Ephraim Scott Sommers
04 December 2008Review of Jericho Brown’s Please by Ephraim Scott Sommers
Jericho
Brown’s new collection Please croons
like the countless rhythm and blues singers the author either
innovatively
describes or emulates in persona. This book of poems, organized
like an
album, sings tales of an African-American, homosexual male with a
bruised
childhood, and does not run out of breath there. Existing
everywhere and
nowhere at once, Brown throws his voice, stepping into the personas of
Janis
Joplin, Diana Ross and even “The Burning Bush.” Please nudges the core of every reader. Its many
different
voices enlighten through emotive songs laden with a deep richness of
being. For Jericho Brown, the act of singing best expresses the
hurt of
the human condition.
The poem “Track 1: Lush Life”
begins the selection, “The woman with the microphone sings to
hurt you,/ To see
you shake your head. The mic may as well/ Be a leather
belt. You
drive to the center of town/ To be whipped by a woman’s
voice.” The
vocalist becomes an instrument of punishment.
The singer is the median through which the man in the audience
can
remember his dreaded past and reflect on it.
One must note that no solace from the ache comes in the poem. Brown illustrates only a moment at a bar
where the singer and her audience of one meet in the center of the room
and
somehow understand each other through shared anguish.
Those kinds of moments give this collection
its propulsion. The reader wants to be
whipped, and furthermore, wants to share that pain with some one else. Brown’s characters and even Brown
himself
eagerly accept the task. The last line
reads, “Call me your bitch, and I’ll sing the whole night
long.”
As Janis
Joplin in “Track 5: Summertime,” the author writes,
“Chainsaw, I say. My voice hacks at
you. I bet/ I tear my throat.
I try so hard to sound jagged.” The
persona allows the poet to take on the
mask of a singer deeply hurt in her attempt to be something great. This time, the voice is not a leather belt,
it is a chainsaw that “hacks at you.”
Not only does the listener hear a lament about childhood agony,
they
hear a throaty, screaming voice, harsh to the ear.
Brown has repositioned the characters in this
poem. Now, the reader is the man at the
bar in “Track 1: Lush Life” and the poet is Joplin, who
eventually kills
herself. The author heightens the
tension, letting the singer’s injuries drip like black oil from
her own lips,
not the pen of the poet. Surely,
Joplin’s
song jilts its audience with a line like “I get high and moan
like a lawn
mower/ So nobody notices I’m such an ugly girl./ I’m such
an ugly girl.” These lines move away
from a hope at a shared
connection through song, and more toward a covering up of wounds. Brown uses this singer to show art as a
method of escaping that which deeply scars which, in
I want to ask
If they ever heard of slavery
The work song—the best music
Is made of subtraction,
The singer seeks an exit from the scarred body
And opens his mouth
Trying to get out.
Just like Joplin and the woman with the leather belt blues voice, Brown candidly states the singer’s ultimate goal in what is perhaps one of the most profound lyrics in Please. “The best music” is that which comes from the deep dark place that is specifically human and that is why the audience simply must listen. The patrons at the bar are not there for joy, they are there to connect on some unspoken, unseen level which can be experienced and shared, but not ever quite understood with the musicians on stage. D.H. Lawrence wrote, “We don’t exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch/ with that which can be touched but no known[1].” We can’t know why the pain expressed through a human voice in song connects us, but it does. When a truly broken singer croons, it felt like being at a funeral, but instead of wanting to go home, one finds himself searching to hear that voice that oozes soul again and again. Jericho Brown in Please sings to his audience to bring us all into that shared moment. We keep rereading his poems for the same reason we keep going downtown, “to be whipped by a woman’s voice.”