AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DC POETRY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT Oral History Interview With: Ms. Sarah Browning By Daniel Schwarz Graduate Resource Center at American University, Washington, DC October 10, 2012, 9:40 AM
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY: DC POETRY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT NARRATOR: Ms. Sarah Browning DATE: October 10, 2012 INTERVIEWER: Daniel Schwarz PLACE: Graduate Resource Center at American University, Washington, DC PERSONAL DATA Birthdate: December 15, 1962 Spouse: Married Occupation: Poet, political activist, and the founder of the Split This Rock Poetry Festival SUMMARY OF INTERVIEW The following is the transcript of an interview with Ms. Sarah Browning, a poet, political activist, and founder of the Split This Rock Poetry Festival. She is also the host of Sunday Kind of Love, a poetry reading series at Busboys and Poets 14 th and V location. Over the course of the interview, she discusses her experiences as a political poet, the history of poetry in DC and the nation, and her hopes for the future of the medium as a catalyst for social change. INTERVIEWER S COMMENTS Prior to interviewing Ms. Browning, I met with Libbie Rifkin, who is an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University and an expert on DC poetry. She highly recommended Ms. Browning, whose Split This Rock Poetry Festival has inspired numerous poets from DC and elsewhere to speak out against war and social injustice. As a grad student in the MA Public History Program at American University and a former English major who has both studied and written poetry, I came to realize that DC has a unique poetry scene with a history that deserves to be documented. Ms. Browning has contributed greatly to this poetry scene, and she has witnessed it evolve over the last decade. In addition to this transcript, a background journal is also included with the archived materials from this interview. COPYRIGHT STATUS Ms. Browning has generously agreed to allow her interview to be archived at the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, as well as the Washingtoniana Collection at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library.
INDEX Public History, American University, Split This Rock Poetry Festival, Carolyn Forché, The Country Between Us, Vietnam War, political activist, Santa Barbara, Civil Rights Movement, Black Arts Movement, Black Power Movement, Chicano Freedom Movement, western Massachusetts, Pat Schneider, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Langston Hughes, African American, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, multitudes, creative democracy, DC Poets Against the War, Full Moon on K Street, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden, tsunami, Japan, Tiger Woods, Kim Kardashian, The Fifth Fact, Kim Roberts, Park View, Petworth, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, ghosts, Soldiers Home, Georgia Avenue, Thomas Circle, homeless, Civil War, Virginia, London, South Side, Chicago, Ward 1, Shaw, U Street, LeDroit, Mount Pleasant, William Faulkner, gentrifier, Folger Shakespeare Library, Library of Congress, National Book Festival, Bush administration, E. Ethelbert Miller, Muriel Rukeyser, Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, pundits, open mic, spoken word, Busboys and Poets, Howard University, Carter Barron Amphitheatre, Lucille Clifton, Institute for Policy Studies, AWP, The Washington Post, Martín Espada, Poetry Foundation, Maine, Michigan, Alabama, Maryland, Israel- Palestine, Martin Luther King, Jr., Grolier Poetry Book Shop, YouTube
DC Poetry Oral History Project Transcript of Interview with Ms. Sarah Browning on October 10, 2012 at the Graduate Resource Center at American University, Washington, DC DS: Daniel Schwarz SB: Sarah Browning 00:00 DS: All right. It is now about 9:40 AM on Wednesday, October 10, 2012. My name is Daniel Schwarz. I m a student with the Public History Program at American University. And, would you like to introduce yourself? SB: Good morning. My name is Sarah Browning. I m a poet and resident of Washington, DC, and I m the founder and director of Split This Rock. 00:28 DS: And it s very nice to be talking with you this morning. I d like to begin by asking you How did you become a poet? What sort of factors in your life introduced you to poetry and inspired you to become a poet? SB: This is a long and winding tale, I m afraid. I come from a family that was very literary and literate also political activists. So, these two things were always married in my life and in my family. My dad is a retired English professor of American literature. My mother was a poet. My grandmother, who was a refugee from World War II in England from the Blitz and had left school at a young age, had very little formal education, but she herself was also a poet. And when I was about nine and visiting her in Santa Barbara, she took me to her poetry group. And that s my memory of the first poem that I wrote was at that group. And then I started writing more in high school. But I started feeling as I got older that it was not a legitimate pursuit for someone like me. Cause, I was very political as a young adult, and of course, I continue to be. But at that time, which is the God-awful early eighties, the aesthetic in poetry, the mainstream of poetry was very conservative, and very opposed to what we call political poetry. Of course, the fact that the world did not intrude on the poems was itself a political fact that poets had so much privilege that they could ignore the