“‘Poetry Makes You Deal’: An Interview with F. Douglas Brown” by Devon Ward

“. . . Maybe the isolated ‘F’
was for ‘fight,’ the temperament
a scared and broke boy takes
on when the odds have beady eyes
that scatter when the lights ‘flick’.”
(from the poem, “Un-Portrait of Frederick Douglass”)

There’s a selfishness that fuels a conversation with a person I admire; I’m looking for answers. I want the people I admire to have some answers to how they maintain their admirableness. I hoped that during our interview, F. Douglas Brown would bestow wisdom that would help me make sense of things. I sat down with him like Beatrix Kiddo meeting Pai Mei in Kill Bill. He might have just given me the Hanzo sword, the keys to the universe.
In 2018, Brown lost his mother, and I lost the Grandmother who adopted and raised me a few months ago. Both of our families are half Asian. We both love hip hop. I’m a writer and aspiring educator, and he’s an award-winning poet with three books under his belt, and a veteran teacher.
Brown is both a mentor at Cave Canem, the prestigious organization of Black poets and writers, and a Fellow with Kundiman, an organization dedicated to Asian writers. As a hapa myself, I was interested in how being Black and Filipino has inspired and influenced his life and work:

I'm half Filipino and half Black. My mother was Filipino, my Dad was born and raised in Mississippi. They met when he moved out to California. He worked for the paint company Dunn-Edwards, and my uncle, my mother's brother, also worked there. He introduced them to each other and because of that, here I am.

So I grew up with these two really strong cultures, and balancing and loving both of them, which is not always the norm for someone who's biracial, right? Some love one and don't know enough about the other and so on. Being raised by my mother in a Black community, it was always something to wake up to someone who loved me, but didn’t look like me.

My Dad and my Mother were divorced, but they lived on the same bus line, which meant I was able to take the bus from one end to the other, and have entirely different cultural experiences in each household. I grew to really appreciate and love them both equally. There's always a layering of me, a layering of the work I do, because of that. I love hip-hop because of that. It’s all kinds of music infused in one genre, and I kind of grew up like that. All of the things were validating instead of feeling like I needed to find one thing to validate me.

You can tell a lot about a person by what they eat, and how they feel and talk about food. I had to ask Brown, did you grow up with food from both cultures?

Both worlds! My Mother was the family cook. She could get down on any level. She's kind of competitive with it. My dad was a good cook, too. I was really blessed with both sides, you know, but it's tough being Filipino and Black, you have issues with high blood pressure and heart disease, and those things are food-related. Both sides like fried food and it’s tough, because it’s so good! I'm starting to examine a lot of that now, the food in relation to family. I'm writing about my mother a lot and I kind of find myself staying away from it. It hasn’t been so much that food is a taboo topic but, in order for me to really go into it, I might have to say, “well, I might need to make some changes in my own life. My Mother was a diabetic, so I’ve got to face some real issues that both cultures don’t deal with very well. And that can feel rude and tough, because it’s rooted in something so culturally identifiable.

There’s a line in Icon, in the poem “Go Fo’,” where you say, “The Hills like a brown Kahlua pig, roasted bright with hot coals in a ditch, banana leaves and burlap. The pig will feed the entire lot of workers after outhouse and outside showers.” This reminded me of my family’s food. They’re Korean from Hawaii, and so we ate a lot of macaroni salad, spam, beef, and pork. But the pigs our grandparents ate are different from what we have today, and we’re not doing the kind of physical work they were, so the diet isn’t as good for us.

Right! How they raised the poultry and pork is different. When my dad taught me how to barbecue, it took three days. On day one we went to the butcher. The next day you marinate. And after three days, you’re ready to do this. My dad was from this town called Madison. It's just south of Jackson. He would always say that the fish tastes different in Mississippi, and I never understood that until he passed away. We buried him there, and we had a fish fry that night of his funeral. It was catfish, and sure enough the fish tastes different. When you think about how many hands touch that fish before you ingest it? Probably two people touched it: the person who caught it and the Monger who sold it, and the third person cooked it. His Southern life really mimicked the life that my mother was familiar with, growing up in Salinas, California, on farms. Everybody just did things a little slower, a little bit more deliberate, in our family.

