Atlanta Poet Jericho Brown Questions Status Quo With Words

“There’s a certain kind of uncertainty to poetry, and I feel really attracted to that,” Brown says. “[Poetry] is the conversation that the self has with the self. It’s a way one can talk to himself without being crazy. It’s very similar to what we think of as prayer. It has a lot to do with meditating on what your ideas are and finding the exact and perfect language for those ideas.”

The fellowship will allow Brown to complete his next collection of poetry, titled “Character,” which he says deals with the ideas of celebrity and media.

“The movies we really love — part of the reason we love them is because we feel different after we have seen them,” Brown explains. “We feel ourselves changing as we are watching them. We start having ideas that we didn’t have before. They give us things to talk about years after we have seen the movie. Poems do that too. Part of what I really want to do with poetry is bring things to a place where people read my poems and start asking questions about the status quo.”

Some of the work in the collection deals with issues of police brutality and issues affecting people of color. Brown shared his poem “Bullet Points,” which recently went viral after it was published by Buzzfeed in late March.

Jericho Brown’s previous book, “The New Testament,” was named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by Library Journal.