Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to a new episode of HER with Amena Brown, and today we are going behind the poetry. I thought it would be good, we haven't gone behind the poetry in a minute. So I was looking through the list of poems that I had that are possible pieces to take you behind the poetry on, and today I wanted to talk about my poem First Lines. So as always, I want you to listen to a recording of this piece, and the recording that you're about to hear is the version of First Lines that I recorded from my last spoken word album, Amena Brown Live. Check it out.
Amena Brown:
First lines never care what time it is. They nudge their cold noses against my ear wanting to go for walks in the briskest part of the AM. They don't care that I just went to sleep, that I'm lazy, that I no longer take to the habit of keeping a journal by the bed for this very moment that I want to shoo them away. I'm too afraid of losing one, so I drag my right hand out from under the covers, grab the pen that has long since riddled my bedspread with ink spots and let the poem do its business so we can both head back to sleep.
Amena Brown:
Some days I want to quit, afraid that the words I write, or maybe even my own life, this will never be good enough but thankfully words don't give up, they are ants crawling in a line sending out one at a time to scout out the territory. I mean, they bring reinforcements, long lines of stanzas, tracing a trail around my floorboards, up and then down the door jamb, surrounding the perimeter of my walls, will not be stomped or stopped until they find the sweet thing they've been searching for.
Amena Brown:
So despite the decline of printing presses or the fact that magazines, books and newspapers have become an endangered species, or that words have historically been misused and taken advantage of, words will never grow extinct, they will not be rationed or put on government assistance. Words know no economic crisis, and their stimulus plan can be found in my grandmother's Scrabble tiles, searching for triple word score or in the hands of a little colored girl clutching the spine of For Colored Girls, hoping to find the backbone to be herself in a world that would encourage her to be anything but. So as long as God is still speaking, as long as the story must be told, as long as the words that are inside your heart will always show up on your tongue, as long as a whisper still has the power to send the hairs at the back of your neck to rise in standing ovation, words will survive.
Amena Brown:
They are really just like the rest of us, searching for a place called home where strong arms and a warm heart to told them, for someone to accept them in their present tense, to believe they can become something. Which is why, after a long day and an even longer list of things left to do, I leave my worries outside this room, I lay down next to these words, I wrap my arms around them until I can feel them breathing and sometimes in the middle of the night, we wake up just to share each other's secrets. Then after we have both fallen asleep, the pen slips from my fingers and leaves its mark on the page.
Amena Brown:
Oh, this poem is so tender. I actually feel like most of the poems that I write now all fall in the category of tender, but in the era of time that I was writing First Lines, I was not writing as many tender poems. It was like every now and then a tender poem would come out, and so I feel special feelings listening back to the piece now. What made me write the poem is, I really have to give a special shout-out to my friend and wonderful and amazing poet, Gypsee Yo. She wrote a poem called Why a Poem Has to Wait, and the link to a YouTube video of Gypsee Yo's performance of this piece will be in the show notes, so make sure you check it out because Gypsee Yo is fricking amazing. She's amazing, internationally renowned poet.
Amena Brown:
In Gypsee's poem, Why a Poem Has to Wait, and maybe I should give you a little bit of the era of this time that she was writing this, that I then was writing First Lines, I met Gypsee Yo on Atlanta's poetry scene. Gypsee Yo is a fantastic spoken word poet, at that time she was also a slam poet, and if you're not familiar with slam, slam is the competitive side of spoken word poetry and Gypsee Yo was a formidable competitor. So she was doing slam poetry, I had done some slam and I think around the time that I was writing First Lines, I was just starting to edge my way out of slam poetry and just focus most on being a spoken word poet. I didn't really feel cut out for the competitive parts.
Amena Brown:
But Gypsee Yo and I were not just poets on the same scene, but we were wonderful friends and she's still someone I consider a friend to this day. At the time of her writing Why a Poem Has to Wait, if I'm remembering right, she had just had her daughter and in the poem she's talking about all these things that creep in, in life, all these responsibilities and different things she had going on. She's got to feed her baby, she's got to take the trash out and take care of different things around the house, and all those things become reasons why a poem has to wait, why a poem can't immediately be written when the idea initially comes to her.
