necessary for their writing to soar.
Making the personal public
“One of the things that young writers are always asking me is how do I say such personal and private things in my poems, and show my parents my poems. And my question back to them is always, ‘why would I show my parents my poems?’ My parents ain’t got no money. My parents are not paying me for a reading. I show my poems where I get money from my poems,” said Brown. “Why am I suddenly changing that room for my mom and dad? Do you take your mama and daddy to work? I don’t know anybody taking their parents to work. Why is there this expectation that I’m supposed to take my mama and daddy to work? People are writing poems and they show their parents their poems and then their mama and daddy are mad at them. Take mad out of the equation, he said. “Don’t show your mama and daddy your poems and be free as a poet.”
Freedom is a core tenet of Brown’s poetry and the human vessel from which those poems flow. A work in progress—Brown honors the “snap” in the spirit of the late filmmaker and activist Marlon Riggs as the blueprint for how Black same gender loving men can show up as their authentic selves despite having endured the trauma of being Black and gay in America.
“I grew up thinking my life should be sacrificed. The world made it quite clear to me that whenever or however queer people died, it was because they deserved to die,” wrote Brown in a recent editorial on Riggs for The Criterion.
Brown tells The Reckoning that he is working towards being exactly who he is no matter who is in the audience while loving those things about himself that are deemed unlovable, and encouraging other Black same gender loving men to do the same.
“So if somebody hates me because of how I appear, that means those are the things that I need to find a way to love about myself,” he said. “If there’s something about me that’s feminine, I need to be the one to call that out. I don’t need anybody else to call that out for me. Because if somebody else calls that out for me, I’m going to be scared of that part of myself. I can’t do anything about that, that’s who I am, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
In one of many quotes attributed to Brown, he says: “We are all inventing our lives. Invention means improvisation. Just because we were told a certain way of living is right or wrong, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the opportunity to test what is really best for us and our people and our families.”
So what’s next for this literary master? Of course, more poetry and a book of essays that Brown says will allow him to compile all of the pontificating that he does on his very active Twitter account. From poetry readings to politics, to the killings of unarmed Black men and women, he publicly opines on issues impacting people of color in 280 characters or less, or more pointedly in poems like “Bullet Points,” where he warns his audience of the true nature of his death should his life ever be cut short due to a police encounter.
I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we've been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
