Overview
In this extensive conversation (with audio excerpts), Southern Spaces “Queer Intersections” series editor Eric Solomon talks with acclaimed poet Jericho Brown about his editing of The Selected Shepherd and how Reginald Shepherd’s work “helps us think about Jericho Brown.”
Queer Intersections / Southern Spaces is a collection of interdisciplinary, multimedia publications that explore, trouble, and traverse intersections of queer experiences, past, present, and future. From a variety of perspectives, and with an emphasis upon the US South, this series, edited by Eric Solomon, offers critical analysis of LGBTQ+ people, practices, spaces, and places.
Introduction: The Selected Shepherd: A “Fair, Just Place”
Let us live beyond the here and now by nurturing each other and supporting one another’s works.—Assotto Saint, “Why I Write”
In the first lines of his introduction to The Selected Shepherd (University of Pittsburgh Press 2024), editor Jericho Brown writes of the impossible effort of introducing “a dead man,” the delayed poet Reginald Shepherd , to readers: “You mean to honor him knowing that you cannot present him as he might present himself.” Brown’s work with The Selected Shepherd allows the Shepherd to introduce himself to readers as he would were he still with us: directly through his poetry. Brown describes Shepherd as an unpredictable, fearless, and brilliant poet who wrote “a little more wildly” across each of his six published collections. What follows is an edited conversation between Jericho Brown and Eric Solomon about the work, resonance, and legacy of Reginald Shepherd.
Reginald Shepherd was born Reginald Berry on April 10, 1963, in New York City. When he was five years elderly, he was issued a birth certificate with the name “Reginald Shepherd” after his mother’s successful suit against the absent man legally proven to be his father. His mother, Blanche Berry, raised him and his sister Regina in the Bronx where he remembers going by “Reggie” until he adopted the more formal “Reginald” in his mid-twenties. (Shepherd addresses the permutations of his name in the essay “What’s in a Name?”). After his mother’s death when he was fourteen—a fact that would shape much of his future poetry—Shepherd moved to his mother’s hometown of Macon, Georgia, to live with family until he left, after graduating from high school, at age seventeen. He enrolled as an undergraduate at Bennington College, leaving in his junior year to move to Boston where he worked at the Boston Public Library, before returning to Bennington to finish his BA four years after his initial expected graduation date. He earned two MFA degrees, one from Brown University and a second from the University of Iowa. Shepherd published five books of poetry [Some Are Drowning (1994); Angel, Interrupted (1996); Wrong (1999); Otherhood (2003); and Fata Morgana (2007)] with a sixth volume published posthumously, Red Clay Weather (2011). He also published two books of essays [Orpheus in the Bronx (2007); A Martian Muse (2010)] and edited two poetry anthologies [The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (2004) and Lyric Postmodernisms (2008)].
Courtesy of The University of Pittsburgh Press.
Shepherd met his partner, Robert Philen, in Ithaca, New York, in 1999, and the two moved to Pensacola, Florida, in July 2001. After a battle with colon cancer, Shepherd died on September 10, 2008, in Pensacola. Though he accomplished much in his career, Shepherd remained aware of the structural inequities that prevented men like him from accessing what he called “fair, just” places of belonging in the academic and literary worlds. “Sometimes I stand in the poetry section of Barnes and Noble and wonder how many authors there come from backgrounds like mine. They can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” he writes in an essay published the year before his death. “Unlike the vast majority of those in academia or the literary world, I have nothing to fall back on. Since leaving Georgia at seventeen, I have been on my own… I have gone from place to place, from circumstance to circumstance, and still I haven’t found that fair, just place, but I continue to search, hoping and believing that there’s a place for me.” Sixteen years after his death, Jericho Brown’s The Selected Shepherd has helped secure the poet’s “fair, just place” on the bookshelves of our great poets.
Searching for Shepherd
Reginald Shepherd’s six volumes of poetry continue to amass a dedicated following from fans, fellow poets, and scholars. Shepherd’s work contains an intoxicating blend of image, metaphor, allusion, formal innovation, and often dizzying complexity. His work incorporates references from Hart Crane to Wallace Stevens to Walter Benjamin to Sam Cooke to Barry White while always remaining the work of an original voice and visionary.
Jericho Brown. Photo courtesy of Emory University.
“I was around twenty-four years old when I first read Reginald Shepherd’s poem ‘Semantics at 4 P.M.’ in an edition of the Best American Poetry edited by Rita Dove,” Jericho Brown writes. Transfixed, Brown recalls asking other poets why he had not been made aware of Shepherd’s work beforehand. He continues, “the poem itself does not identify its speaker as gay, but if there is a queer voice, I believed I was reading it.” For Brown, Shepherd became an example of a “gay, Black poet who was alive,” and for those of us lucky enough to have discovered Shepherd’s work, it is the vitality and the voice—queer, brilliant, complex, propulsive—that resonates long after the initial encounter. Though Brown’s work with The Selected Shepherd will now make a first encounter more accessible for many readers, I would argue that one does not find or search for Shepherd’s poems. As Brown’s story illustrates, you don’t find the poems; his poems find you. Or, as Brown states, poets “are the makers of the beauty that people didn’t know they needed until they see it.”
Similar to Brown, I was twenty-three when I first came to Shepherd’s poetry by happenstance at a time when I needed to “see” his work. I was in an MFA poetry workshop as a MA student in English studying men and masculinities—i.e. not a poet—but we were allowed to take innovative writing workshops as our schedules permitted. I recall vividly feeling like an “outsider” to what I perceived to be the “real” poets in the room (classic imposter syndrome), and I found my work at the time out of step with the much more highly inventive and experimental work of my colleagues.
Eric Solomon
In retrospect, I was attempting in my juvenilia poems to rescue the stories of our queer dead from the tragic detritus to which their lives had forever been relegated in our collective memory. In one poem titled “Appendix,” I elegized Scotty Joe Weaver, an eighteen-year-old gay man from Bay Minette, Alabama, who was killed by two of his roommates in 2004. In another, I attempted to grapple with the death of Matthew Shepard, whose name now serves on official federal hate-crime legislation. One colleague recognized in my meditations on the queer dead something he called a poetic sense of rescue and reclamation, and he invited me to consider Reginald Shepherd when it came time to give presentations on the work of one contemporary poet in our MFA workshop.
Unlike Brown, by the time I found Shepherd, he had passed away. At my friend’s suggestion, I ordered copies of his published work, in which I found poetry full of life and resonance and contradiction and complexity and difficulty but not obscurity. Though they made me feel, I did not then, nor do I now, fully understand what I feel when I encounter and re-read a Shepherd poem. As Brown observes in The Selected Shepherd, Shepherd’s work is not basic by design. Shepherd thought poetry should be “hard enough” to sustain multiple re-readings, not written in such a way that it could be “used up” by readers after a few encounters. For Shepherd, poems should be able to contain different resonances with each return. In a conversation with Krista Tippett, Brown similarly states, “I think poems are better built out of what we don’t understand, not what we do already know, but what we’re trying to figure out and better understand.”