Amena Brown:
At the time that she was writing this, and also experiencing motherhood and her marriage with her husband and everything, I was single, I don't have any kids, so didn't have any kids then, and I listened to this poem and it's a dope poem, it's an amazing piece, and it really speaks to me still in a lot of ways about those of us that do creative work and feel that creative work calling to us, and sometimes our responsibilities in life, our obligations are things that are a priority, that have to take priority above our creative work in some ways, start eating away at that time. We're just doing the best we can to try and give some attention to our creative work when we can, while also trying to take care of these other pressing things in our lives.
Amena Brown:
But it also gave me a moment of reflection, as far as in my creative process, do I feel like I'm at a season of life where the poems feel like they have to wait? I didn't feel that way at the time. At the time, I felt like my poems were nagging me all the time. I thought to myself, "What would it be like if I were to write my version of this idea that Gypsee Yo put together in her poem, Why a Poem Has to Wait?" I was like, "My idea would be like why my poems don't wait." That was really the beginning idea for First Lines. What was the real life story behind writing the poem or behind some of the things written in the poem?
Amena Brown:
Well, if I remember right, at the time that I was writing First Lines, I was living alone in my first apartment ever, I can still close my eyes and just see that little place. I was so, so proud of it. My first apartment, I moved into it when I was 27 and I was working in corporate America at the time and I had been living with some really good friends of mine, a couple that are really, they're friends, but they're like family to me, and I had been really living with them since I graduated from college. So I'd been living with them for five years and they were moving, and so it was this moment where we were all separating, going our own way. Even though I had been grown and working a job and all that, it was like that apartment was my first time where I was going to be responsible for all of the bills.
Amena Brown:
Those of you that live here in Atlanta, my first apartment was in an area of town called Vinings. It was a very cute area, kind of like a suburb, but not so far into the suburbs that you're super far from the city. I remember the apartment, when I first went to see it, had faux granite countertops and you couldn't tell me nothing that I had that faux granite, okay? I also remember that I was working in corporate, but I had a feeling that I was not going to stay working in corporate long. So I had a choice, where my job was, was in Sandy Springs, which is a bit outside of Atlanta and even more deep into the suburbs. So I was looking at apartments there and looking at apartments in Vinings, and the apartments there were super-duper nice, all these amenities and everything like this.
Amena Brown:
Then the apartments that were more in Vinings or more close to town, I was able to find some apartments that were a bit cheaper, a little further away from work, but a little closer into the city. I was still doing some journalism work and stuff like that where I was outside of work covering music events and different things like that. I think I have talked to you all about, maybe I haven't, but I probably actually may need to do a separate episode about this, but briefly I had a mentor for a brief time and his name was Greg Tate. Greg Tate actually passed away recently and so he's been on my mind a lot, and other people have been posting about him because Greg Tate is one of the pioneering hip-hop culture journalists.
Amena Brown:
He was a writing for the Village Voice and just a very well known voice and leader and writer. He was a mentor of mine for a while and one of the last times that I saw him in New York, he had said to me, he was encouraging me to move to New York, and he had said something to me about New York that I actually took to heart even in Atlanta. He had said to me, "When you pick a place to live, pick a place to live that's near where you like to kick it, that's near your friends, that's near the restaurants you love, that's near your bar, your coffee shop, your stuff like that." He was like, "You can commute to work, but you don't want to have to feel like you're commuting to the things that you do for fun."
Amena Brown:
So in his advice, he was telling me, "When you move to New York, pick the borough or the area of the borough where you're going to live, pick the borough that's near some friends of yours, that's near the spots you like to live. Take the train into Manhattan or whatever to go to work." He was like, "If you want to live in Harlem, you want to live in Brooklyn, do that. Live near where the fun is for you." Even though I never moved to New York, I thought about that a lot as it related to Atlanta. So I had that choice at the time, I could move into my first apartment, live 10 minutes from where my job is, live in this really, really nice expensive apartment, and I felt if I picked that apartment, I was choosing a life. I was choosing a life that meant I was going to have to stay at that corporate job longer because I knew if I decided to leave that job and go into writing and being artist full-time, what if I couldn't afford the rent on that side of town?
