For this week’s ‘Poem of the Week’ feature, I’m turning to a poet that many people haven’t heard of, but one whose poems have struck me as especially unique since I stumbled onto his work a week ago: Brandon Brown.
Somewhat unique compared to the other poets I have chosen to focus on since the beginning of this series of blog posts, Brown is a much smaller poet in terms of wide recognition, but don’t let that stop you from thinking he is anything less than a force when it comes to wordsmithing. Hailing from El Cerrito, California, Brown got his Bachelor of Arts and MFA from San Francisco State before becoming a poet, translator, curator of the Heart’s Desire reading series at the Bay Area Public School, and co-editor at Krupskaya. He is the author of five books of poetry and several chapbooks, as well as four collaborative volumes of Christmas poems with J. Gordon Faylor. He has won a fellowship from the National Endowment from the Arts, was awarded the inaugural Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing in 2018, and his work has appeared in Art in America, Frieze, Open Space, and The Best American Experiment Writing, amongst others.
I personally stumbled onto him after seeing a poem he wrote and published a week ago through the Academy of American Poet’s ‘Poem-A-Day’ feature on poets.org called ‘Dog Park.’ Similar to Billy Collins’ work, his poem, and the subsequent poems that I found after seeking out his work, are simple, based heavily around imagery and emotion, and aren’t full of fluffy, large words or metaphors that require you to do a ton of digging below the surface. To some, this sounds like boring, throwaway poetry, the antithesis of Keats and Byron, but to others, like myself, it’s what I prefer. It’s the kind of poetry that many people can relate to instead of a very small minority, and that’s what poetry should be in today’s day and age—a way to bring people together and share common experiences through the art of putting words on a piece of paper and making them mean something to many.
‘Dog Park’ was written last year (2020 still feels like this year in my head), and it was written at the height of quarantine. According to Brown, the poem is about ‘writing every poem that is given to you to write, if you can. Because if you don’t write it, perhaps no one will, and those poems will be lost.’ He goes on to note that, in this poem particularly, the poet is sleepy and ‘in bed next to someone extremely sweet.’ In other words, the poet is with someone whom he loves, someone whom he wants to spend all his time with if possible, and he’s in the most comfortable position in the world. Who would want to leave such a spot to go drag a pen across a piece of paper and create something like a poem?
What the poem is touching on in response to that idea is to not take things for granted. By ignoring this urging that he has in his mind to write a poem, he could lose something that others would kill to have (his poetic ability and mind to think of such things), and it touches on the theme of being thankful for what you have. Be thankful that you either have a skill that others don’t have, or a job that others aren’t able to have, or a bed and an apartment with someone who loves you while others are homeless and have no one to turn to. Do not take anything in life as a given, in other words, and always seize the day when possible.
It also touches on the themes of hard work and ‘getting it over with,’ having a skill that others explicitly don’t and using it for what its worth, and recognizing your place in the world. By getting out of bed and leaving a comfortable position, Brown is hinting at the idea that everyone needs to recognize when they need to ‘get their crap together’ and go out into the world and do what they were made to do. For some people, as he writes, it’s working as a salesclerk in a bedding store, and for others it’s getting out of bed to write a poem. Never be lazy and give into the kind of mentality of ‘I can do it tomorrow,’ as you never know if tomorrow truly will come. The poem also smacks with whiffs of procrastination, with the line ‘But it will just / take a minute or two’ a subtle shoutout to all those who procrastinate doing something when they know it could be finished right now, very quickly, and it’s a feeling I think that the vast majority of people can relate to. And, on an artistic side note, the shot that Brown takes at the New Yorker and the kind of poetry they publish in the very first part of the poem is a subtle diss that I can appreciate personally, especially after reading some of their published work and wondering how it even made it past a good editor.
For more of Brown’s work, check out his collection Top 40 from our library catalog here, a more recent collection Four Seasons from Amazon here, or his most recent collection, Work, from a local bookstore here.
'Dog Park'
I told Alli I really wanted to write a poem called “Dog Park.”
In bed she’s like you could make it a New Yorker poem, where you go to a dog park and then have some huge epiphany. And then we have a soft debate as to whether a poem called “Dog Park” needs a dog park in it or not, or even a dog. I dunno.
But I do I know I don’t want to get up out of bed, not now, five milligrams of warm indica coaxing me into its native land of sleep, to write down Alli’s idea for my poem “Dog Park” and I tell her so and she says get up, you’re a poet, and it’s true, so I shuffle off this warm, magnificent mattress, firm as the back of a Golden Retriever in the prime of life.
The blinds in the bedroom are shut tight against the mean lights of the Pacific East Mall that moan all night and make the nearby bedrooms bright. But I get up, ugh, to write down what might be the beginning of a poem called “Dog Park,” with or without a dog park or even a dog. And obviously you’d rather be a cloud than a poet, Jesus. Or the plastic tip of a vape pen or the floating lint in the store where they sell beds and sheets and pillows and duvets or even a grody hunk of sand on the ground of a dog park, my nightmare. But it will just take a minute or two, and then I can pee one last time with impunity, double check the door is locked, go back to bed, wait for the next one.