social conditions that they were living in. And so, of course, when Carolyn Forché wrote her astonishing and groundbreaking book, The Country Between Us, she was completely vilified by the poetry establishment. And really, she was writing what poets have written for millennia, which was about war and the exploitation of humans at the hands of other humans. And, this is, of course, sadly part of everyday life for millions, billions of people on our planet millions of people on our planet and has been from the dawn of human history. And yet, there had [been] a long history about what happened to American poetry, but this was completely beyond the pale of establishment poetry. And I was told directly by a creative writing professor at college not to write this kind of work that poets must love language above all else. Well, because I was a political person and had been marching against the Vietnam War with my daddy when I was five years old, these were my concerns. This was the world that I lived, and if I
couldn t write this work, then I felt like well then I ll never be a real poet. I ll never be a success as a poet. Plus, I felt like well I m a relatively privileged, upper-middle-class, well-educated, white woman. The world doesn t really need to hear my voice. And so, I felt alienated from poetry. And also, every time I picked up a journal or a book, it didn t speak to me, and so, I really shut up throughout my twenties. I became a community organizer and a political organizer, and I worked stumbled into the culture of the brain in politics, which unfortunately took over the sort of white Left. I think, in communities of color, the movements for social change had always put culture at the center. We don t even think about the Civil Rights Movement without hearing the soundtrack of the freedom songs the freedom singers. The Black Arts Movement was central to the Black Power Movement, and the same is true, of course, in the Chicano Freedom Movement. But on the white Left, which was where I found myself, there was complete lack of cultural expression. If we don t have culture in our movements for social change, we don t honor the heart and the reasons that we re doing this work, which is that we believe passionately in justice. And it s such a difficult struggle always. The forces against us are so enormous, that if we don t have a way to sustain ourselves, to remember and acknowledge that sometimes we fall into despair to help us come out of that despair, but even just to honor the despair sometimes. And that s just, of course, one role that poetry and other forms of the arts can play do play in movements. But that s the one that I was missing personally, and I thought I was just going to up and die. And so, finally, toward the end of my twenties, I realized that if I didn t find a way to put poetry back into the center of my life, that I wouldn t survive in a long-term commitment to making social change. And so, I changed my life quite radically at that point, and began writing again, and it really saved my life. And I want to honor my first writing teacher in the community-based setting, whose name is Pat Schneider, in western Massachusetts where I moved with my now-husband, cause he wanted to get a Ph.D. in economics, and he ended up going to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and we moved out there. And Pat Schneider is the director of an organization called Amherst Writers and Artists, and she is a brilliant poet, writing teacher, especially for someone like myself who was very blocked, and changed my life. 07:29 DS: Well. (Laughs) Thank you. That was a very, very thorough answer. And SB: Let me know if you want the shorter versions. DS: No, no. That s okay. It s really important to hear your take on different issues just about how you became a poet is a very important question to answer. I would wonder actually I know in an interview you had said that you described Langston Hughes as your literary father. So, what is it about Langston Hughes s poetry that s inspired you? SB: Well, Hughes is one of those American poets who wrote a whole range of kinds of poetry. And we tend to learn in school if we read him at all, which now kids do, but I certainly didn t just a few of the poems. But really, his collected [poems] is about twoand-a-half inches thick. So, he wrote a tremendous range of all kinds of poetry. And so, I love that, cause I feel like there s too much emphasis on we have to find our voice, or
there s some kind of narrow, one way that we should write. And I think the beauty of this art form is that we can it has so much flexibility, and it s fun and challenging, I think, to write in many different styles. And different poems demand different forms, different voices, and different styles. So, I admire that, and I admire his ability to keep pushing in different directions. But, so that s sort of the aesthetic side of things, including, of course, the honoring and celebrating of the African American voice, which has been so central to the culture. We can t even imagine American culture without it. And then, politically in the poems, he is able to hold the complexity of the American experience, and I think that we can t understand America and we can t understand American poetry without wrestling with the complexity of our history and of our experience today. And that has so much to do with the crime against humanity that was slavery and the slave trade and the genocide of native peoples. And these being side by side with these great aspirational documents and founding sentiments of our country, and so which hold up even today. So, his