Name the Taste of Joy
We have all moved from one location to another at some point in our lives. Perhaps it was a new neighborhood. Perhaps a new state. Perhaps, as was with poet and memoirist Aaron Brown, it was a new country, and with it came a realization that the heart can call multiple places home at the same time. Aaron Brown’s newest poetry collection, Call Me Exile (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022), navigates the consequences of migration, the daily displacements of one’s physical self and emotions, and the spiritual journey that must be taken in order to arrive at a place abundant with truth, love, and acceptance. The author of Acacia Road (Silverfish Review Press, 2018) and the recent memoir Less Than What You Once Were (Unsolicited Press, 2022), Brown was gracious enough to lend his time to discuss his latest book and how poetry can provide comfort in times of need.
Aaron, I appreciate your time tremendously. Reading your collection, Call Me Exile, I’m drawn to the idea of place and what it means to hold onto a location, especially as it concerns memory. In “To the Stars Through Difficulty,” I couldn’t help but linger on the ending lines:
how do you learn to lose a land
you are just beginning to love?
Your collection centers on various places that span from Lebanon to Delaware. Did the inclusion of these places come from personal experience? And how does your life reflect what the reader witnesses on the page?
As someone who grew up a few hundred miles south of the Sahara and made several cross-country moves as an adult in the US, I am perhaps a little too familiar with movement and migration. Place is personal to me because I have come to be familiar with losing it. When I moved back to America at eighteen to attend college, I realized that my childhood home of Chad had become my homeland, though I was no longer there to experience it as such. Each of the places in my life represent significant periods of my life–from the Chad of my youth to the Kansas of my 20s when I became an educator.
These are places synonymous with childhood and growth, just as they are synonymous with loss–loss of childhood through war, loss of marriage, loss of homeland, loss of child. Inhabiting these places through poetry becomes a way for me to navigate a deeper, uncharted wilderness. Tied up in these poems is also the notion of exile, both a geographic and spiritual exile resulting from ruptures endlessly traumatic or reductively logistic. I like to think there are many exiles in this book, some you can identify on the timeline of my life and some that are outside of time–slow, kairotic and cathartic. The book is perhaps a series of losses that I am yet trying to name and find a place in, just as they are disappearing. That’s what poetry is, I think, the ability to point to something just as it is disappearing, to name a feeling or experience that is almost impossible to name.
Are there certain losses that just needed to find a home in these pages? And if there are, could you speak further about them?
My first collection, Acacia Road, navigated the loss of my adoptive country, Chad, the nation of my adolescence, where I grew up from age eight to eighteen and learned to dream in Arabic, share tea with friends who became brothers. Poems in this geographic and mnemonic space came easier to me thanks to distance and life in America.
At the same time, I found myself increasingly writing new work on struggles of faith and doubt in the face of suffering and death. Death of friends, family, my own child in utero. I thought that these new poems couldn’t mix with the old ones. That they were different thematically as much as they were stylistically.
I am forever grateful for a chance phone call with the poet Li-Young Lee a few years ago. I shared this exact conundrum–writing poems that seemingly inhabit two separate spaces. I didn’t know how to bring these together. And Lee simply told me that these poems were not separate as I had thought. That dislocation can be as geographic as it can be spiritual or interpersonal. This is when I began to think of “exiles” in a broader sense.
So the structure of this book places exiles together thematically… In the first section, the exiles of home and loss. In the second section, the exiles of memory, country, border-stalking. The final section is a kind of synthesis I think, an attempt to love what was lost and to find some kind of new terra for living–those sweet moments of wonder with your child amid the maelstrom of an anxious world. The joy only made more vibrant through the wasteland. I’m not sure I’m arriving anywhere by the end of the book, so much as I am finding a new way of journeying, of seeing.
I am incredibly interested in the literary techniques you used for certain poems throughout the collection, one of them being the use of anaphora. Take the poem, “Downpour”:
Where are you going when the sand-encased clouds come rolling?
Where are you going?
Where are you going when the alleyways rush with runoff?
Where
Are you going
When the sandpiper preens in the nabakh tree?
When the scorpion scurries among rooted rocks?
When the donkey foal lies down in the rutted road…
Its use is not to say that you rely on this technique as a crutch. No, taken individually and as a whole, it becomes almost incantatory, and it felt like I was listening to a sermon that had answers I didn’t know I was looking for. Can you speak further about this and about your process when you write a poem?
The poems that use anaphora often start with that single repeated phrase. I hear it, mull over it, walk around with it. Let it build. Where are you? Where are you going? I chew on the phrase and follow it to different conclusions, letting it unearth new possibilities. I don’t think I would call it magic, although I love the effect that anaphora creates! But really it comes from just dwelling on some of the best who do it–from Martin Luther King to Frank Bidart to C.D. Wright. I love how poets can take a phrase and build upon it until what is there at the end of the poem is entirely different than the semantics at the beginning.
Once a semester, I lead my college composition students in a study of the passage in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” where Dr. King meditates on “why we can’t wait.” What follows is an entire catalog of segregation experiences begun by the phrase “when you…” The cumulative effect of the anaphora is powerful–each injustice builds on another. I can’t think of a better place where language and pathos meet. Perhaps my students and I should be diagramming sentences or studying subject/verb agreements, but I’m not that much interested in that approach to language. I’m much more interested in letting those who have gone before us show us the way with words. “Downpour” was written after I finished reading Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining. Her language compelled me to write.
CD Wright was a poet unparalleled in many ways, and her works have influenced not only you, but countless poets. What other poets, writers, or books motivate you to write? What non-literary things drive that passion?
