An Interview with Jenny Browne

Poet Jenny Browne, the author of New And Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2020) sat with our Interviews Editor Esteban Rodríguez to discuss her former role as Texas Poet Laureate, how landscapes and environments can influence our writing, and literature’s ability to help us cope with the harshest and most tender realities around us.  

Esteban Rodríguez: Before we dive into your New and Selected Poems, readers should note that you were the 2017 Texas Poet Laureate. Can you describe a little of what the position entailed and the work you did?

Jenny Browne: I ended up serving overlapping terms, first as the City of San Antonio Poet Laureate from 2016-2018, and State of Texas Poet Laureate in 2017.  Both are nominated positions chosen by an external review board so really just coincidence that I was tapped at the same time. In any case, the city position was paid and required me to create a signature initiative. My project, St. Anthony's Lost and Found, was an ekphrastic community-based poetry exchange that used the elegy and epistle forms to encourage citizens to write about this place, as well as it's metaphorical and historical legacy of being named for the patron saint of lost things. 

Here is a little video about all that, which might be useful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKRp8n0sWXE&feature=emb_title

In contrast, the state poet laureate position is unfunded, and so more an honorific than anything, one I was grateful for.  But coming into the position the year after the election of Donald Trump also felt significant in the sense so much I valued felt increasingly threatened—access to water, humane immigration policy, public education, truth itself... I could go on...—but my point is that in being asked to represent a place I felt like I needed to speak to the ways it was becoming increasingly inhospitable not only to humans, but to non-human creatures as well.  

As poet laureate, I understood one of my charges to be using poetry to speak to the most pressing issues of our time, which to my mind are ecological. Obviously, climate change is connected to everything else and there is a larger conversation to be had about responsibility and also about who ultimately suffers most from the effects. But I've also taught a college class on climate change for several years and it has become apparent to me that information doesn't really change human behavior.  I'm not saying poetry necessarily does, but it does help us imagine the world differently and it felt within my wheelhouse as a "state artist," and therefore someone charged with engaging the "public" in the public humanities, to explicitly address the challenges being faced on and around public lands and the inadequacy of public discourse to articulate new relationships to it.

Another way to say this is that I believe in the larger role and responsibility of poet laureates to resist linguistic generalizations that erase individuals and the political half-truths and platitudes that stand in for witness, attention, and creative transformation. And I decided to do my best to use my time and platform to encourage those qualities, both in my own writing, and by traveling to the edges of the state to give talks and readings. I remember someone once asking me if I considered myself a poetry interpreter or an evangelist, and I said "YES."  

One month of that year I also lived as an artist in residence in Guadalupe Mountains National Park and gave readings and workshops inside the park. It's located next to the Permian Basin, which is one of the largest and most prolific oil fields in the world. So, I tried to write about that juxtaposition: poems in the voices of native plants being passed by frack trucks, poem that unfolded in deeper time. Eventually, I organized what I half-jokingly called the Inferno Tour, where I gave a series of readings and workshops on a ten day road trip that took me from the highest point in Texas (Guadalupe Peak) to the lowest (sea level in Corpus) with stops in Salt Flat, Valentine, Alpine,  Del Rio, and a bunch of other places that didn't seem to have too many poetry events.  Sometimes I read at bookstores and libraries. Once in a cemetery. Once under a bridge. Once to the ocean. The new poems in the New and Selected book mostly come from this time. 

ER: As a native Texan, I was fascinated with the way the new poems in the book traversed the entirety of the state. I was especially drawn to "Until the Sea Closed Over Us and the Light Was Gone," which is a travel narrative that explores the ecology and people of a variety of different cities and places, from El Paso to Seminole Canyon. In the sonnet section titled "And turning our stern toward morning,” which is situated in Brownsville, a city I was raised near, the speaker says the following: 

To thank the water with both of her hands.
Do you know what is the way? Return us
to the body’s surface without violence, 
as we were & as we never were, still
approaching the ocean like we own it. 

There seems to be moments in our lives when we connect to a particular place that we may have never been to, but which we appreciate, in some small sense. During your tour, how did it feel to inhabit these places, even if momentarily? Were there deeper connections to some more than others?

JB: Thank you for the kind words about the sonnet sequence. Indeed, I too feel so many things when I encounter a new place. What am I looking at? What am I seeing? Who might I be here? Who was here before me? 

I hadn't thought about this before, but the way you asked your question made me think of Richard Hugo's essay “The Triggering Town,” both in the actual sense of how Hugo finds inspiration in places that have seen better days, as many of these places have, but also in the metaphor of how some scrap of a place, often experienced in passing becomes a location in memory, and ultimately in language. Which is to say I wanted to get to know places by connecting to one another in poems, a sort of ecosystem even. And one of the connections is/was water. 