In searching for and finding Shepherd, equal in importance to the poems for me were something you will not find in The Selected Shepherd: his essays where the poet further attempted to understand his craft, his poetics, as well as identity, politics, and his life journey from the Bronx to Georgia to Boston to Brown University to Iowa and eventually to Florida. In the essays, Shepherd reveals his personal struggles as well as the difficulty of his relationship with academic institutions and the literary world. He also displays his immense critical knowledge and broad reading practice. Shepherd, comments Brown, “was a man who seemed to have read all the books you keep meaning to read.” Further, his insights on what we might call a queer literary canon are must-reads for those of us who study LGBTQ+ culture, past and present.
“My aim,” writes Shepherd, “is to rescue some portion of the drowned and the drowning, including always myself.”It seems to me that Shepherd’s “aim” exists in conversation with our queer cultural tradition: those of us in subsequent generations keeping “alive” some portion of the work of those who have gone before, many of whom were lost far too soon. When necessary, we rescue them from the dustbin of memory and place their stories and their works back on the central shelves of literary culture as Jericho Brown has done with The Selected Shepherd. Whether in our innovative work or our work as editors, curators, scholars, documentarians or memory-makers, we claim places for our queer kin. As Brown writes, “we know poets don’t die. And if they do, people who love poetry can always resurrect them.” And in rescuing them, in resurrecting them, we rescue, always, ourselves. As Shepherd writes, no matter the challenges we face, we queer folk refuse to “forget beauty, however strange or difficult.”
Interview: Jericho Brown on Selecting Shepherd
Eric Solomon: Thank you, Jericho, for being here for this conversation in our Southern Spaces series “Queer Intersections.” I’ve organized the questions in two parts. First, is thinking about your editing of The Selected Shepherd . And then perhaps we can talk about how Reginald Shepherd’s work helps us think about Jericho Brown.
In choosing poems for The Selected Shepherd, you present a generally equal number from each of his six collections, with a little bit more from Angel, Interrupted. What were you looking for as you were editing?
Jericho Brown: When I got the opportunity to do this, I had somehow already started doing it in my head. It was the kind of thing, you know that phrase “comes to fruition”? it was the kind of thing that I don’t even think I was aware of it until I was asked to do it. But I had started doing it somewhere in my brain as a Reginald Shepherd reader, as a person who teaches his poems, as somebody who’s interested in his work, as someone who is actually taken by the ways in which his work could be uneven, even.
I don’t love every Reginald poem. I don’t love every poem by anybody with that many books. I had already started this system of ranking of this particular poet’s work, which I think happened because there were so few Black queer poets on the national scene when I was first figuring out that I wanted to be a poet. There were so few that I could hold them all. I could read all of everything they said in every interview. I could read every book. I could read every essay that they had written. Now there are more than I can keep up with. But because there were so few, picking poems for me was at first a matter of going after what I already knew and trying to figure out which book — was that in Otherhood? Was that in Wrong? Trying to remember exactly which book each poem is in. Rereading the books put me in a position where I could see what Reginald Sheppard’s concerns were, or his obsessions, throughout his work. But more than that, it gave me the opportunity to see how he changed from book to book.
Wrong. Courtesy of The University of Pittsburgh Press.
My goal in selecting the poems was to register those changes. I wasn’t going to be able to make a book that only was the poems about nature, only was the poems about queer desire, or only poems about his mother. It was never thematic. It was always craft based. For instance, in Angel, Interrupted, he’s very clearly trying to write a longer poem. In Otherhood, he’s trying to figure out what to make of fragments. In Wrong, he’s following up an influence through trying to see what would happen if Wallace Stevens wrote the queer love poem. All of that had a lot to do with how I went about selecting poems. As you mentioned, there are more poems from Angel, Interrupted and from Otherhood, but I just needed more poems to make it clear what those books were doing because they were doing it in a different way.
My favorite book by Shepherd is Wrong because I think it’s the most truthful that he is in all of his books. I think there are fewer poetic craft tricks. I really love Wrong. I love the long poem “Nights and Days of Nineteen-Something” and “Semantics at Four P.M.” Wrong feels to me when I’m reading it that it’s a miniature book. I can hold on to it in a different way and walk around with it. At some point in “Nights and Days of Nineteen-Something,” he writes,
Hear Jericho Brown read “Nights and Days of Nineteen-Something.”
It was never sex I wanted, the grand etcetera
with a paper towel to wipe it up. I wanted him
to talk to me about Rimbaud while
I sucked him off in the park, drunk
as any wooden boat and tasting of elderly cigarettes
and Bailey’s Irish Cream, my juvenilia. Don’t talk
with your mouth full. (In the clearing
at the bottom of the artificial hill, his two hands
covered every part of me until I couldn’t be seen,
a darkness past the burnt-out lamppost.
There’s something about that kind of audacity. And the way that it includes him. It is indeed that sort of thirst, that primal energy that we associate with desire. But it’s also this guy who likes to read Rimbaud. Which is a specific and a particular guy. It’s also somebody who’s very aware; most of that particular poem includes cruising outside and having sex outside. But also being very aware of the natural landscape that surrounds him as he is following that primal desire, that urge to make love. I’m really taken by that poem and by a lot of the work in Wrong. I would read these books like crazy. I loved Reginald Shepherd, and I would look forward to the next book.
When it became clear to me that he was dying, I felt a kind of sadness. Not because I knew the man. I felt a sadness because I wouldn’t be able to see what he was going to pull off next. I thought he was brilliant, and I loved his prose, and I loved following his blog — at the time that people had blogs. You could wake up and go to the internet and see a handsome recent essay about poetry from Reginald Shepherd, which always included names of poets you never heard of. And because you had never heard of them, you could look them up. You had more reading to do. In many ways, he was like my teacher. I had a lot of respect for him. And I’m glad Terrance Hayes and the editors at Pitt asked me to do it.
Shepherd and Myth
Solomon: I love your craft-based approach being one to register the changes across the six collections and to pull poems that spoke to those changes. And I was reflecting on my own reading of Shepherd. I first encountered his work in 2008, 2009 — Wrong meant something to me as well. Reading it now, in the lithe of what you’re saying about honesty and audacity and that kind of drive that you see with desire in the poem.
Before we get into thinking about the resonances between Shepherd’s work and your own, speaking of those essays that he would post on his blog, he says something about myth, and I’m curious how you understand the role of myth as you were selecting Shepherd’s work. He writes in 2007 that “myth can also be used to place one’s own experiences, thoughts and feelings in a larger context, opening them up to realms beyond the individual, making them less purely personal.” How do you see myth in Shepherd’s work? Is it speaking to that kind of audacity and that honesty? How is it functioning? As you were selecting poems, did you find yourself drawn to examples of the Adonis, Orpheus, and Narcissus figures?