Amena Brown:
So I chose my first little apartment, believe it or not the rent was $775 for a one bedroom, one bath. This is almost, wait, I was about to say it's almost 15 years ago, but it's not, it's literally 15 years ago that I was moving into this apartment. They had two units available, they had one unit available that would have been more expensive that had a washer and dryer in it, and I didn't own a washer and dryer at the time, and they had one unit that didn't even have the plugs for a washer and dryer. So they were offering discounted rent, so I think the rent would have been more, but they knocked it down to $775 because there was no way that you could use a washer and dryer in there. I was like, "Yes, yes. I'll take it."
Amena Brown:
So I took it, moved into my first little apartment and figured, "Hey, I'm going to be on the hustle." It was true, within the year that I moved into that apartment, I did quit my job and was glad, even though I had to move out of there, because going full-time I still couldn't afford $775 worth of rent, but I was glad for the months I had having that rent versus the way higher rent I would have had in another apartment. Living by myself and just having the bed all to myself and everything, I typically read books before I went to bed, sometimes I wrote in bed and I have always been a sleeper that pretty much sleeps on the same side of the bed, even though I never really shared a bed with anyone until I married my husband.
Amena Brown:
So I always slept on one side of the bed and on the other side of the bed there were typically journals, books I was reading, different little notebooks that had poems in them or pieces of poems. So this idea that's in First Lines of me laying there and the poems being like a pet or a dog that needs to go for a walk in the morning, and me picking up the pen and actually writing in bed was actually true to my life. Not as much anymore, because it's a husband, it's a husband on the other side of the bed. So now, my version of First Lines would be very different, but at this time that was still really true of my life. That I just would go to bed sometimes and have ideas for poems, I would wake up sometimes with ideas for poems, and I had a one-bedroom, so I didn't have an office.
Amena Brown:
My friend, my assistant Leigh and I were talking about this recently that my dinette table that my grandmother helped me buy, it's a much longer story to go with this, but I was trying to date this man when I moved into this apartment and he had done a favor for me and so as repayment for that favor, I had agreed to make dinner for him. But at the time that I told him yes, I would make dinner for him, I didn't have a table. My grandma is notorious, she just does this with her grandchildren, probably her children too, but I see it even more so with her grandchildren where if she sees that you need something, she's just ready to take you and buy it for you. She's like, "It's cold, your coat is raggedy and you haven't bought a new coat since blah-blah-blah-blah." She's going to take you to the mall right away.
Amena Brown:
So she knew that I had moved into this apartment, she was ready for me to go ahead and buy a little dinette set, a table that would have four chairs, just the right size for my little apartment. But with my grandma, and maybe this is oldest kid stuff, I am the second oldest grandchild, I am the oldest girl grandchild in my family, so I didn't like the idea of my grandma taking me and just buying the whole thing. I was like, "I'm working a good job." So she agreed that we could go half on it, so she bought me this dark espresso wood table, actually there's not a technical way to call, called espresso wood, but it's wood that's colored in what was considered to be an espresso color, dark brown wood with the chairs and everything.
Amena Brown:
It was between my bed and that table that my grandma helped me get so I could make dinner for this man, and then subsequently go through all sorts of wonderful experiences, as well as heartbreak with him. But other than that, my main memory of that table is that I didn't have an office, I didn't have this official place to sit down and write, and so that table became my desk, my work area where all of the poems and papers would be scattered about. So it was that area and it was that place on my bed with all the books and everything, those were really my main two areas where I wrote.
