Lunch Poems - Brandon Brown

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us for the final lunch poems reading of the spring semester. We're very excited to have Brandon Brown here who will be introduced shortly by Professor Jeffrey Geo Brian, the director of the series. I'd like to before that make a couple announcements. First and foremost, we'd like to thank Dr. Tom Colby, the Morrison Library, the Dean of Arts and Humanities, and the English Department who are all funding contributors to the Lunch Poems series. I'd like to thank Pegasus Books for being here with us to sell Brandon's um collection work after the reading and Brandon will be signing copies and able to chat for for a little while after the event. Finally, I'd like to ask you all to please silence your cell phones so that we don't have any interruptions during the course of the reading. And um I'll come up after to tell you about how you can stay informed about future events in the series. Thank you so much. >> [applause] >> Thank you, Violet. And yes, we're really happy Brandon is here and that the seventh and eighth graders of the Academy are here as well. Welcome. Um so Brandon is going to be reading mostly from a forthcoming book called Top 40 another volume. Um although we have work for sale over there after the reading. So that's what I'm going to talk about a little bit before we hear him. A list, say the top 40, is usually much less expressive than a poem. The list expresses a logic of set membership, but it doesn't produce lots of correspondences and surprising interactions between its elements except maybe by the order in which they appear in the table of contents. But a poem is a place where a set of materials can be initially proposed and then those elements can be crossed, put into relation, become the terms of productive, funny, brilliant category errors of inter-application. If that is so, then Brandon Brown's book is a quote typhoon of errors to cite a phrase from the very first poem which is on Taylor Swift's lavender haze in which the etymology of typhoon, whirlwind, or smoke allows the poet to connect it to the altering of mind, fever, a child's linguistic play, and the mind-altering power of early romantic love, maybe parental love as well. Brown's poems admit a number of elements in their early going and then start playing feverishly as those sick with typhus with their proximity and susceptibility to interaction. This delirium of words and ideas in the first poem, the drug or lavender haze that is neither a controlled substance nor Taylor Swift's model of romantic love only, but poetry itself has a formal signature. All the stanzas are end-stopped. Our sentences may in fact be prose paragraphs of a single sentence in length. They are thus sealed off from each other by the vertical white space after each period. Paradoxically, this is what emphasizes them as units whose contents can be remixed together. They are all in a closed form, but they are all in the same closed form, and thus we're encouraged to leap the period and connect their contents much as the poet himself does. Their closure doesn't prevent the emancipation of what they hold from entering into new combinations. But Brown doesn't want to be that consistent. The next poem's very first unit is two sentences rather than one. We will have to prepare for more complication and different fevers. Though most of the time the single sentence rule will obtain. That second poem of the collection on Kylie Minogue's Padam Padam has all the other kinds of funny and serious combinations going on. As with the marrying of academic discourse to slang in {quote} "Anaximander did not know jack [ __ ] about the heart." Or {quote} "Kylie too takes up this pre-Socratic attitude of certainty when she regards the future." {end quote} It's funny and it's not. It's how these poems draw their materials out of their separate silos into community and its fervent language games. It may be the way these poems argue for community, erotic, familial, platonic, literary, political. It's where things enter into unexpected relation via what the third poem in the collection refers to as {quote} "a wisdom bridge." And the heart, padam padam, beats faster. Maybe for this poet the poem, by the action of its verse, is the place where a list, even a top 40, becomes community. We're lucky to have him in ours and the music of his pensiveness in our earbud-less ears. Please join me in welcoming Brandon Brown. >> [applause] >> Thank you, Jeffrey. Thank you, Violet. Thank you all for being here. Um wow. There's like a whole panorama. Um my friend Bob uh Gluck advised me a long time ago that you should always take off one article of clothing if you're giving a poetry reading. Excuse me. >> [laughter] >> Wow. It is really good to be here. It's an honor. In this room. Um okay. So, um thank you, Jeffrey. That was beautiful and I think um I I would just add for now that um this I wanted add two things. One is that I I wrote this book once before. Uh 10 years ago, actually. In 2013, um I took the top 40 pop chart from the week of September 13th, 2023 and I wrote a poem for every song. And that book was published in 2014. And 10 years later, I did it again um with the pop chart from September 13th, 2023. Um and I wanted to acknowledge that this was in part a direct homage to the poet Lyn Hejinian, uh who taught at this university for many years um and who, after writing a masterpiece called My Life, then wrote it again uh in the '90s, My Life in the '90s. Um and she gave me the permission to do this. Thanks, Lyn. Um and the second thing is just that the poems' titles are just the um the artist and the name of the song. And this one is Taylor Swift, Lavender