So are these poems actually "about" the towns after which I named them, yes and no. I wanted to record my own passing, as it were, and I mean that in terms of being a temporal impermanent body, but also something of the way all the moving around that humans do is bound to cause harm, both intentionally and now. I wanted the poems to be pauses in all that human generated momentum. 

Whenever I spend the night in a new place, I try to wake early and walk it a bit. And I did see a girl in Brownsville, seeming to see her own reflection in the water she cupped in her hands and maybe imagined myself as that girl and in that reflection the knowledge of also being a body of water. As both a poet and a person, I do remain loyal to knowledge of images, how what we notice is one door leading what we need to know about a place, and also about ourselves. There are others of course. 

On a more practical level. Yes, there were places that felt hard to connect to, let alone love, and here I'm talking places visibly ravaged by the machinations of the fossil fuel industry. Other places just felt wholly forgotten by people. Sonnets are love poems so it seemed a good container to play with our human projection (maybe a kind of love?) onto places. Some places I just sat at a roadside picnic table and ate a taco. In others I stayed a few days and talked to people, often people who were really different than me (oil field workers at the hotel breakfast buffet, elderly ladies at the library tea, etc.)  I always tried to ask people how they felt about living where they do. What has changed? What hasn't? That usually leads to another door. 

ER: Doors are indeed open within this poem, but they are also open within the book as well. Included here are poems from your collections Dear Stranger (2013), The Second Reason (2007), and At Once (2004). Reflecting upon your body of work, how did one collection open the door to the subsequent one? And is the relationship between the books what you expected? 

JB: I remain amazed (and grateful) for having a life that has led to making books of poems at all, and also how those books feel like both witnesses and doors to earlier lives. What luck to have such evidence of what changes and what doesn't. Which is one thing a poem does right, at least a lyric poem, dramatizes a moment and holds it still. I know many people look back on early work with critical eyes but I don't feel that way, as early and raw as some of the poems in At Once feel right now. I was really interesting working with TCU Press on the New and Selected in terms of what I poems I felt drawn to, what help up craft-wise and even which ones I felt a little sorry for. I do thing there are relationships both explicit and implicit between them. As the title of At Once suggests, it is a very lyric book, a singular voice, poems of attention, I think. And then I had kids! Kidding, but not. I began The Second Reason at time when I was pregnant and continued writing it through the birth of my second child. The US also invaded Iraq during this time and has continued to wage wars. The concern of this book is political I think but set in the landscape of domesticity as I navigated my own changing relationship to vulnerability and violence, and to the female body in relationship to those binaries. Dear Stranger is more outward looking, more in the world and its layers of encountering. The sequence of letter poems began when a friend asked me to participate in an art project by writing a love letter to a stranger. It was harder than I expected but then I got a little obsessed with the idea. Isn't that a useful working definition of a poem? And what do we mean by stranger anyways? Both questions that built on the questions of The Second Reason, I think. How might we love the world the way we love our own children? How might we write (literally, as there are many epistles) in the book to strangers with intimacy and to our beloveds with strangeness. I can't say that any of these relationships are what I "expected" but I do try to trust the process and know that the making of a book eventually points to questions beyond the scope of that book. I'm working (slowly) on a new manuscript now called This Part of the Country, which is more explicitly grounded in the so-called natural world, but I think I'm still asking some of the same questions about time, intimacy, distance and love.  

ER: As you mentioned, the poems in The Second Reason share a political concern, and I can't help but think of the poem "The Body Before It Is A Body" and how even in the midst of conflict, the speaker must continue the practical aspects of her life: 

 I could lie and say that 
on the day my country most 
recently went to war I at least 
changed my plans but  

I went skiing.  

My hat was orange and warm. 
The snow, at times, blinding.  

The other landscape is always internal. 
I was finally pregnant but no matter 
how hard I listened I couldn't hear 

the noise of so much fallen 
snow as it tumbles 
from the steepest rooftops. 

How does poetry, and literature for that matter, help cope with the harsher realities around us, as well as with the moments that we are thankful for? 