Amena Brown:
To this day, in the house I currently live in now, what was my original dinette table in my first apartment is now my desk in my office. My husband and I were just talking yesterday about this, because we need to get a new dining room table, but we want a smaller one because the area where our dining room table is, is not very large. So ironically, my original little dinette table would probably fit perfectly in our dining room area, but that would mean I'd have to get a new desk and I'm just not emotionally sure if I'm ready to get an actual desk that's probably better for me ergonomically, but I just have a lot of emotion and sentiment around that table and the amount of times in my life I sat at that table to write. It feels like that table has my writer juju, and I just don't know if another desk will have that. I don't know if you all that are writers or do creative work that way have sentimentality about some of the things ...
Amena Brown:
So that's the beginning parts of this piece, this idea of the picking up my hand out from under the covers, the bedspread riddled with ink blots is also true and accurate. I think I still, I got rid of, I only have one left, I had two bedspreads that I'd had for years, I have one left that I just, I don't know, it's like I'm Linus. Is Linus the one that holds the blanket of the Charlie Brown characters? If it's Linus, then I'm him about my blanket. I still have a comforter that was on my bed when I was like 13 years old, and I still curl up with it on the couch all the time. It's one of those blankets that's not for guests, the only person outside of my husband that uses it and I don't feel some type of way is my sister when she comes over, she'll use it. But if just regular guests are over, that blanket is folded up somewhere, it's not for anybody.
Amena Brown:
But that blanket and the other comforter that I used to have when I was in college all had ink spots on them. Every comforter that I had until I married my husband and we bought new bedding, all had ink spots on it because I would write in bed and then sometimes I would fall asleep, and I always write with rollerball pens, so I would forget and fall asleep or fold up the pen in a book or a journal, and then as I'm rolling over, the pen would slip out or the book or journal would get folded over and I would wake up and big ink spots on the bed. So that is an accuracy that was in my life for a long time, until I married my husband.
Amena Brown:
I also really appreciate about this poem the honesty that there are some days as a writer that I want to quit. I have to really think about that statement, because when I say that, it's not literally for me like there are days that I'm just like, "I'm going to give this up and I'm going to move on." But there are days where I question if it's worth it to continue writing. I think every writer would say that they have this moment sometimes. I love the vulnerability of saying that here, and that as a writer, sometimes you do want to quit, you do want to give up on yourself, but it has been my experience that the words don't give up. That even when I think I am not a good writer, I'm berating myself or being mean to myself in certain ways, or even in the times that I worry that the words won't come back.
Amena Brown:
That's happened a lot for me as a writer, where I'll go through a time that I feel really prolific and then I'll go through this quiet almost fallow time, and during that time, I always question, "Was that it? Was that the last time that the words are going to show up?" And it never is. The words always show up, they always come back. I'm a person who actually really, really dislikes ants, ants almost freak me out more than one big bug, because I'm like, "You could kill one big bug, even if you had to use a bow and arrow or a big rifle or something, you could kill one big bug. But what are you going to do about 600 ants?"
Amena Brown:
So it's fascinating to me that ants are in this poem, but they're the perfect example of how ants also don't give up and they work as a team, there's always more than one of them. You might see one, but if you see one, that means there's 1000 of them somewhere else. I loved that visual of the words being like ants, and just doing all of the crawling and organizing of themselves to get back to you as the writer.
Amena Brown:
This other section here talking about, no matter what happens to the mechanisms that we think are supposed to carry the words. At the time that I was writing this, 15 years ago, there was all this conversation about what was going to happen to our newspapers and people were starting to want to read less and less, and not as much wanting to read long form literature, only wanting to read short form literature, wanting to read blogs more than they were reading books. What would that mean for our magazines, for our newspapers, all these things? Of course, it's interesting that as things were becoming digitized, a lot of people feared what will that mean for writers and what will that mean for readers?
