the conversation: Jon Sands interviews Mahogany L. Browne

Conversation is the foundation of all relationships. It’s also a space that allows for the transfer between art and ideas. And in our highly connected world, that chance meeting, a mix of mystery and familiar can illuminate or unify us. It’s in that tradition that we present a regular series we like to call, The Conversation. For our debut, we asked poet Jon Sands to talk with writer and entrepreneur Mahogany L. Browne.

The Cave Canem Fellow is the Editor of His Rib: Stories, Poems & Essays by HER & Barbershop Chronicles, and author of several books including her latest book of poems: Destroy Rebuild & Other Reconstructions of the Human Muscle. Mahogany has released five LPs including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production, Jam On It, and co-producer of NYC’s 1^st Performance Poetry Festival: SoundBites Poetry Festival, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poets and literary emcee. Her freelance journalism can be found in magazines Uptown, KING, XXL, The Source, Canada’s The Word and UK’s MOBO. She also facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country, focusing on women empowerment and youth mentoring. She is the owner of PoetCD.Com, an on-line marketing and distribution company for poets and is the host and curator at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Mahogany L. Browne is New York City, simple. She’s also Oakland, CA, but it’s difficult to find any aspect of Performance Poetry in the Big Apple that hasn’t been massaged by her long, tender, and powerful fingers. She balances poet, publisher, curator, promoter, host, mother, and educator, with expertise and grace, while making it all look F.L.Y. The perfect choice for a winter interview, hold on tight.

JS: Recently, you have written poems addressed to Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, to McCain supporters and ignorant real world cast members. What draws you towards creating poems that address individuals whose chance of hearing/reading them is out of your control?

MB: My poems are meant to spark dialogue, whether it’s my obsession with reality TV, my infatuation with Michelle Obama, or my unease as a woman supporter of Hilary Clinton. I feel like the work you write can be the conversation you have (or may never get to have due to geography, time, etc). It can be the portal between two different worlds with one common thread. It can be more than just a slam piece, a literary journal [or] an op-ed. It can change someone’s mind. Even your own.

JS: Do you ever find yourself addressing someone, and then discover that the poem is actually addressed to you? Or to both of you?

MB: Definitely. I find myself writing poems to abused women and realize I’m talking about specific instances that I’m still recovering from. It’s a beautiful and scary thing.

I definitely had that moment of, Oh snap, this is about me. Can I read this on stage? Will people judge me? Will they think me weak? And that’s when I know. I have to share it. Things that scare me the most are the things I gravitate towards. I did trapeze classes ‘cause I was afraid of falling. I made my daughter do it too.  Shyt killed my hands and I don’t have to do it ever again, but I didn’t have that defeatist fear in my heart anymore. I try to approach my writing the same.

JS: So, when it comes to your art, what are the things you fear most? Or, what is a fear that you feel writing has allowed you to address and process?

MB: What I fear most. Hitting the wall. The writers block thang — I don’t think I believe in that for myself, really. Coming from a journalism background, I’ve learned to write on deadline and about anything. I can start a poem about the mesh in your hat, and be ok with that. So — the fear would be hitting the wall in this world of writing. Like – there’s nowhere to go now.

JS: But that’s easy, because my hat is dope.

MB: Your hat is some type of fresh. But I have found places to go – ‘cause I don’t limit myself to just one genre of writing, or one genre of performance opps. I’m into collaborative art, and producing other people’s art with Penmanship, distributing it through PoetCD, and then I blog. I have a growing kid — I write about her often. She’s over it. She went to my website at school and WENT OFF on me when she got home. I felt bad. She’s like, “I told you about Terrell calling my ears elf-like in privacy.”  So, I’m learning as I go. Yeah. I think my other fear is failure. Like all women with the superwoman complex, I never want to fail, even if that means an idea that I really wanted to do but didn’t have the guts to do, scares me to shreds.

JS: So you have mentioned the role, not only in your art, but in other people’s as well. You are a figurehead in myriad artistic circles, obviously through the work you do with Nuyorican Poets Cafe, but also Urban Word, and you have organized informal writing/workshop groups that overlap many of NYC’s artistic circles. This is to say, you play various roles in multiple communities. What do you feel is the role of community in your artistic process?

MB: The role of the community in my artistic process is to support my endeavors, to challenge me as I challenge others, to play soundboard as I would for others, to offer stages and ears and honest critique. That’s the only way we ALL get better.

JS: What are one or two specific parts of your process you feel have been directly influenced by some of the communities you call home?

MB: Hmmm. In the slam & performance poetry community my performance has definitely been challenged to be better. It has taught me there is no better YOU than YOU. The Cave Canem Fellowship taught me how to analyze poems, to find light on the page, to feel full in the life of writing, not just who sees me perform. The workshop/mentor world has taught me to teach with honesty and patience, how to lead with compassion and open a space to voices that may never see a stage in their life – but will walk away knowing their voice is still valid because they’re writing is their own, and that in itself is a life lesson. That is the reason I started the Poetcd Sundaze Writers Workshop: For those of us that teach others, are active in the slam/literary world, and need a space where we can learn again, and not just be teachers or mentors, but can nurture each other. Everyone in that group has facilitated a workshop, and then had the opportunity to share their work and get honest critiques, not just, “That’s some hot shyt! Can I get a feature?”

JS: What first drew you towards poetry? How has what brings you to creating poems evolved over the span of your relationship with the art form?