Haze. Um my favorite song is Night Life by Willie Nelson. I love how Willie curses and celebrates the night in the same sentence. The night life ain't no good life. But it's my life. For a little while, the nightlife was no good life, but it was my life. So even now, I'm attracted to a song like Lavender Haze by Taylor Swift that opens Meet me at midnight. But I am almost certainly not going to meet you at midnight. >> [laughter] >> What I want at midnight is deep sleep, somatic repair, Allie, Earlie, and Pasta sleep in their cocoons. Um so one thing I did when I wrote this book was listen to these songs like a lot of times. Too many times. And after listening to Lavender Haze 40 times, I really wanted to hear Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix. Both songs conflate the overwhelming effect of falling in love with an interior narcotic typhoon, violaceous haze all in my brain. It's hard to hear about a haze creeping up in someone's brain and not think about them being high. >> [snorts] >> You know what I mean? I hadn't listened to Purple Haze intentionally since high school when I turned to it and other songs to try and articulate for me what it felt like to do drugs. Although not every drug will make you feel like you're in a purple haze or lavender haze, there are there are other colors. Swift says that she took the song's title from a phrase in Mad Men. And apparently in the 1950s, it was something you would say if you were falling in love, that you were in a lavender haze. That the Mad Men writers knew this. If it were up to her, the lavender haze would spiral forever. Bloom evergreen is aroma and cirrus surrounding. The mind's the muscle that hypertrophies with love, I guess. The other day I thought, "My eyes are my brain." >> [snorts] [snorts] >> Marcus Aurelius wrote that everything is a take. The word he uses is hypolepsis, and the take is taken up by your brain. Monomus the Cynic wrote something similarly totalizing, that everything is a typhos. Typhos is the word from which we get typhus and typhoon. In the cynical context, it means something like something you think when you have a fever. >> [snorts] >> For a while, I was really obsessed with that word typhos. Or at least for one day in Oakland in the early teens. Like the middle teens. When I ask Earlie what color something is, he always says blue. Even before he sees it. It's a take, I guess. Or a fever. Sometimes I debate with him, Early, this is red. And he insists, it's blue. And finally, I suppose that's simply the take taken up by his brain. Or perhaps this red thing I'm gesturing toward actually is blue. And it's my mistake. A typhoon of error. Lavender Haze is set at midnight, the time for love. But it's not all good. Taylor's on the defensive. Thinking about some things that she saw on her phone. And I'm going to take just one moment now to daydream about Taylor Swift's phone. How it feels. Smooth and weightless in the hand. Its limpid amethyst sleeve. The way it could take down whole governments. >> [laughter] >> Like all government. >> [snorts] >> I like this couplet she repeats, Get it off your chest. Get it off my desk. If it is surreal to think about Taylor Swift's phone, it is just silly to think about her having a desk. >> [snorts] >> It reminds me that Marie Antoinette named her dog Mop. >> [snorts] >> Taylor Swift and her boyfriend both call each other Tay. Uh okay. I'm going to um I'm going to read one poem from the first Top 40 book. Uh and I haven't read this poem in probably uh 10 years. So, we will see. >> [sighs] [snorts] >> Uh it's Calvin Harris featuring Ellie Goulding, I Need Your Love. Ellie Goulding is from Lyonshall, a small rural town in England near the Welsh border. She is the most famous person from Lyonshall ever. Calvin Harris is from Dumfries in Scotland. And the most famous person to come from Dumfries is either Calvin Harris or the poet Robert Burns. Depending, I guess, on who you ask. I am from Kearney, a small rural town in Missouri, and except for the outlaw Jesse James, I am probably the most famous person to come from Kearney. Now, I mean, obviously, this is not saying much. Okay. But, it makes me feel close to Ellie Goulding. Like we could really bond about our humble beginnings and supernova maturity. It would be humiliating if we did meet. I'm sure I would just stutter and talk nonsense. And she would feel sorry for me. In her very urbane and sophisticated way. That word sophisticated comes from the Greek word sophos, which means wise, but it was also just a way to say melody in ancient Greece. Some think pop music is a desiccated shucked husk, a fanatic facade for the violence of finance, but I remember that our philosophical tradition begins with a thought that melody is wise. I Need Your Love is an extended expression of one fundamental need, and that's already smart, right? As knowing what you need is intelligent. Some might argue that love isn't a suitable object of need, or might try to argue with Ellie Goulding and Calvin Harris that they need food and water and shelter, but they just want love. But I don't know. Anyone who has ever felt a Ragnarok of the upper breast over somebody, I think understands that reciprocal love can be as essential as any calories. Just ask Halford, the troublesome poet. He needed love so bad that even when his lips were lopped off in a gruesome meadow, he was like, "I love you." I need a haircut. I'm adorable. I need to pee. I really need a glass of like very cold Hungarian white wine. I need to assuage this soft extra retinal apocalypse. I Need Your Love. It makes me laugh to say that I'm the other famous person from Kearney, Missouri. I can already guess that when Ally reads this, she will say "Oh my