Amena Brown:
But in truth, looking back on it, we may have created other accessibility for folks that there are these options now of audiobooks that are more accessible, that the audiobooks don't have to be on tape or on CD or whatever, there are the Kindle, the Nook, the eReader type of vibes, and now even on our smartphones. I'm not even sure at the time I was writing this poem that you could have read a book on your smartphone at that time. So it's an interesting idea that there was this fearful talk around this and that now we know, post this poem being written, that there are all these ways that words are accessible to us. Even some people feared when Twitter became very popular like, "Ugh, this is ruining folks' attention spans."
Amena Brown:
Maybe in certain ways it did or it is, but there are other ways that books and stories are even more accessible to people, it's just the form of that is different. I loved this idea that words know no economic crisis, that our ability to write or read or story-tell in whatever form we do isn't controlled by capitalism, it isn't controlled by what the economy is doing, that the stories will always get told is a hope for the writer and hope for the reader too. These few lines right here are probably my favorite lines of this poem, "Words know no economic crisis, their stimulus plan can be found in my grandmother's Scrabble tiles, searching for triple word score or in the hands of a little colored girl clutching the spine of For Colored Girls, hoping to find the backbone to be herself in a world that would encourage her to be anything but."
Amena Brown:
That's probably one of my favorite sections of a poem that I've written, because this grounding visual, my grandma is a Scrabble player to the end, to the end, my grandma's a Scrabble player. I was thinking in writing this piece, what were some things in my life that caused me to be a person that values words or felt that words were important? My grandmother playing Scrabble is a part of that, that words are important to my grandmother, that even to this day, if we're having a conversation with my grandma and we say a word that she's not familiar with, she'll ask us, "Say it again to me, spell it." Then she'll go in her physical dictionary sometimes and look up what those words mean, or if she plays someone else in Scrabble and they play a word and she doesn't know it, she'll look up what it means.
Amena Brown:
I love that about her that even at almost 90 years old, there's still this openness with her to still want to learn things. So this idea that the survival of words, it's found in my grandma playing Scrabble, it's found in me having been a little girl that was reading a book like Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls, and I loved that idea that when we read, here we are holding, for those of us that are reading the actual physical books, you're holding the book that has a spine. This idea that me holding the spine of a book by Ntozake Shange also would help me to find the backbone to be who I am in the world, and that being a writer is about the power of your own words, it is about the power of your own story, but I do believe that in order to be a good writer, you have to be a reader too, which means you have the experience also of what the power of what someone else has written can do for you
Amena Brown:
As I'm getting to the end of this poem, taking the listener and the reader back to this bedroom scene that the day is over and I get in bed, and at this time I was literally getting in bed with my books, I was laying in the bed next to books and journals, and that sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and have an idea or write something down, and then having this concept of personifying the words, the books, et cetera, and having it be this conversation between me and the journal or me and the book and the pen slipping from my fingers, leaving its mark on the page. I love that. Very tender poem this is. What is the real life story behind performing this poem for the first time?
Amena Brown:
I can not remember actually the first time that I performed this poem, but I will tell you this poem ended up on my last spoken word album, Amena Brown Live, and I don't mean my last as I'm never going to record any more, I hope to record more albums, but the last one that I did came out in 2016. I did not remember until working on this episode that First Lines was actually on that album, and I'm so proud of Amena Brown Live as an album, it's still available out there wherever you listen to music, but Amena Brown Live was so important to me because, many of you know, I've talked about this a lot on the podcast, I spent many years of my career working in White Christian conservative spaces. I also, as a subset of that, spent many years as a poet writing what would be considered in that space to be worship poetry or poetry that was only about God, it was not about your life, your experiences, your breakups, falling in love or anything like that, it was supposed to be something that was either written to God or about God and that was it.
Amena Brown:
So I have quite a few albums that are like that. For me, Amena Brown Live was the first album that I recorded that I really focused on truly being myself, doing the pieces I really wanted to do, and a lot of the pieces that are on Amena Brown Live were pieces that I sometimes was not able to do in some of the church settings where I was performing at the time, because they were pieces about life, they were pieces about storytelling, they didn't go between these two worship songs. But still to this day, I am so, so proud of Amena Brown Live because it is probably the best representation of what it is like to see me live. Of all the things that are out there, it's probably the closest to.