Brown: No, he uses Greek myths so much that you wouldn’t have to plan it out. It’s going to happen. Any book you would do selecting Reginald Shepherd’s poems, there are so many allusions to Greek mythology that you wouldn’t be able to get around it. He had questions about this himself. If you check out the interview he did in Callaloo with Charles Rowell, he talks about that relationship to Greek myth, but also what that might suggest about his relationship to whiteness in general — which I was really taken by.He was always truthful, and even though he was participating in it, he would also question the ways in which what he thought of as beauty had been informed by whiteness, by white beauty standards. Of course that included not just who he was attracted to physically, but his reading and how that reading played out and how it worked out. And we’re all doing that in some way or another. You can only write as wide as your reading is. If you have various kinds of cultures coming in, then that will come through.
People think differently about what writing is and how it’s done. What the “we” means in a poem and what the “I” means. That’s different considering who you’re talking to. And if everything you read is informed by the same classical rendering, then you’re going to have a lot of Greek myth in your poems and you’re going to have a lot to question about why that Greek myth is there. What does it really mean? And many poets do it. Many poets of color, many African-American poets, even Indigenous poets are making exploit of, or identifying with, mythological figures from the Greeks. And part of the reason we do that is this understanding that this is something our readers will share. I think Shepherd was very earnest about making exploit of Greek myth because he was very earnest about beauty, and he understood that poems must be handsome.
Otherhood. Courtesy of The University of Pittsburgh Press.
You said something earlier about the book Wrong, and it having meaning for you. Even the titles of Shepherd’s books are so tragic: Otherhood, Some Are Drowning, Wrong, Fata Morgana, Red Clay Weather. It does not sound like a good time. Greek myths lend themselves to tragedy. And Reginald Shepherd, I think, needed a kind of, how do I say this, a backdrop or a landscape of tragedy on which his poems could grow and through which he could build artifice. The Greek myths are full of rapes. They’re full of wars. I think it was very essential to what he was doing, but I chose poems thinking, okay, in these poems, Reginald Shepherd is making a lot of leaps, a lot of what seems to be non-sequitur leaps. And Orpheus happens to be in here. But in this poem, in another book, for instance, things are very narrative, but Orpheus happens to be in here. So, Orpheus is going to be there.
Solomon: Myth is just a vehicle for him, one of the traditions that he’s drawing from and reimagining throughout his work. I know that you were registering changes as you were selecting, but myth is, as you’re saying, omnipresent. You couldn’t get around it, but it wasn’t a strategic thing as you were selecting the poems.
My next question is about the relation of Shepherd with your work. Certainly, the exploit of myth is a common thread, but I’m thinking in another interview you talked about how poets love flowers, and the exploit of flowers that connects your work with queer culture. As I was reliving these poems through your work with The Selected Shepherd, I noticed ways in which Jericho Brown and Reginald Shepherd’s poetry were in conversation with each other. Have you reflected on these resonances? Either as you were selecting the poems, or post the volume coming out?
Brown: It’s difficult to tease out.
Solomon: Maybe it’s easier for a scholar looking in.
Brown: Yeah, I actually like hearing that. I like finding out what I’m doing and how people relate it to the poets that I’m influenced by. Because I always see things I’ve never seen before. I recently realized I’ve been reading this poem by Shepherd for years — I can’t think of what poem it is — but there’s a certain kind of phrasing that he uses that I exploit toward the end of a poem of mine called “Say Thank You, Say I’m Sorry.” As I was reading on a podcast, I’m like, “Oh, I stole that syntax.” I don’t exploit the same words. I realized there’s a lot about my work in terms of syntax that I probably learned from Shepherd.
There are other poets who helped with this, but Shepherd helped me realize that what was most essential about my writing would be how singular it was, or is. That I had to somehow either be myself or create a version of my self, and that had to be the speaker of my poems. The way Jericho Brown makes exploit of sentences. What I sound like in a poem has to be only what I sound like in a poem. So, part of what Shepherd does for me, reading his work through and through, is you realize nobody else wrote these poems.
No one could have written a book like Wrong but Reginald Shepherd. No one could have written “My Mother Was No White Dove,” or “Semantics at Four P.M.” but Reginald Shepherd. And I think he is the person who led me to understand that. It’s like when musical artists appear on the radio, I know its them. The deejay at the radio doesn’t have to say “here’s the new song by . . . .” I just know, because I’ve been listening to music, and I know what they sound like. There’s really never a question when Mary J. Blige comes. And I figured out through Shepherd that in my own work, when people are reading a Jericho Brown poem, they need to be like, is that Jericho Brown?
So, what does that mean about a consistency of heart, a consistency of intellect, of line, of phrasing, of a kind of experimentation? Which I think was his goal. How do I continue to question myself and to challenge my idea about what a poem is and yet remain who I am throughout the poem? How is it still me? And obviously “me” changes and grows. And yet there’s a way that when we look at that last book and we look at that first book by Reginald Shepherd, we can see that it’s the same guy, but it’s so different. That last book is so different from anything else he’s written mostly because he wrote it on his deathbed. He was dying when he was finishing that book. He didn’t even get to put the book in order. His partner, Robert Philen, ordered it, but it’s all Shepherd’s poems. Which is why there’s so many in that last book. I kind of got frustrated because there’s so many very long poems, one right after another. And I’m like, “Bro, Shepherd wouldn’t have done that.” [laughter] Those long prose poems. But I also noticed maybe he would have done it because it was his first time writing prose poems. I’m fascinated by what those poems yield.
Solomon: Yeah. You’re comparing what you learned from Shepherd, that sense of voice, with your own. It is a Jericho Brown poem. It is Reginald Shepherd poem. That can be consistent even if, as you said, the experience of selecting these poems was to track the way he changed in terms of his craft across the six collections. Even though it’s changing, there’s always a sense that when you read a Reginald Shepherd poem, you know it’s him. And I will say that’s also true of a Jericho Brown poem.
Brown: Aw. [laughter] Thanks Eric.
Shepherd’s Queer Eros
Solomon: You’re welcome. Another thing that I notice as someone who considers myself to be a queer cultural historian, I’m always down for seeing tongue-in-cheek play with the queer community or, “mock” is not quite the right word, but just send us up a little bit. Remind us not to take ourselves too seriously. I think Shepherd does something like that in “The God’s at Three A.M.” Or where you do it in your poem “Host” which, I think is subversive; it has a message. It’s not just pure satire, but it is reminding us as queer people to be better to one another.