The list is endless. For this collection, I think the poets Li-Young Lee, Katie Ford, and Christian Wiman have a significant influence. But I also reach across genres and find that even fiction and nonfiction can fuel my poetry, writing like Italo Calvino’s undefinable novel Invisible Cities or Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (woefully cliche, I know, but quite intriguing nevertheless) or even the work of Nigerian novelist Chigozie Obioma, such as his recent novel Orchestra of Minorities with its mythical elements.
As far as non-literary things that fuel me–I can’t think of anything more impactful than becoming a father. My young son has taught me so much about finding joy in the smallest things of our world–a stone, an insect, a word. He gives me another way of seeing, I think, or has restored a way of seeing that I lost as I grew up. It really is true that we must become like children again. Joy and laughter and wonder. G.K. Chesterton has an amazing little passage in “On Running After One’s Hat” about a boy who finds an entire universe to explore at a train station while all the adults wait impatiently on the platform, checking their stopwatches, waiting for the train to come in. We’d all be better off if we were like that–finding an adventure in what others might label an inconvenience.
And there are so many other things in life–the rhythm of a jumpshot in basketball, running into a friend at a local coffee shop, pausing between oar strokes on a kayak, etc. We need life for the writing. The spontaneous and the rhythmic.
I want to draw our attention to the poem “How We Come to Language,” and the ending lines:
Our DNA is to name: how we call the sky
the sky, how we name the dirt rimming
our fingernails. How those shadows of pets,
our first lesson in death, become the zoo
made flesh to dwell among us.
In the beginning was the word wonder
one friend told me—what we whisper
to ourselves as we watch the little ones
turn their tongues toward infinity.
The poem is about a speaker contemplating the ways we become acquainted with language, but in a larger sense, it speaks about our intrinsic need to say something about us and the world. Do you believe poetry has the power to turn us toward “infinity”? And if not, what does?
Innate in the reality of language is its power to transcend. We are poetic people, formed by language, participating in a long stream of words, sentences, stories. Narrative and poetry have existed in every culture since the first humans. It has to be written–figuratively, literally–in our DNA. Through the artistic word, we have attempted to make sense of hardship, grapple with the divine, name the taste of joy. We have needed dramatic tragedies and comedies to narrate our losses and our successes. The greatest poems reorient the reader–Wordswort’s The Prelude, Dante’s Paradiso, the book of Job. So, in a long-winded way, I think poetry absolutely “turns us toward infinity”--the sublime, what we cannot express, the immeasurable that exists beyond us.
Of course, it’s important to remember that poetry is not a substitute for the infinite. I think sometimes writers can get so enamored with what we are doing that we forget life. But poetry, like all good things, points us to something else beyond it.
What conversations do you hope Call Me Exile sparks? How do you see this collection engaging with your previous poetry collection and your forthcoming memoir Less Than What You Once Were (Unsolicited Press, 2022)?
Call Me Exile is an attempt to become more conversant with my own grief. And I hope the book helps create a similar space for others. In my mind, I think especially of cultural conceptions of masculinity–how often men fail to acknowledge emotion, grief, etc. How fathers grieve. So I want to dismantle all that–the silence around grief especially for fathers–just as I have begun that journey myself.
Call Me Exile, while slightly shorter and stylistically different than Acacia Road (more minimalism, less of a physical journey), I do see this second collection as a continuation of my journey back to America from an adolescence spent in Chad. The echoes of these journeys are deeper here in Call Me Exile. Though it’s been thirteen years since I moved back to go to college, the journey is ongoing and always will be, to find resonances of home, to arrive and start out again. My memoir, Less Than What You Once Were, also coming out in 2022, follows this journey as well, though it is more of a prose retelling of the events explored in Acacia Road. I loved the challenge of seeing the same memories through a different genre lens. But the memoir goes further back to when I first arrived in Chad at age eight and is also a catalog of memories before the trauma of war. It’s this juxtaposition of peace and war, joy and grief, that I think is the one poem I am always writing and will write for the rest of my life.
I’m always fascinated by the way poets arrange their poems in a collection, and the last poem in Calle Me Exile, “Always We Begin Again,” beautifully captured the sense of longing for something both simple and meaningful. And I couldn’t shake the following lines:
Today you could wake up and say, It doesn’t have to be complicated—
life, that is, in the way a forest overtakes the scourge of the machine.
Eventually, the scare will be covered first by high grasses and flowering
weeds, then shoulder high pines that spine their way to the leaf ceiling.
Life, you could say, could be like that. A regrowth, something
the whole forest seems to agree upon, beginning the moment after
the metal teeth carve a wound.
Can you speak further about these lines and why you chose this poem to close out the collection?
To any individual poem’s detriment, I probably think too much about how my poems speak to each other across an entire collection. “Always We Begin Again” was on a shortlist of poems in my mind to close out the book, and I think I ultimately wanted the book to end with a poem that is as much about regrowth as it is about looking back and seeing the scars of a wound. It is a poem of recommitment despite the violence of grief.
By extension, the third and final section of the book was perhaps the most challenging to assemble–in part, because the work of recovery, of life, is continuous and ongoing. I couldn’t simply end the book with so much poetry of dislocation and elegy. Instead, I started to bring together the final poems that attempt, I think, to offer a re-orientation, a hint of a promise, of possibility. Daily we choose to be a part of this world. Daily we commit to building upon the work we started yesterday and the day before. And daily we step out into the hope of the future unknown, faithful that the small things we do will amount to a narrative we get to partake in. There are things and people I have come to know and love, like my son, who are so far greater than loss, they begin to offer a way out of the wilderness. Perhaps more poems to come will be about these small yet great joys.