god, you cannot put that in your poem. You will sound You will sound so arrogant." You know, the person I thought was really famous in my hometown was the guy who cut my hair at the town's one barber shop. He happened to have the same name as a real famous person, Kevin Kline. Kevin cut hair for a living, but he was a country musician where with aspirations for astral metamorphoses. I mean, he dreamt himself in that old Opry God's grandeur twanging through him. And he had like recorded an album, which was on vinyl up above his barber chair. That was enough for me. I can't remember what it was called, but on the cover of the album, there was a picture of him in his own barber chair, kicked back. And I think there was something like hanging out of his mouth. Hay? Cigarettes? He had one denim ankle draped over the other. A dusty and powerful mullet. >> [snorts] >> Sunglasses. At the town's annual festival, Jesse James Days, he would perform as a one-man band. I spent hours today looking for any shred of evidence about this person on the internet. It does not appear to exist. Did I make him up? Bernadette Mayer says, "There are some [ __ ] I would like to show a star to." And I get that. As the Civil War we call history brings down a torch to Lions Hall in Dumfries and Kearney, Missouri, who will be the singer of our deeds, Ellie? I may have disappointed you all with my little descent into boastfulness, but it's not like I'm acting like Jesse James. When I was a teenager, some scientists came to Kearney and dug up his body so they could perform mitochondrial analysis of his DNA. My neighbors across the street made these t-shirts to smell to to smell to sell >> [snorts] [clears throat] >> Well, they did make them to sell to the little flocks of tourists who wanted or maybe even needed to see that old shabby coffin get pulled out of the dirt. The t-shirt said, "I dig Jesse." >> [snorts] >> Absolutely not. I anticipate the complete and utter destruction of these t-shirts of Jesse James's mitochondrial DNA of the ephemeral transitory museum known as American Top 40. But I want I need your love to survive. Like I need I need your love to survive. >> [snorts] >> Uh okay. Uh this one's uh called Billie Eilish. I'm going back to the new book. Billie Eilish uh What was I made for? I was trying to think of a pre-Socratic philosopher who asked the question that Billie Eilish asks. What was I made for? But all I could find were people asking What was I made from? >> [snorts] >> Uh the answers were atoms, fire, water, love, strife, air, and mind. Doom is made of data. Our phones are made of sand. The planets we move around as bodies are made of mycelia, bacteria, energy, and skin. But I don't know. I still think it's a good question. What was I made for? >> [snorts] >> One answer might be you were made to focus your attention on this Passiflora Mission Dolores, spreading body across top of fence, dropping red stellar form droop towards ground. When the sun is out, they open up to light like dewy soft spreading thighs. Eventually, they swell with aching yearning yellow nubs which distend with seeds and age into fruit. When the fruits begin to drop, they swallow up the face of the flowers. Maybe the fruit is what the flower was made for. And maybe you were made for thinking about What Was I Made For by Billie Eilish, a ballad I believe will survive for several centuries and incite feeling among its listeners forever. I mean, it just feels atmospherically endemic to all human history. Like Sappho could have gotten up at one of those flute parties and asked, "When did it end? All the enjoyments." [singing] >> [snorts] >> But there is something deeply universal about the song's intelligence around Eros and identity, how we conceptualize ourselves through the experience of loving others. And I could see this song being quite appealing for the artificial intelligence overlords who will soon arrive and end the experience of lived humanity as we know it. It is a song that even a robot could be moved by. Like even a robot might ask, "What was I made for?" Like like especially a robot. >> [snorts] >> I was recently on a long flight. That's the only time I ever read The New Yorker. Do you know? Uh it has to be kind of a long flight, too. No offense to The New Yorker, but just I was reading this article about these tech doomers in San Francisco. These people who get together and have dinner parties in Hayes Valley. And what they talk about over dinner is whether the human species is doomed by the work that they do at their day jobs. >> [snorts] >> I'm going to spare you some of the details of their conversations, but I think they basically more or less go like this. There's some programmer in a railroad flat on Octavia Street working remotely in her apartment. Like the one that Eliana used to live in. The one where she played me Mozart on her violin in front of frothing, full, very not doomed moonlight. This person will log into work in front of Eliana's old window overlooking the off-ramp of the freeway. And she will say, "Instruct a robot to win a card game against the current World Series of Poker champion." And the robot might then reason, "You know, one way to make sure I win a card game against the reigning World Series of Poker champion is to kill every person on Earth reasoning that if there are no people, there will be no one to beat me in a card game." I don't know how to feel, but I want to try. I don't know how to feel, but someday I might. Someday. Before "What Was I Made For?" was released, Eilish previewed the track for fans and warned them, "Get ready to sob." And I could see crying to the song. >> [snorts] >> Here, I'll try I'll try it. >> [snorts] >> I'd like to think that "What Was I Made For?" is a message to our future AI demigods, a study of how we conceive their concupiscence. Think some of us assume that the robots just dream about being us with all of our flowers and fruits and [ __ ] but I don't know. You really can't tell how things will end. They might discover that even though we made them, that they are not us. That the reasons that we think we made them are not the reasons that they think they were made for. And perhaps one of these robots might finally decide, "You know, what I was made for is to eradicate the human species. Every living person. Except for one. Billie Eilish. She they would retain as a kind of jester or Mozart. >> [snorts] >> All right, I'm going to read one more. This one's Miley Cyrus. >> [snorts] >> Flowers. If you think about it, a boyfriend is a kind of postnatal egg. >> [snorts] >> I mean, at least in the universe of Flowers by Miley Cyrus. At one time in the recent past, her boyfriend had an ovular function. Cocooning Miley in the big spoon of regular flowers. Writing her name in the sand, taking her dancing, holding her hand. When he left, he left roses. Useless except as a match for the pigment that she's painted on her nails. When he left, the egg broke. Yolk and plasma lining the dance floor where Miley slides. A new being talking nonsense, but dancing really well. David told me that he once took mushrooms spontaneously at a house in San Francisco with a bunch of other people. All of them were high on mushrooms and playing instruments. He said that while he was playing like some kind of rattle, he started thinking about the concept of terminal modification described by Barbara Herrnstein Smith in her book Poetic Closure. So, I think what Smith means by the phrase terminal modification is how a poem will establish a very regular rhythm and tempo of of ideas and themes and then right at the end make a huge detour and therefore perversely the poem feels more satisfying. I don't know though cuz I have not read this book. This book is probably in this library. That's not in the poem, but um I think it might be how like in Willie Nelson's Funny How Time Slips Away where in every chorus Willie sings, "Ain't it funny how time just slips away?" And then at the very last chorus he sings, "Ain't it surprising how time slips away?" Anyway, David, while he was high, realized that by applying terminal modification to the percussive sounds he was making, he could theoretically make a music that would never end. And later I thought, "That's ironic." David invoking poetic closure to recognize a way to reject closure infinitely and indefinitely. I write to declare that I've begun to perversely think about Lynn's concept of the rejection of closure as a metaphysical concept. And I say it's perverse because in some ways Lynn was the most atheistic person I ever met. When I informed her that David, like another David, not the David on mushrooms, had become born again, she emitted an iconic eye roll. Like a swimmer turning in the water just before the wall. Or like a crouton turning over in a bowl of soup. Clive's brother Mark died almost 1 month exactly after Early was born. When he died, we all marveled that Mark had gone into one portal just as Early had merged from his. It was when the doctors showed us the placental sac, which Ali birthed a few minutes after birthing Early, big, purple, veiny, hazy, soft eggshell, that I understood how psychedelic it is to be born. How psychedelic it is to be merged with your mother's body. That placental wall is your view the whole time. The only thing you've ever seen. And then you emerge into the bright white I mean Early emerged anyway into the bright white light of Kaiser Oakland. Whether death is psychedelic, I cannot tell you. Right? Not yet. >> [sighs] >> And I can't remember being born. Clive gave a talk. I keep saying Clive gave a talk at Mark's memorial. That's not the right word for it. You don't give talks at a memorial. I mean, maybe you do. But his wasn't an elegy. Like an elegy just means that you say good things about someone. And Clive said some good things about Mark. But they weren't all good things. He was mad at Mark. Mark didn't buy himself flowers. Mark didn't hold his own hand. Trace his name in the sand. Love himself better than you can. Allie was wearing Ergo in the Ergo leaning back with his weight against the wall of the church Clive's mom attends and where Mark went to find community. In Clive's talk he said, "Life is the gift that death gives us." He repeated it a few times. "Life is the gift that death gives us." Miley Cyrus understands this, too. And while she's alive in here buying herself flowers, writing her name in the sand, saying things you don't understand, she can take herself dancing. She can hold her own hand. She can love herself better than you can. >> [snorts] >> I love myself so well the other day. Um I've got these uh yellow floral swim trunks. I wear them when I go into the pool for play. I look like a toucan. You know? I don't know. I don't know. But I did. Early's face broke open like a poppy when he saw me. He bloomed. And he hollered, "FLOWERS!" "Flowers everywhere!" Really appreciate you all listening today. Thanks so much. >> [applause] [applause] >> Thank you so much, Brandon, for that wonderful uh springtime explosion. Um, if you'd like to attend future readings, you can sign up uh on the piece of paper that's on the desk as you walk out on your left. Um, just write down your email. Um, we'll announce the fall the 2025 2020 No, oh my gosh. 2026 2027 lineup later this summer, and we hope to see you back after the break. Um, please do buy a book, uh get it signed, and have a wonderful rest of your day. >> [applause]