Brown: Yeah. To be better to one another is captivating. I never knew I wrote that. But I’m ecstatic to hear it. I’m not against hearing that. I think what attracts me to those poems that you’re talking about by Shepherd and by any queer writer, is the same thing that attracts me to poems that I’m attracted to by certain Black writers, whether they are queer or not. Because they’re “in-house.” There’s a way that you can read Shepherd’s “The Gods” and what you and I see in that poem we know other people are just not going to see. Because we’ve actually been to that bar. [laughter] And we understand that we could go to any city in America and still go to that bar and see those characters. [laughter] And we can see ourselves. Like, who am I in this poem? And yeah, that’s what is meant in a poem by me, like “Host.” Obviously, there’s a reader who won’t have had that experience, and they’re sort of observing it from the outside, and maybe even identifying with it, but in a different way. It’s the same thing as when, Future this lyric where he says, “Y’all move that dope.” And I’m always amazed. When that song was such a huge song, every time I went to a club, every time I turned on the radio, I would hear that song. And I remember thinking, none of these people dancing to this song are drug dealers. [laughter]
Solomon: Were they “in the know”?
Brown: Yeah, like if I was really moving dope, that song probably had a certain kind of meaning to me when it came out, but when I’m listening to this song, I’m just thinking about grading papers. [laughter] I’m not trying to move dope. I’m just trying to stay up delayed enough to finish a poem.
I do think some things you can extrapolate or translate beyond that immediate in-house audience, but having an in-house audience I think is the actual backbone to voice. If we’re having a conversation about Reginald Shepherd, we’re talking about a poet who was always willing to be himself, to always have his own experiences in his poems. And so, sneaking around to make love outside, which I think queer people actually know less about than they used to.
Solomon: I agree.
Brown: But sneaking around to make love outside is an in-house conversation. It can translate. It can extrapolate to anybody sneaking around to do anything. But my experience reading those poems is “Oh, there I am.” Thank you, Reginald Shepherd, for writing this thing about yourself that shows that I’m not crazy, that shows that I exist.
Solomon: And that you’re not alone.
Brown: Exactly.
Solomon: A whole history of what we might call cruising.
Brown: Yeah, that I miss. Yeah. [laughter] A whole history of cruising.
Solomon: That some people don’t think we need anymore, right?
Brown: Yes. Well, I mean, maybe that’s not what this interview is about, so I’ll let that go. I don’t know if people think we need that anymore. I just know you can meet a guy online and whatever happens from that happens. And you can meet a guy at the grocery store. And if you meet a guy at the grocery store, my personal history has shown that there were more options for what I could do with the guy and what the guy could do with me. When I meet a guy online, it’s either I have to make love to you now or marry you? [laughter]
Solomon: There aren’t as many options … And I love that Shepherd invites us to have this kind of conversation about his work.
Brown: Yeah, exactly.
Solomon: In a way that if I were someone different, if you were someone different, and we were sitting here talking about Reginald Shepherd, maybe we wouldn’t be talking about “The God’s at Three A.M .” The idea of cruising that you mentioned. I think that’s handsome that his work allows for all these entry points.
Brown: He would love that. And I think that we should also mention that this is all happening for Shepherd from his first book onward at a time when he is in those anthologies with Joseph Beam and Marlon Riggs and Essex Hemphill — who also heavily used Greek myth. But there’s no mixing up Hemphill and Shepherd. Among Black queer writers, even Carl Phillips at the time, there is this idea: we are going to say what our actual experience is in our poems, and we are not coding it. The code will be the fact that we reach out to you, Jericho, in that library when you’re nineteen years elderly. In this library, actually, which is where I found Essex Hemphill’s poems.
Solomon: What you’re saying reminds me of Assotto Saint’s “Why I Write” where he says (and I’m paraphrasing) we have an obligation to not file away our experiences in a desk drawer. I think that is very much clear in Shepherd’s work and in your work and in Hemphill, and Riggs, and the people that you’re mentioning.
Shepherd and the Natural World
You write in the Introduction to The Selected Shepherd, about framing his work around three primary concerns: 1) an understanding of the natural world as endangered; 2) his grief over the death of his mother when he was fourteen, and 3) his desire for the white male body and self-identification as a “snow queen,” and his processing of what this desire might mean.
Can you talk about the way Shepherd “reflects on the beauty of the natural world through an understanding of that world as endangered.” How did his thinking change from Some Are Drowning to Red Clay Weather? Or was it always the natural world as under threat? Did you notice different nuances as you were moving through?
Red Clay Weather. Courtesy of The University of Pittsburgh Press.
Brown: I think that maybe the one thing Shepherd would have in common with a poet like Mary Oliver is this idea that you protect and conserve the natural world not because of conservation, not because of its resources, but because it is holy. Every image from the environment is always a reason to be excited about nature. But we understand in many of the poems that that which we should be excited about could end.
For me, coming up with these concerns first had to do with separating what is a concern or a subject from that which is artifice. Greek mythology is not a subject, it’s an artifice. He’s not writing a poem about the Greek myths. He’s making exploit of classical allusion in order to say something about these other things.
Poets have to exploit what they have. And what we do have is a bunch of trees, flowers, and grass. We have the sky. We got some dirt. Those things seem to have already been here. They seem to have some capacity to be here if you get rid of us. And I think that particular concern is also the reason why poets can tell you the name of every flower. You just don’t know what every flower looks like. You wouldn’t be able to actually point to a narcissus. [laughter].
Because you read that part of the intro, I’ll read what I say right after that, which I think deals with that, that first concern:
In each book, Shepherd reflects the beauty of the natural world through an understanding of that world as endangered. In his first book, Some Are Drowning, this endangerment appears in direct proportion to the fact of whiteness. And then I quote, “My true love’s eyes / are nothing like my own, are bland as the suburban lawn / he mows on a summer Sunday afternoon, backyard / cookout with domesticated dog (And the beef cattle / graze x world? And the deforestation proceeds by x miles / per minute?).”
And that endangerment status matters all the more as environmental elements often get presented as characters with agency. Here are a few lines from “Surface Effects in Summer Wind” from Wrong:
I’m learning to remember the sound
days make: one sky disdaining the idea
of clouds, sunlight surviving
its centrifuge, breeze keeping blessed September
at bay.
Notice September is what’s at bay. Then in the same poem a few lines later, he writes:
Midnight,
look at the things I’ve done
in your name, in my shadowy, walking out
into the street that changes nothing
Midnight gets called on and talked to directly. September gets held at bay. That which you think of as the natural occurrence, the natural world, has a mind and a life of its own. And the speaker in Shepherd’s poems understands that and is always speaking directly to that mind and that life of the natural world.
Solomon: So, there’s a sense of that agency of the natural world and that agency being under threat by human actions.
The Day the ‘World Ended’: Shepherd’s Perpetual Return
The second concern is from the very first page of Some Are Drowning to the very last page of Red Clay Weather. It’s everywhere in his poetry. It calls to mind other poets who have talked about what it means to have that sort of exigence—what motivates you to write; what, in many instances, traumatically or tragically, happened that somehow gave you the engine to write. In his poetry and essays, Shepherd writes constantly about – and is processing — the grief over the death of his mother. In the poem “Vampires,” for example, which you select, he writes “a song like every song for the dead” or in “For My Mother in Lieu of Mourning,” which is in Fata Morgana: “Would you have frozen in these lines? You were their possibility: now love must find another shape.” Really powerfully returning over and over again to what it was like to lose his mother when he was fourteen years elderly.