ability to hold both these things at once is very inspiring. And of course, others Walt Whitman, before him, could also do that. And even in his wildness, he could both examine and celebrate that craziness that complexity, which really makes us all crazy. I think it makes us all crazy, and especially those of us who are, you know either you repress it, or you re just crazy all the time. And that s one reason that s another reason we have poetry is to help us try to we can t untangle it. There s no way to untangle it. You can just try to live it. And Adrienne Rich has a brilliant quote, which I m not going to remember, but about that our task is to tell the truth about our lives in all its complexity and to not let anyone trivialize it. And I think reading that right when I was getting back into poetry helped me feel that my voice was important too, and my lived experience was one that was part of our story as Americans. 12:22 DS: I know you mentioned before we started we were talking about Walt Whitman, who s one of my favorite poets [he] has been a real source of inspiration for me, but you referred to him, I believe, as the uncle of us all. Would you like to elaborate on that statement a little bit? SB: Well, no one writing in America since Whitman everyone owes a debt, to Whitman. He was not just the first poet in America to create a kind of American verse and to write in an American voice. More importantly, to me, he contained multitudes as he says in the poem. In all his crazy arrogance and self-promotion, the work, the poems are rich in what I was talking about the lived experience of his times. And they pay tribute to everyone in our culture, in our society, and they invite us all to the table. And I think that really inviting in the introduction to the DC Poets Against the War anthology, I wrote something about inviting us to the table of creative democracy, and I think that s Whitman s great legacy 14:14 DS: What I also really like about Whitman is I feel like he had a really great ability to speak to people of the future. He was one of the first poets I ever read, who I felt like he was really speaking directly to me as someone from the past. I felt as being someone who s really fascinated by history, I felt like it was the next closest thing to going into a time machine, to be able to I felt like, almost like I was having
conversations with him. When you write poetry, do you try to write to an audience of the future, or do you feel like you re concerned with a lot of political issues do you feel like you re mostly writing to people in the present, or is it a little bit of both? SB: The other cool thing well, Whitman, of course, has that thing about I m under your feet in the future and that s in my poem that s in Full Moon on K Street, although not intentionally. And actually, that s kind of a segue, because I don t write for anyone. I just write, and I write because I can t help myself, because otherwise, I go crazy. And I think that s I could speculate endlessly about the source of the creative, but really, for myself, if I m not writing regularly, it takes an enormous, psychic toll. And that s because I write to figure out what I know. I write to figure out what I don t know. I write to try to understand, or at least to live in the confusion, and to put it on the paper, on the page, so it s not just rattling around in my head. If it speaks to other people, that makes me very happy, of course. But if I try to imagine an audience, or try to write about assign myself a topic, it s death to the poems to the creative process, for me. I know other people who can say we just had a horrible tsunami, I want to write a poem to the people of Japan and they go off and write one. I can t do that. Although, it may be that I read something in the news, and is pounding inside me, and I write it. It may or may not work as a poem, but that depends on the poem, not on the topic. So, when I go to the revision process, that s another question, because then you have to ask yourself are these current references in the culture, to the culture? Are they going to is anyone going to know what I m talking about, you know, fifty years from now? Does that matter? Is this poem just a poem for today? You know, I have a poem in my book with Tiger Woods in it. Probably, people will remember Tiger Woods down the road. But if I had Kim Kardashian in the poem, we can hope not! I don t know. But you can t know what s going to speak to someone in the future. And so, people have images of sort of tossing the poem out there, and hoping that it speaks to some reader or some readers in the present, in the future. You never know. 18:30 DS: While we re on the subject of Whitman and talking about the past and the future, I thought it would be nice for our readers [listeners] if you could read your poem, The Fifth Fact. SB: Thank you. I m happy to. I m reading from Full Moon on K Street: Poems about Washington, DC, where this poem is anthologized. It s also in my collection, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. This anthology [Full Moon ] was edited by Kim Roberts, who s the editor of the Beltway Poetry Quarterly. And Kim is a good friend of mine, and she lives near me. She lives in the neighborhood called Park View, which is right adjacent to my neighborhood of Petworth. And Kim, when I first moved to Petworth, Kim and really, two years before that, when I first moved to DC it was Kim who taught me a lot about the history of DC, and of the literary history of DC. And she s been a great source of inspiration for me. So, I always like to dedicate my reading of this poem to her.