MB: Anger drew me towards poetry. I had a bad boyfriend. So yes, that has changed. But I also realized in my poetry – there was anger from feeling abandoned by my father who spent most of MY life in prison, from my mother who fell to addiction in my late teens, and it just festered for so long that once I started writing and speaking and hearing that I wasn’t crazy for feeling these feelings, I wasn’t weak for feeling these feelings — I couldn’t stop. Now’ days, since purging myself of that, I challenge conditioning I’ve been taught as a growing girl. When my ex cheated, my family shrugged and said, “He’s a man. Get over it.” (Laughs) And I thought, WHAT?! I got a 3 month old, talking to this dude’s side chick, and your advice is to GET OVER IT? I never understood where the complacency came from, and I still don’t. I have an idea, but to really KNOW and understand the art of giving up, of settling, I don’t think it’s in my nature, and I continue to challenge that with my writing. At least for women, who like me (or unlike me), need a beacon of some sort – to find their way through the fog. Or even for the man that does it, and doesn’t understand the consequences of his actions, doesn’t understand how he can break a woman so easily, how those scars never really go away.

Soapdish
By Mahogany L. Browne

We live in a house of glass and ice. The
refrigerator is built of chrome and cream.
The stairs are white and eggshell thin. We
walk on stilts around each other’s smile.
There are no blues or browns or yellows
splayed on the wall. No pastel cat canvas
to lick our hands the color of love. But the
washroom and his mood ring glaze, became
our favorite instantly.

We made love in the shower one morning.
Broke the sink and stripped the wallpaper
clean with our sweat. The toilet and the floor
are still flushed a baby pink that I matched
perfectly with a rug from Ikea. One morning
he left wearing all black with white socks. His
keys jingled in the lock a lullaby. The door swang
an opera under the pressure of his departure
before I ran to our room of solace.

I found his stubble still fresh against the sink’s
throat. Small hairs; black and sharp congregated
at the mouth of the pink porcelain. They gossiped
like little old ladies with blue hair. Their focus was
a long bold auburn tinted lock, resting her feet on the
soapdish. I combed my fingers through my pitch
black mane, a church of curly short coiled fish – nothing
like the sophisticated strand with her straight posture,
beautiful dye job and yaky brilliance. She had
one eye. An arrogant eye. It winked at me.

JS: Word. What role do you feel discipline plays in your artistic process?

MB: I have deadlines. I have hourly writing sessions I’ve assigned myself. I try all the lessons I create before I facilitate a class with the idea. I try to cross train, son. Apathy is a sad sad thing.

JS: Are there methods you use to put yourself into a creative space?

MB: Not really. I read a lot. A LOT. It has to be balanced with how much reality TV I watch.

JS: Ha! OK, I have been to many a Nuyorican Friday Night. The easy description of this ridiculous host would be, “Mahogany is HILARIOUS.” But certainly, one of poetry’s many lessons is that making something look easy is its own kind of difficult. So, as a host, publisher, student, educator, friend, and mother, in what ways do you apply the creative process of your poetry to your life’s other endeavors?

MB: The one thing that has followed me through my endeavors has been honesty of self. I try to go into each project being as ME as possible, rather than molding me into what I think the genre calls for. Sometimes it works, and sometimes I’m overbearing, but I seldom leave feeling that way.

JS: Has that been a process, not only with growing comfortable that “ME” is enough, but also, trusting which part of “ME” is being drawn out for each situation? As in, maybe “The Educator” Mo has a different energy than the poet Mo, than the host Mo, etc.

MB: Not necessarily. I’m a mother, so I have the nurturing thing that interrupts a lot of my fun. (Laughs) That’s what steers my tone in facilitating. But, I try to keep it fun. I don’t want to be the Ferris Bueller teacher.

JS: Word to the bird on that.

MB: But I have to make sure they understand the importance of their voice and the weight that comes with the use or lack thereof of this tool.

JS: Which becomes infinitely more challenging to convey if you’re not acutely tuned into your own voice.

MB: Yes. Yes it is.

JS: I think it’s safe to say your work has tackled some ambitious and complicated issues, both socially and politically (from infidelity to Barack Obama’s election), always with a striking honesty. Certainly, there exists a time honored connection between art and political/social commentary. Though, there can be a feeling in reading another person, that they’ve found closure on an issue, or if they’ve found their way within the poem, then they have undoubtedly found that way in their own lives. What responsibility, as artists in our personal everyday lives, do you feel we have to the poems we have written or the art we have made?

MB: Our responsibility to art is like that of the creator of Frankenstein. It can be a monster turned loose if we surrender to trend and remove ourselves from the discussion and activism of a piece of social commentary. A lot of my poems, whether love, confessional or social commentary, never have the spoon fed facts, but the outcome and results that it [has] had on the people surrounding me, and that is a fact that can’t be changed 20 years from now when the real shyt comes out, or we’re allowed to know the other half of the story. That’s the only way I am at peace writing anything social or political, because I am a witness to the people it’s affecting, and that in itself is worth discussing.

JS: Do you feel then that the poems you write become something you aspire to? Or do you ever look to your own work for guidance?

MB: I think it’s a mixture of both. I look for guidance and use the pad as the compass. I also look to others in the community. I’m lucky to have people around me that are amazing thinkers, like Jive Poetic, that make me really look at the small instances and how they affect the big picture.

JS: Mahogany L. Browne, this has been a T-R-E-A-T.

MB: You are too awesome for your own good

JON SANDS has been a full-time independent teaching & performing artist since December of 2007. He’s a recipient of the 2009 New York City-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam, subsequently becoming an NPS finalist. Jon has performed and facilitated workshops with university and arts organizations throughout North America, and is currently the Director of Poetry and Arts Education Programming at the Positive Health Project, a needle exchange center located in Midtown Manhattan, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. Jon’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in decomP, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Spindle Magazine, The November 3rd Club, and others. He is also one-fourth of the nationally acclaimed electricity-fest, The SpillJoy Ensemble. Jon lives in New York City, where he makes better tuna salad than anyone you know.