Fata Morgana. Courtesy of The University of Pittsburgh Press.
I know you spoke with Natasha Trethewey in 2010 in Southern Spaces, and I think about hearing Trethewey speak about that existential wound, the murder of her mother, and also at such a teenage age. And Shepherd speaking in an essay that he would publish, talking about the day “the world ended” on March 31st, 1978, which was the day of his mother’s death. Two questions here. One, how did you live with the loss of Shepherd’s mother in these poems as you were reading them? How did that return for you? And then the second question is more for Jericho Brown: does that sense of a wound that writers write from jive with you? Does that make sense to you? What was it like living with that concern that you identify in Shepherd’s work?
Brown: I just think it’s his best work. I think it’s his most handsome poems. I think when his mother comes into a poem, I’m probably going to like the poem. I think that she was his way into and back to blackness. She was a specter to him. There’s a way that she haunted him, and therefore, blackness haunted him. Whenever he talks about music in his work, his mother’s coming up. If Sam Cooke, Donny Hathaway, or Otis Redding is in the poem, then his mother’s in the poem. Also, the color black itself seems to always appear in a poem where his mother appears, if not talking about Black people, just the fact of a black shirt or a black shoe. I think it’s also handsome because it’s not Hallmark washed. It’s not a Mother’s Day card. The relationship between the speaker and his mother in these poems is fraught. There’s fear as well as love. There’s regret. There’s also a calling out of neglect in some cases. Reginald Shepherd used to write that his mother knew that if she gave him a book, he would be occupied for the duration of the time that it took him to read the book. So, she could do whatever she wanted. She went through the trouble of making sure he was schooled at the best possible places, in spite of the fact that she was needy. He grew up until he was fifteen in the projects, in the Bronx. He has poems about that. I’ll give a couple of examples.
I’ll start with this one as it will give me an opportunity to talk about some of the things in Shepherd’s work that I’m really interested in.
Hear Jericho Brown read “My Mother Dated Otis Redding.”
“My Mother Dated Otis Redding”
My mother is laughing in the hallway with her friends I don’t like much, maybe the numbers runner who gives me dollars to go see movies while they fuck, a mattress propped in the doorway where there’s no door. I know what’s “fuck,” and “dick,” and “pussy.” They’re “tipsy,” she says, they’re having a good time. “Don’t I deserve a good time now and then?” I’m looking through the telescope I just got from a catalogue, while they break out the Tanqueray; I don’t know what that is. They’re putting on some records, it’s 1970, Nixon’s president; there’s a dock in one song and I don’t know how to whistle, but I know what’s a dock, and a bay. There aren’t many stars because of the streetlights, it’s the Bronx, the singer sounds sorrowful, he’s dead. My mother says, “You know, I went to high school with him, back in Macon,” and everybody says “I’ll bet,” and she laughs. I wish I was his son, I wish they’d all go home. It’s delayed and I just want to go to bed, but she just wants to have a good time. I turn my telescope on the Puerto Rican couple fighting, kissing in a window across the concrete courtyard, three parrots escaped from the loading dock freezing in a trash tree, it’s November, neighborhood kids throwing rocks at each other from bicycles, my mother standing in the hallway with a paper cup of Tanqueray, or lying in the hallway in a pool of her own shit.
That’s a poem that’s difficult on the mother, but also interested in what the mother affords. The mother affords this telescope. The mother affords an awareness of stars. The mother affords an awareness of the speaker’s neighbors, of other cultures. The mother also affords this way into Otis Redding’s history and music. And then the poem is also political in this way that I think might be in-house for Shepherd. He mentions Nixon; he mentions 1970. What many people don’t know is that they would build these projects very purposely without doors in the apartments; you wouldn’t have a door on a closet, or a door on a bathroom, or door dividing your bedroom from a hallway. And that was designed to take the idea of deserving privacy out of the minds of people who had to live in the projects. That was real. That was on purpose.
So, part of what he’s getting at here goes beyond the mother. And I think what I learned from that poem has to do with how no matter what you start with, the poem’s got to include everything. It’s got to reach out into the world and somehow be about more than just whatever its obvious subject is.
Here’s another poem where Shepherd is talking about his mom:
Hear Jericho Brown read “My Mother Was No White Dove.”
“My Mother Was No White Dove”
My Mother Was No White Dove no dove at all, coo-rooing through the dusk and foraging for miniature seeds My mother was the clouded-over night a moon swims through, the shadowy against which stars switch themselves on, so many already dead by now (stars switch themselves off and are my mother, she was never so celestial, so clearly seen) My mother was the murderous flight of crows stilled, black plumage gleaming among black branches, taken for nocturnal leaves, the difference between two darks: a cacophony of needs in the bare tree silhouette, a flight of feathers, scattering black. She was the night streetlights oppose (perch for the crows, their purchase on sight), undiscovered bruise across the sky making up names for rain My mother always falling was never snow, no kind of bird, pigeon or crow …
Which I think is also a handsome poem because it allows his mother to be a person. And there’s a way that when we think about poems — we found this out during the Iraq War — the way Laura Bush thinks about poems is that is that they’re all sweet. And that’s not what poems are. I’m sorry to tell you. So, there’s this way we get his mom being his mom, but also a human being, which I really love. Saying your mother is no white dove is a way also of calling to the beauty of one’s mother’s blackness.
Beautiful White Men: Shepherd’s Desire
Solomon: I love hearing you read it. Hearing the rhythm and the way in which it was constructed. One of the things that stood out to me as you read it was the exploit of the word “snow,” which for readers of Shepherd’s, there’s a lot of exploit of the word snow — allusion, metaphor, imagery — throughout his collections, throughout his poetry. And I wonder if this is a convenient segue, or too heavy-handed, but I am curious to get to the last concern that you identify, across his poetry, which is perhaps the most controversial still. I know it was divisive for some readers during Shepherd’s lifetime. And that’s his self-identification as a “snow queen.” And where readers today might land. I am thinking about, Shepherd’s attraction, veneration, of the white male body.
He writes in the 1986 essay “On Not Being White”: “I write about men, and most of them are white. And I write about white men, and most of them are beautiful. So, I write about beautiful white men.” You can see that in his poems. Do you think that lands differently in 2024? Has anything changed in thinking about Shepherd’s potentially divisive, or confusing, as you put it in your Introduction, presentation of himself.
Brown: I don’t know if it’s any different. I don’t know why, but I guess I just never cared. [laughter] I mean, I do care, but only intellectually. I don’t get it, but I don’t need to either. Even Shepherd didn’t get it. I mean, he says so; he says this is weird. [laughter] There is a poem where he’s looking at a very attractive Black guy reading a book and saying, what’s wrong with me that I’m not attracted to you? Why not you? You’re reading a book. It seems like an admission that the problem that Shepherd has is with himself, with his own idea of his own beauty or possibility for the beauty of blackness. And to be quite truthful, I only feel sorry about that.