Amena Brown:
If you were wondering, "What's it like to see her live?" That album is closest to it. So I love that First Lines was a part of that, because First Lines is a poem that typically if I, and I'm rarely doing events now, a lot of people are rarely doing events because of the pandemic, but even for me, I'm not doing even a lot of virtual events and stuff like that, but when I have done virtual events in this last couple of years and I have to do a 15-minute set, a 30-minute set, First Lines is not typically one of the poems that goes in that set. It's very rare that I actually bring out First Lines and perform it, but it felt right that night to do it.
Amena Brown:
My favorite place to do First Lines is at an open mic or at a room where there are poets and writers there, because it's a writer's poem, it's a poet's poem to talk about that creative process. So that's my memory of performing this piece, and when I do get back to performing and sharing more, it is one that I hope to bring out of the woodwork a little bit more. How do I feel about this poem today? I still love this poem, I still love this poem. I still love how it, I hope, brings hope to folks who are doing creative work, that sometimes the creative work nags you, sometimes it is like what Gypsee Yo talked about in her poem, sometimes you have so much life and other things you have to get done that the creative work has to wait. That's also hard for us, as creative folks.
Amena Brown:
I also love about this poem that it's saying it's okay, that sometimes in your creative work you feel like giving up or you feel like you might quit, even though maybe you know deep inside you'll never quit, but your emotions just feel like, "Forget this." Push back from the table and never come back. Or you worry that it's not you that wants to quit, but what if your ability to be inspired, your ability to write new or fresh things, what if it doesn't come back to you? All those things, I hope this poem is hope for folks who do creative work to say that creativity's always there, the inspiration is always there no matter how much life may happen to us that may keep us from the work, no matter how much we may have been beaten down by the business aspects of the work that we do, that the inspiration is truly there, is always waiting, is ready for you to take it out on a walk in the morning, is waiting between all of the errands and chores and stuff that you're doing during the day.
Amena Brown:
It makes me think of another poem that I won't do in full, but I wrote another poem called, I think it was A Letter to the MC. I'm going to see if I can find it real quick, because it has a little section in it that I want to read to you as a close of our episode today. But when I was working on this piece, I was just thinking about how a lot of times when we talk about writing and creative work and things like that, we're always talking about the perfect scenario. That the perfect scenario for you to be writing, we've heard people ad nauseam say, "The perfect scenario for you as a writer is for you to have your ..." What's the word I want to use? Your cabin and all of this perfect scenario, and who has that really? No one. No one has that.
Amena Brown:
Nobody has, unless you are really super, super rich and privileged, which is a very tiny percentage of people, most people and most even other writers that we love, they were also juggling their real lives. They had jobs, a lot of them weren't full-time writers, they had families or they had family members that they had to take care of and these types of things. I want to propagate more the reality and the idea that you can be a writer and be a creative person and have all the things that are going on in your regular life, and maybe you don't have time to write a poem every day or paint a new thing every day, but it doesn't mean that all that life you're living is not showing up in the art somewhere.
Amena Brown:
So I'm going to read this little bit of a section where I was writing to the MCs, the rappers that I love, but I think this applies to writers overall. What I like, what I want to see you do is stand on the corner in your own hood, shove one hand into the pocket of your hoodie, place one hand on your chest, pull that hood over your head and ears and listen to your heart. Listen to the streets you come from, tell me a story I've never heard, tell me a story I've heard 1000 times and help me see it through new eyes.
Amena Brown:
Break out your spiral notebooks, scrawl, scribble, write until your hand cramps up, until the sun comes up, until your lunch break is over, until your boss catches you, until all the words in your head rest so you can catch shut-eye for a few hours and wake up and do it all again. Rhyme while you restock the shelves at the store, after you put the kids to bed, while your math teachers lectures equations. Un-spool the lines wound in your head, hold them in your mouth until you can give them a place to play. That's First Lines, you all. Thanks for joining me.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.