How’d you meet the giant and light known as Geffrey Davis?

We met at Cave Canem in 2012, and I was actually his mentor. At Cave Canem, somebody who's a third-year poet is connected with the newer poets, Geffrey was one of the newer poets. Geffrey was working on a PhD. I was like, “I’m the mentor?!” We really hit it off, straight off the bat. We're a lot alike; his mom is part Filipino. He grew up in Seattle. I grew up in San Francisco. We both grew up in what most would consider “the hood” of our respective areas. We connected on everything, like our Dads, our upbringing, and a lot about fatherhood. I mean it was really just kinship, you know? I say love at first sight. We became brothers in so many ways. It really extends beyond poetry. There's a piece that I wrote about him, talking about why and how we met, how it’s benefited us both and our careers. It was a moment where he consoled me about something going on with my son. Forget every poem. Forget all the awards and publications. The real moment that brought us together was that right there. You know, in a lot of ways he saved my life.

When you have that kind of bond, what's it like writing together?

Right after Cave Canem, you have all of this energy. We had like these back and forth poems that we were sending to one another, and we would riff off of them. He would write a response, and I would write a response. We had this whole system based off a deck of cards. Like you pull a certain number, that’s how long the stanzas were going to be. You pull a face card, it was going to be which person the poem was going to address, like your father, your mother, family, whomever it was and so on. It was like this real deliberate way to get started. I think we wrote two or three that way, and we were like, “all right ,we both got to work on these books.” And then he wrote a book and won an award, and I wrote a book and won an award. After both of our books, we’re like, “Okay we want to get back to what we were doing that turned into these books? Can we create a workshop out of it?” So we created a workshop that centered on writing about fatherhood or family. Geffrey pushed me, I pushed him, and we each came up with another book from it. He went to continue the fatherhood stuff, and again he won book awards. I went the route of research and wrote Icon. What a flourishing and synchronistic relationship.

We all need some community and encouragement from fellow artists, which is hard to find. Creating in 2020 feels challenging, but I was expecting Brown to tell me that he had been prolific with his pen during quarantine. I was surprised when he said,

It just gets crazier and crazier and crazier, man. An earthquake hit the other day. I was like . . . man, 2020 just gives no fucks. I mean, none. There are some parts of it that I feel are so tough because we weren't letting go of certain things. We are 20 years into the 21st century, but still doing 20th-century, mid-century things. And so COVID has forced the world into the 21st century. The problems we have with it show the kind of issues that we have as a people, like the lack of transparency, not talking to one another. Technologically, who’s set up to fail and who’s set up to succeed. And our pace of life. We were running out of control, man. This has really slowed us down and probably saved us in a lot of ways, even though people have passed away, we don’t forget about them. But I think keeping on that pace would have led to even bigger damage. It’s very hard to write, man. I think I've written one COVID poem. Mostly because I need space and time. Most of the time, I can't get away. It’s kind of confining. I've written more essays. I’m thinking more about the essay form during this time than the poetic form. Poetry makes you deal with so many emotions, and, in a time of turmoil, it’s tough to turn to your emotions. That’s me at least, but there's a lot of other poets who are kind of thriving right now, and we need them. We need their voice to kind of take us by the hand and lead us. I'll be there on the way out.

Devon War

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Devon Ward is the Program Manager for Issue Six of MORIA. He also works in communications and media with Mass Liberation Project NV. At 14, he found poetry, writing rhymes, and making beats, which sparked his fascination with language. He consumes mass amounts of short stories and continues his search for art that gives him the feeling of hearing “Respiration” by Black Star for the first time. While he is currently working on completing his teaching credential and applying for graduate programs, he also steals moments to work on a forthcoming hip hop and poetry album.