But all emotions and all ideas are welcome to be expressed in poetry. Only the Black poet can actually write about Black self-loathing that is the result of whiteness. And that’s a real thing among us. And not just in the United States. I went to Nigeria a few months ago [laughter] and was just fascinated by how many blonde wigs there were. We’ve decided something about blonde hair that in and of itself is supposed to have a meaning toward what we think of as handsome.
So, I don’t trip about that from Shepherd. And no shade, but you know these writers who call themselves Black pessimists who are all married to white people, maybe I haven’t read enough of it, but I don’t see the part of their work where they’re like, why is my wife white if I care about Black people so much?
Solomon: So, at least there’s a self-reflection that’s happening in Shepherd.
Brown: Yeah. I’m much more attracted to that than I would be attracted to somebody participating in that without understanding that’s what they are participating in. There’s an awareness. It’s like when I vote Democrat. Like I’m not crazy. I’m not stupid. I also would like to at least have a home to come to. Like, I don’t want, like, no shade, but I don’t want porn to be illegal. So, I’m not interested in project 2025. And I’m voting for her, but I don’t think of Kamala Harris as some kind of freedom fighter or some kind of rebel. I don’t think that that is inherent in the fact of her blackness, either.
So, these poems are in the book because they come up so much and that’s what he was interested in. And I am so ecstatic that they’re there because I would love to see critics and scholars on race and on whiteness — fields that did not exist during Shepherd’s time — take these poems up.
Solomon: There’s a complexity in these poems and in his essays that should lead to studying Shepherd’s approach to the white male body. His will to process and understand.
Brown: He also probably felt, given what was happening among Black queer writers at the time, a bit of a pariah. But it’s not like he’s the only Black queer person dating white guys. I think him feeling like a bit of a pariah has to do with him expressing it through his poems. When something comes up in a poem, it ends up identifying you like that’s who you are. I think we might not be friends with, but we’re friends with somebody who’s friends with, a Black guy who only dates white people. [laughter]
Solomon: If you think about it, Shepherd publishing in the 90s into the 2000s, the post- In the Life generation, Joseph Beam and the Black man loving Black man is the revolutionary act of the 80s, there is a sense that he is publishing as a poet in contrast to those other writers and poets.
Brown: Yeah. The thing about Shepherd that makes him different is his move that, okay, you call me out about this thing. All right. So that’s where I’m going. That’s what I’m going to do in this next whole book. We got to see how much of that thing I am. And his way of doing things was put the poems first. And, if that’s the experience he had for his poems, that’s what was going to be in the poems. I’m really fascinated by that and even envious to some extent. Poets are the people who have to say the brave thing. Who have to say the thing that is true in spite of the fact that nobody else seems to be saying it. Even if that truth makes us look bad.
Solomon: Or is uncomfortable.
Brown: Yeah. And I never felt that I was doing that in my work as much as I feel it now. I feel like, “Oh, damn, I really don’t want to talk about this.” I would actually rather not say this in a poem, because once I do, it becomes who I am. You can say this controversial thing in a poem, in Reginald Shepherd’s case, he would say in poems that he wanted to suck white cock, which, I’ve never said it in my life, but — and he understood this — after that, you forget that that same person might want a sandwich too, might want a bowl of cereal, might like watching “Charlie’s Angels,” might prefer orange to red. [laughter] There’s a whole world involved with being a human being. And yet poets have to deal with the fact that once we put it on the page, we understand we will be identified that way, and in many ways dehumanized for that identification. So, Shepherd is an opportunity for me to not dehumanize somebody. But I don’t get it. I don’t like it, but I like him. I can still be interested in him, even if I’m not interested in that particular facet. And I as I said before, I think that that interest is allowed because he’s aware.
From Shepherd to Brown
Hear Jericho Brown talk about his early influences.
Solomon: So next is a series of questions that I teased up about how Shepherd can facilitate us think about your work, poetic philosophy, and approach.
In an essay, “To Make Me Who I Am,” Shepherd writes about the importance of certain kinds of music being present in his poetry. For instance, in relationship to his mother as you mentioned. He adds, “Patti Smith was my first image of what a poet might be. She turned social ostracism, into rebellious outsider-hood, loneliness into proud isolation from the uncomprehending mass.” Do you have a Patti Smith? When you think about Jericho Brown before he was Jericho Brown? Was there a person who served as some type of image for you of what a poet might be?
Brown: I think that’s a great question. There were always Black poets that I knew about as a kid growing up. I’m always fascinated about people not having an awareness of poetry. I don’t know, it’s because of the time that I grew up in. I don’t know if it’s because of what the Black church was then and how it’s different now. I learned who Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes were in church. My idea of a poet were the poets. It is true that when I was a kid listening to Stevie Wonder, I felt like, “Oh, wow, this is poetry!”
I guess the substantial poet, for me, might be the same as the substantial poet for a whole bunch of other people. And that’s Langston Hughes. Yeah. He seemed to me when I was a kid a kind of unifying force. I was always taken by the fact that the poems are so musical. I loved, and still to this day love, his particularly miniature poems: “My Friend,” “Island,” “Suicide Note.” He was amazing at creating moments of sublimity. These poems are sublime. When he’s good, he’s just so good. I don’t like “Make America Great Again” or when he goes long. I always thought of him as The Poet because he was given to me as the poet most aware of his people. You know, the self that was made up of many selves; the I that understands there’s a we. Later, the more I read his poems, I was taken that he always seemed to be reaching outside of himself.
Hughes was that poet for me. He was the first poet made accessible to me, and I knew when I got him I was getting poems. I never felt locked out of anything. I will also add, I understand people’s idea of poetry as a marginal literature. But I didn’t understand that at all when I was a kid. I thought poetry was the literature. To this day, I have questions about it. I think there are more poems sitting on people’s refrigerators and in their mirrors above their dressers, and right by their door so that they can read them as they walk out, or inside the visor of their car. I think there are more poems in people’s lives than there are novels. So, I don’t know why we’re so marginal. [laughter]
Solomon: Yeah. I wouldn’t argue that.
Brown: Shepherd also in his definition of Patti Smith as that beginning is thinking about how to make exploit of all the ways that he has been hurt, all the ways that he has been oppressed, both personally and as a Black queer person, and turning that into something else. And part of what he’s saying is that Patti Smith was an example of that. I don’t think I was self-conscious enough or aware enough as a teenage person that that was indeed my lot in life. Because I didn’t feel that way then, that’s not what my need of a poet was.
I liked Sylvia Plath too when I was a kid. I liked Anne Sexton. I liked Gwendolyn Brooks a whole lot. I thought she was amazing. And I mentioned Stevie Wonder. Very early on, Wonder gave me the idea that art could be a contribution to the culture; that you can make a feeling and change the entire culture. I love that. In particular, thinking about blackness. We are having that happening right now with an artist like Kendrick Lamar. Where the music is informing the way the people think about themselves. Which means that blackness, yet again, gets expanded.
