Interview with Earl Braggs — Spring 2018

Braggs’s book Negro Side of the Moon released September 15, 2017!

Over the course of this winter, C&R Editor Katie McGunagle spent time chatting with Earl about who he reads, his writing habits, and how to interpret this fierce, long form poem:

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Katie McGunagle: What collection of poetry is Negro Side of the Moon most like?

Earl Braggs: I am reminded of Walt Whitman’s sweeping lyricism in Leaves of Grass and Danii Kharms’ Today I Wrote Nothing rambling, beautifully written craziness. Reminded, also, I am of the political protest tradition of Russian poets like Anna Akhmatova and Yevgeny Yevtushenko. In his blurb for one of my earlier collections, House on Fontanka, Yevtushenko said of me, “Being an African American, Braggs so deeply understands the suffering of Russia, as Pushkin’s grandson, inheriting Pushkin’s great gift of global compassion…” In short, I guess Negro… is like nothing that I have ever written, but have been meaning to write for a long time.

What are you reading right now?

At this time, I am reading Carson McCullers’ (I love that girl) Clocks Without Hands and just finishing Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World And Me.

What projects are you currently working on?

Recently I started composing a collection of poems called “Breakfast with John Lennon, Dinner with Dorothy Parker.” This collection examines the intense passion these two had for the spirit of the “Negro side of the moon.” Lennon and Parker celebrated African America without being told it was politically correct or incorrect to do so. They placed honor above empty hearted hate. To use a baseball analogy, John and Dorothy knew and continue to know how many innings have been played and what the score really is regardless of what the neon box-score box says.

Do you have a type of space you like to write in?

I tend to prefer to write in public, I love interruptions. Many times the interruptive chats and conversations make their way into whatever I am composing at the time. Because I am an improvisational composer, I go where “it” leads me. Around my town there are several cafes and other haunts where I feel comfortable writing
my stories. Though I am not a Starbuck’s clone, we have one with a fireplace and winter-writing there is a pretty nice Colorado-cabin type experience.

Negro Side of the Moon is full of an insatiable energy that makes it difficult for the reader to do anything but ride the current until the end. How is Negro Side of the Moon meant to be read?

Negro…is to be read as a gale force wind, taking one places one never imagined one would ever go, discovering in each stanza a new undiscovered way of looking at the world (America’s relationships with minority populations). The reader gets on for the ride and ends up wherever. The ride is the student and the teacher just as I, the story teller, am a student and teacher of history, science, biology, etc. Like rapid water rolling, there is a rage on and within the pages, but the rage is a kind rage like Gandhi’s rage. As a poet, I wear my title as a cape and try to be an honest storyteller. The truth burns, this I know. But also, I know that it’s a burn that must be felt if we are ever to get out of this racially confusing mess. Some years ago, I had breakfast with a writer, a late middle age white woman from Indiana. She said, “The white American world would be a much better place if white people would allow themselves to attend a Negro gospel church just one Sunday of the year.” She was talking about getting in touch with the “beat” of being a Negro in America which is as American as apple pie, some say, more so. She was talking about feeling the Negro gospel spirit. Negro side of the Moon is a song meant to be read, sung, and danced to as one would move to the rhythm, good and bad beats, of African American history, African American spirit. America, she told me, is a crisis of faith.

One of the many remarkable foundations of this collection lies in its language. What, in your perspective, is the relationship between language and race?

Syntactical re-arrangement of how to say something in order to create jazz is my focus. I love the play-possibilities of words. I grew up partly in an urban-projects “Hood.” Language, as if that’s all we had control over, changed on a daily basis. Everybody had a nickname. Ralph Ellison called nicknaming the deadly art of black escape. Places, ideas, situations, the cops, drugs all had nick names that changed sometimes overnight. You had to pay close attention, otherwise you wouldn’t know what the hell was being talked about and/or referred to. Life in the “hood” is like jazz, it’s never played the same way twice, it’s improvisational. Ralph Ellison said improvisation is the greatest human endowment. It’s shift-shaping, blues on the way in, jazz on the way out. It’s the knowing of nothing in order to know everything contained in “that” moment, improvisation!

How is Negro Side of the Moon relevant to our current time?

That’s obvious, Donald Trump is President of the United States of America, Trayvon Martin and Rodney king are household names, the war between Black men and white men is evident on the 6 o’clock news every night of the week, and the war on women in America continues as if it were pre-1920, pre prohibition. The glass ceiling was refortified in Nov. 2016. The answer is always in the question and the question is: What kind of unbreakable glass is the glass ceiling made of anyway?

The voice of Negro Side alternates between collective and general, intimate and accusatory. How are we to understand this voice, and in what collective does this text participate?

You understand the voice by realizing that the voice is that of biological kin. The African American voice (my voice) is not a foreign voice, speaking a foreign language. Everything I say in Negro…directed towards white America is already known by white America, been known since the beginning of time as we, Americans know it, 1776. Acknowledgement is the problem. The Black philosopher/historian WEB Dubois said to white America around the turn of the 20th century, “Here I bring to you 3 gifts, the gift of song and story, the gift of sweat, and the gift of spirit. Then he posed the question: Are not these gifts worth giving? According to me, white America, for the most part, is yet to answer for it is known that a “yes” answer completely changes the racial dynamic in this country. It will place value on black lives (matter).

We begin this collection with the American eagle and the landing on the moon. Is Negro Side an American text?

Yes, Negro…is an American text, written by an American in America. Negro…is an African American-Negro-Black-Colored-Nigger interpretation of an American
political love song, the story of ugly love. Ugly love is only ugly in key places. The problem is that the key places by far outnumber the un-key places. Often, we do not talk about the love between master and slave. Take a look into the front yard of any Southern plantation, see those slave children running, jumping, playing. Some of those children are the master’s children. It is difficult not to love, to some degree, your own bloodline. The thinnest of love is still love, even if it is never expressed.

What challenges surfaced in the composition of this collection?

None, no problem. I just did what jazz, blues, country artist Ray Charles said,
“Just make it do what it do, baby.” Improvisation!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
bookin_it_earlEarl S. Braggs is a UC Foundation, Battle Professor at UTC. He is the author of ten collections of poetry. Braggs is the recipient of the Anhinga Prize, the Jack Kerouac Prize, the Gloucester College Prize and the Cleveland State Prize (unable to accept). His novel, Looking for Jack Kerouac, (finalist) James Jones First Novel Contest.

Grab Negro Side of the Moon and join the conversation!