19:39 SB: The Fifth Fact For Ben s project he must research five facts about his African American hero and write them on posterboard. He chooses Harriet Tubman, whose five facts are: Her father s name was Ben. Her mother s name was Old Rit. She was born in 1820 and died in 1913. She was born in Maryland and died in New York. Ben asks for advice about his fifth fact and I suggest: She led more than 300 people to freedom. Ben sighs the way he does now and says, Everyone knows that, Mom. So I try to remember the book we read yesterday, search for the perfect fact, the one that will match his four facts and satisfy his almost-seven mind. Remember, I ask, she was a spy for the North during the Civil War? It s a hit! He writes it: Harriet Tubman was a spy for the north during the civil war. It was a war between the north which is where the slaves were trying to get and the south which is where they were. Before the war, Abraham Lincoln signed a form that said All the slaves everywhere are free! which is one of the reasons they were fighting. On summer mornings, Lincoln rode his horse to work down the Seventh Street Turnpike close to my new home. Down Georgia Avenue past The Hunger Stopper and Pay Day 2 Go and liquor stores and liquor stores. Past Cluck-U-Chicken and Fish in the Hood and Top Twins Faze II Authentic African Cuisine and the newish Metro station and all those possibilities gleaming in developers eyes. There goes Lincoln s horse down Georgia Avenue from the Soldier s Home to the White House much cooler up here in the country, in the neighborhood, at the hospital. And there s Walt Whitman, the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over, hanging around his street corner every morning to bow to the president at Thomas Circle by the homeless guys. It s 100 years now since any president summered at the Soldier s Home. But I was born only 50 years after Harriet Tubman died, all these centuries we drag into the next century and the next. Writing here, in my new neighborhood, the city old
and new around me, I see Harriet Tubman and Lincoln and Uncle Walt and the true stories and sometimes our own despair like Washington s summer malaria, her 40 war hospitals, Whitman moving from bed to bed, stroking the hair of so many dying boys. North up Georgia Avenue in our own soldiers home Walter Reed the boys and now girls too mourn the ghosts of their own legs and arms and our capacity for love. Where is their sworn poet? Harriet Tubman born so close. All these heroes under our feet. 23:10 DS: Thank you. That s wonderful. So, what exactly prompted you to write that poem? SB: Well, I had just learned the history of Lincoln and his family summering at the Soldiers Home, which is near my house. And it was the first retirement community for service members. It was built in the United States in the 1830s when it was still countryside out there farmland. And it is at a higher elevation. It s about three miles from the White House. And Lincoln did in fact ride his horse into town, right near my house. And there was Walt Whitman. Lincoln had no idea who he was, but he lived on the route basically, and he would come out and bow to the president. And this was so striking to me that we treat this history as some kind of ancient, founding story about the Civil War. But in fact, this history is so recent. It s so recent, and has such a profound impact on our daily lives, on our interactions with one another, on our social structure, that it just especially when I first moved to that neighborhood, which is when I wrote the poem obviously it was, it just really felt like the ghosts were everywhere, and they were so recent as the poem says. And so, struggling with our history, honoring it, but recognizing how profoundly it has an impact on us is really important to me. I mean, [William] Faulkner said what, The past is not [never] dead. It s not even past. And then, the poem again, I don t do these things intentionally in advance. They just happen if you re lucky, and somebody strikes you in the head. The way that the past and the present are interwoven in the poem feels right, and felt right when I went to the revising process. Some of the restaurants I moved to the neighborhood eight years ago, and some of the restaurants that I mention, or takeout places, are gone now and have been, in fact, taken over torn down. There are condos going up. The city is changing all the time, and yet the history is pounding beneath our feet all the time. 26:04 DS: That s what really fascinated me about this poem. Just, cause I m always interested in the history of places and the evolution of places over periods of time, and I m really interested in historic landscapes. And just the way you convey the change in this landscape that we had Lincoln marching through here, and now we have Cluck-U- Chicken, and now you re saying there are condos. So, have you noticed that the change of the urban landscape in DC has impacted your poetry in any way?