So, my idea of what a poem is, and what I do when I write one, is to expand that which is broad. I do the work of showing you just how substantial it can be; that it can include all these other things — definitely Black culture, definitely queer culture, but also the wide American culture.
Identity and Poetry
Solomon: Art has the capacity to expand and not collapse any of our identities. One of the fascinating things for me as a reader of Shepherd’s essays is the fact that Orpheus in the Bronx is subtitled Essays On Identity Politics and the Freedom of Poetry and he’s constantly ruminating on what identity is and how it makes its way into his poetry or not. And I see some connections here. He states in one interview, “I prefer to call myself a writer who is gay and Black, or a writer who is Black and gay, and to call myself a gay Black writer. I would give the priority to me being a writer. And I certainly think that an engine of my writing is my experience of blackness, my experience of gayness, of marginality, and exclusion. But that doesn’t mean that the writing arising from that experience is wholly determined by that experience.”
And Shepherd writes in “The Others’ Other” in a similar way: “I have always intensely disliked what I call identity poetics, the use of poetry as a means to assert or claim social identity.”
He continually is thinking through this in his essays: what is the role of identity or “identity politics” in the making and the crafting of a poem. And I really like what you’ve said before about learning to write about race and sexuality and blackness, in your words, “as if they are givens” and not as if you’re “exposing or exposed.”] I see connections between what Shepherd wrote and what you’ve written. But I also see how they’re different. Do you still feel that the priority here is on the writing? What role does politics play in the composition of a Jericho Brown poem?
Brown: I think Shepherd and I were going about this probably the same way, but I also think the difference is that he’s worried about bad poems, and I’m not worried about bad poems. People get so frustrated. I mean, I get it. When a really bad book wins a really substantial prize, you’re worried about poetry. [laughter] But if we’re doing the immortal thing, let the thing be immortal. It’ll work out. It’ll happen. But people get really — and I think Shepherd could have too — bogged down in the present moment; and in like, oh, why is this a poem? Because you said you were Black three times in it?
I kind of like the idea that maybe a poem is a poem because you say “Black” three times in it. [laughter] I don’t care. [laughter] One of the wonderful things about having served on the National Book Award jury was seeing how many poets that I love and admire and respect approached poetry. Even if I don’t like them anymore, [laughter] I still think they’re poets. They are people with a lot of reading under their belts. I very distinctly remember being on that jury and seeing people bring up books that I thought were objectively bad. But they liked that mess, and with all their reading history, thought those were great poems. And then the opposite would happen. I’d be like, “Here’s this book that’s really good.” And they’d be like, “Jericho, no, not that book.” As long as I’m aware of that, I’m not really worried.
I think everything comes out. People get what they need. It’s essential that we get to hear from as many poets as possible so that we know people are getting what they need. But I also think if something doesn’t turn me on, I’m not defensive enough to write an essay. Other people are, and I’m glad they’re out there. There are people who are meant for that: something turns you off, you write an essay, go for it. And people talk about it on Twitter [X]. I’m down. Go for it. I love it. Lore, lore. I’m always for more lore. But I just don’t get into it because it doesn’t fuel my own writing.
My writing, on the other hand, can be fueled by disagreement. I can see someone’s poetics being in disagreement with my poetics and my poems can prove them wrong. [laughter] Through craft, through the fact of the poem, but not in a way where I’m calling him on the phone and cussing them out — which I actually would like better.
Maybe I’m going too far in this question, but I’m always amazed by how people get mad at folks in a community as miniature as Poetry Land. Where you could just call them. Like if there’s a mix up, call me. You don’t have to write an essay because you read something wrong. You can send me a DM. Send me an email. Text me.
I think everything goes in a poem and that my job when I’m writing a poem is to allow whatever falls into it to fall into it. And if I’m allowing everything to fall into it, then all that I know will fall into it. Orpheus might be there. Kendrick Lamar might be too. And an experience from when I was sixteen and unhappy might be in there, and an experience from when I was fourteen and ecstatic might be all in the same poem.
And I think that’s what Shepherd believes. But I think instead of him saying that he’s saying something that puts him on the defensive about identity politics, which I don’t get into just because I don’t know what that means. And every time I try to define it, every time I look it up, every time I talk to people about it, nobody seems to agree about what identity politics means.
And the other thing I don’t know that I see people saying a lot lately is race baiting. I don’t know what race baiting means. And I clearly don’t need to know to make my work happen. I think poems are political. I don’t think there’s any way around that. I haven’t read the poem that is not. I think people are too. I think lives are. And I think poems are living things. When I’m working on a poem, I’m much more interested in the line, and much more interested in rhyme, and the sounds of things, and the construction of the sentences themselves than I am in what the sentences say. I figure out what the sentences say down in revision land. But when I’m in first draft land, I don’t care about that stuff. Then when I’m revising the poem, I’m revising based on a system of sentences and sounds and line and rhyme and meter.
Solomon: There’s a sense that you’re in agreement with Shepherd on the line itself being the writer constructing the poem. Then these other things may be brought to bear on it in revision or as it’s received in the world. I think that that’s powerful. Shepherd is writing these essays in a moment that is different than our moment. During the culture wars of the 90s into the early 2000s, there was this need to define, maybe more so than now in what we might call our queerer moment, when it comes to thinking about identity.
Paying it Forward
One of the things that you mentioned earlier and that I find to be a powerful ethic in Shepherd’s work, especially some of his essays, has to do with going to Shepherd to find poets that you should know about. He was always uplifting and amplifying all kinds of different, lesser known, or marginalized poets. That was something that he was committed to: good work getting out there. You’ve returned to Shepherd here, in the ethic of bringing him to readers today. Are there poets that we should be reading and be talking more about?
Brown: I like everybody, so it’s always difficult for me. I really do. Nobody believes me, but I do. When I don’t like a poet, it’s probably because had a run in with them. [laughter] There are poets I don’t like. I mean, suddenly your work can get bad to me if you’ve been disrespectful to me or my students. Or maybe I’m not into it. There aren’t a lot of poems out there that I dislike; there are poems that I’m neutral about — most poems. Most poems happen and I’m like, okay, well moving on. I get Poem a Day, like everybody else and I read poems every day. And sometimes I’m like, ”Oh, God, I gotta send this poem to my ten friends.” And sometimes I’m like, “Okay, girl. Well, you got in there. Go on, go with your bad self.”
So, I like Taylor Johnson, and I think everybody should be reading his work. And I’ll stop there.
Solomon: Inevitably someone’s going to feel left out.
Brown: Well, it’s not just about feeling left out. But there was this other question you had here just about queer poets. I like Brian Teare, Randall Mann, James Allen Hall, Aaron Smith, Danez Smith, Philip B Williams. All of those folks are like the queer men. I like Ellen Bass. I have never disliked a poet whose first name is Robert: Robert Creeley, Robert Frost. I definitely like Robert Duncan. Robert Lowell.