JB: I haven't thought about this poem in a long time. I'm so glad you asked about it. I remember writing it during those days of color-coded terror "threat levels" and it is not lost on me that we're having this conversation in a moment when the color orange has accumulated more layers of association. Which is just to say that even though I locate the poem in that particular cultural and political moment, I hope the inner tension you mention holds up, if differently, in this moment. More specifically to your question. How do we ever pervasive racial injustices, sex trafficking, the global climate crisis (I can't go on I must go on) while at the same time somehow holding open our hearts to delight, to tenderness, to awe? Not to mention managing the daily with some semblance of grace and integrity, which in my case means being a present teacher, parent, partner, being. Short answer, I don't know but maybe every day is another chance to not know better. Or so I tell myself. But yes, I do believe that literature can help us, not so much by fixing this essential tension, but by creating the experience of holding seeming incompatible emotions and experiences in the body of a poem, an essay, or a story. We like to talk about how literature creates empathy by helping us imagine the experience of others, and I agree with this to an extent, but also not. Because often when we say something like, "I can't imagine what X must be like..." I think we really mean, "I don't want to have to imagine." Walking all night, night after night through the desert, having my children taken from me at the border. Of course, I don't truly want to feel that, but that doesn't mean that I can't be moved (both emotionally and to action) by a poem that does. I am, but that doesn't mean that I actually have that experience is. Maybe this is a weird distinction to make but it feels important. In this poem I was trying to recognize the vulnerability of starting a family, the bizarre (and fun) luxury of being taken on a ski trip, all while thinking deeply about living in a perpetual state my country starting distant wars. My friend Sarah Vap has an amazing new book called Winter, much of which details domestic life but only nearly every page is the phrase: Drones are probably killing someone right now. The way this book illuminates and juxtaposes the contradictions of reality was oddly hopeful to me. Because it felt true. I've also been reading the East German writer Jenny Erpenbeck lately and I can't recommend her enough. She has this interesting essay in Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces that talks about how a story allows you to go all the way to the bottom without actually having to die. I am paraphrasing but you get the idea. That is the gift of reading and you can shut the book when you need to breathe, but you live on with the story inside your body.

ER: You mention reading Jenny Erpenbeck's work recently, but what else have you read this past year that has sustained you as a writer and a person? And what other books are you reading at the moment? 

JB: I just finished teaching (and so reading and re-reading) Ross Gay's phenomenal new book length poem Beholding, which is "about" a famous basketball move by Dr. J but of course in Ross Gay's hands this video clip becomes a portal through which he meditates on seeing, looking, place, race, and creative practice itself. Reading it feels expansive and generative, especially coming through a time that has felt pretty constricted. Like many, this past year has been a time that has tested my concentration and the witnessing the sustained attention of this long—it's basically a sixty-page sentence—felt downright cathartic. It is interesting to think about where we are in our lives when we meet certain books. I've read more non-fiction than usual this past year and I was blown away by Olivia Liang's The Lonely City, Anne Boyer's The Undying, Hisham Mattar's The Return, and Teju Cole's Known and Strange Things. All of them brilliant, and all concerned with language, history and art in ways that thrill me as a poet. More recently I've returned to fiction. I spent part of last year on a Fulbright in Northern Ireland (sadly cut short by COVID) and I really miss Northern Irish cadences, but I recently read two wonderful novels, Anna Burns Milkman and Glenn Patterson's Where Are We Now?,  which thrillingly returned to Belfast in very different ways. 

ER: What's next for you? Are there projects on the horizon? Or new writing readers can expect? 

JB: Like many I have been wondering how/if the events of past year would show up in my writing.  I don't tend to write much—or at least much that I show anyone—about my life event when I'm stiff in the middle of living them. But of course I'm breathing the pandemic and lockdown and all of course all of this is showing up in new drafts, mostly in a some recent writing about walking, or rather poems that feel like they work the way long walks do, with longer lines, an unpunctuated looser cadence, a voice that is part observation, part memory, part the in-between-ness of the mind thinking what it thinks when no one is watching. Long walks have kept me (more or less) sane these months and of course images of the pandemic populate the edges of those drafts. I've also been working on a series of ekphrastic elegies, which is just a fancy way of saying some poems about paintings written through the lens of loss, specifically the death of my dear friend, San Antonio artist Katie Pell. Katie died a few days before I left for the Fulbright in Northern Ireland last spring. While I was at the Seamus Heaney Centre, I taught a seminar on ekphrasis and made a point to spend a lot of time wandering in the Ulster Museum, visiting certain paintings repeatedly. I'm interested in ekphrasis less in the traditional sense of poems "about" paintings and more in the sense of how ekphrasis interrogates the notion of distance between moments of creation and observation, between various art forms and in my case what it means to live in a temporal body and look at something through the lens of grief. The Ulster Museum is wonderful and free and so I developed a practice of returning to certain painting again and again, over time. Still very new work but I'm excited about how they are developing.

I do have a few finished new poems out in the world, mostly part of a recent manuscript that I've been calling This Part of the Country. It continues some of the themes found in the newer poems in the New and Selected, namely looking at how geographic knowledge is often a contested social construct, and also how a poem might reflect the way all landscapes embody memory, drawing the past into the present.  

Selected work from Jenny Browne can be found below: 

https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2020/12/11/jenny-browne-oldest-story-gilgamesh/chronicles/poetry/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/grey-wolf-grizzly-bear-white-tailed-deer/