For me, poets write the Bible. You have this book, and what? You don’t like a part of it? [laughter] You don’t like Second Thessalonians? You don’t you don’t like Acts? Which gospel do you not like? You might like some things more than others. People love Song of Solomon because they see it as a love poem. People like any scripture where Jonathan comes up because they like to think about David having a good time. I just think poetry is in and of itself, actually attractive, likable, captivating, elaborate, a living thing. I like a lot of poets who I think I get on their nerves.
I like Kim Addonizio. I’ve always liked Terrance Hayes’s work. Jeffrey McDaniel. And there are some people whose work I don’t get into, but that’s just because I don’t get into it.
Solomon: And we don’t have to name them, right?
Brown: No, I mean, I could. if you want me to say people I don’t like, I could do that, too. We could gossip. [laughter] We could talk about who we ought to get rid of. Because they’re out there, too. I’m like, oh my God, how is this person still working? You know? That’s what y’all doing? I like a lot of very different things. It’s easier for me when I’m dealing with students to make recommendations because I’ve seen their work and I’m like, “Oh, you should read this or that poem.” Everybody’s difficult on Mary Oliver, but she wrote “The Summer Day.” It’s a great poem. Y’all can get crazy if you want. And Sharon Olds wrote “May 1968.” It’s a great poem. You can wear her out all you want. She gave us that. I love Yusef Komunyakaa. If you live in Arkansas and your name is Jeffrey, I probably think you’re a great poet. You could spell that “Geo,” “Gef,” “Jeff,” however you get to do. I like a lot of poets because I read a lot of poetry. [laughter]
Solomon: I like finding a sense of connection or commonality with particular poets based upon a student’s work. That’s how I was introduced to Reginald Shepherd for the first time: someone said, “I see something in your work, read this poet.”
Brown: I like Catherine Barnett. I like Deborah Landau. I generally like poets name Catherine. All poets named Marie or Mary are always good. Mary Shivers. Marie Howe. [laughter]
I’m using that to show that you can’t, you can’t narrow it down. it is better to create a family tree for yourself. And that includes figuring out who you do love. When you figure out who you love, figuring out who they love. If you can do that, that’s a reading life. You can read for the rest of your life that way.
I didn’t even say Lucille Clifton’s name. Lucille Clifton is my favorite poet. Second to her is probably Louise Glück. She’s good. Leave her alone.
Poetry, Theory, Resilience
Solomon: Those of us who’ve spent time with Shepherd know that he’s constantly invoking names like Adorno, Benjamin, Lacan. And he has written, “Unlike many poets, I have never been afraid of theory.” You’re a poet, a public intellectual, a teacher. What role does theory play in your innovative life? In your intellectual life? Is it something that you begin with? He says it’s a “challenge and incitement” for him.
Eric Solomon
Brown: I generally like to read anything that feels like it wants to be read. Anything from novels to criticism to theory to poetry that makes me feel there’s an urgency behind it. Sure, I went to graduate school, got a PhD, so I’ve read these people. Most recently Bettina Judd, a theorist whose work has been so helpful to me. People get frustrated with theorists because they are… they speak abstractly, in the air. And that seems sometimes contradictory to the impulse of poetry to speak on the ground and in images and that which is concrete.
Poets give often the singular situation in order to show that which is common, or known among us. Whereas theorists are doing this other thing where they want to catch the common situation, and then you get to apply it to your individual situation. What I’ve most recently learned from a writer like Judd has to do with maybe the first question you asked which was about the wound and whether or not I write from it. And maybe I didn’t answer that question. Maybe I avoided it.
Jericho Brown. Photo courtesy of Emory University.
I think the hardest thing about writing for me has to do with the fact that much of where my earlier writing came from I have healed, or am trying to heal. And knowing that, I am interested in what part of my life, in my personality, only exists because of that wound or because of those wounds. And I want to heal that too. If there is something in me that is a descendant of the abuse I got at the hands of my father, I don’t want that thing in me anymore. And some of that I won’t be able to get rid of, and it’s not like it’s bad. I’m like the best friend anybody can have because I am the person who looks forward to cussing people out on somebody else’s behalf. But I was never a person that could do that for myself until recently. That’s because I always saw myself as a person in a family. And in the family where I grew up, you take care of everybody else, but you don’t take care of yourself.
I think that’s the case, not just for me. I think it’s for my sister. I think it’s for my mom. There’s this sense that your life is about other people and that you put your life on the backburner, and that’s the right thing to do. I just ain’t that person no more. And I don’t want to be that person. And so, if I’m not that person, where are my poems coming from? That person wrote Please. So where are my poems going to come from if they’re not coming from that wound? And what I’ve learned from Judd’s work is that my present feeling, my present way of being will always have something from which I can pull a poem.
Solomon: It’s a powerful reorientation. It makes me think of Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness? I’ve been thinking with that book by Kevin Brazil. He’s questioning why we return to certain kinds of narratives as queer culture. Why we’re reproducing certain kinds of stories about loss, about the AIDS dead, for example. And that seems to be even for non queer writers, that’s how they imagined queer life. One of the things he talks about is how complex that reorientation is — to become someone who can write from a place that’s not still dealing with that wound in the same way. You’re saying healing, which I think is really powerful. It’s not healed. It’s that process. So, I look forward to seeing what you write from this space.
Brown: Me too. Yeah. 
About the Authors
Jericho Brown is author of The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Eric Solomon is an instructor of English and affiliate faculty with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He is editor of the “Queer Intersections” series with the journal Southern Spaces; chair of the LGBTQ+ Historic Preservation Advisory Committee with Historic Atlanta; and serves as cultural historian with the Mayor’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Board for the City of Atlanta. In 2021, Solomon launched The #TUOR Project, a digital story tour of sites of importance in Atlanta’s queer past.
Cover Image Attribution
Reginald Shepherd collage created by and courtesy of Eric Solomon, 2024.
Recommended Resources
Shepherd, Reginald. Fata Morgana: Poems. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
———. Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry. Poets on Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
———. Otherhood: Poems. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
———. Red Clay Weather. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
———. Some Are Drowning. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
———. The Selected Shepherd: Poems. 1st ed. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024.
———. Wrong. Pitt Poetry Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.
Shepherd, Reginald, and Robert Philen. A Martian Muse: Further Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry. Poets on Poetry. Ann Arbor, Mich: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2010.
Web
Brown, Jericho. “The Gods at 3 A.M. (guest Jericho Brown on Reginald Shepherd pt. 2).” Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast (April 29, 2024). https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/breaking-form-a/the-gods-at-3-am-guest-lQoB219nVHS/
Teare, Brian. “Where Desire Plays out as Allegory.” Poetry Foundation, September 3, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1594570/where-desire-plays-out-as-allegory.
https://doi.org/10.18737/W60662
