Jericho Brown Reads Elizabeth Alexander

February 26, 2025·36 min·2 clips

“I cannot locate the origin of slaughter, but I know how my own feels.”

Jericho Brown arrives as the guest-poet, and Kevin Young starts with Elizabeth Alexander's "When," the New Yorker poem Brown picked from the archive. Brown hears plenty in it right away. The opening, as he describes it, feels almost like a party: Black men who are divine, spoke French, had read everything, and made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce. Then the ending cuts through. The line "I miss you I love you" stops sounding like a general declaration and starts feeling like something carried inside image and memory. Young asks whether the poem is a love poem. Brown says yes, then pushes the idea wider. A poem exists, he says, because someone needed to write something down, get it right, convey it, embody clarity, and make music from words. In his reading, craft has feeling in it. Sorrow does not erase the love behind the making. The poem also has unruly language, and Brown and Young like that Alexander lets the divine and the profane live in the same space. That mix matters to Brown. It gives the poem more of life as people actually speak and remember it. He also stays with repetition. The phrase about "boyfriend troubles" delights him because Alexander says it once, then says it again with the pleasure of speech. The conversation keeps returning to sound. Declaiming, image, quotation, and tonal turn help them follow how Alexander moves from pleasure into loss without flattening either one. Brown's poem "Coliseum" enters near the end, placed beside Alexander's "When."

As heard by us

Jericho Brown reads Elizabeth Alexander's "When" as love poem, party poem, elegy, and argument for getting language right.

Jericho Brown joins Kevin Young for a generous reading of Elizabeth Alexander's "When," a poem he remembers as his first real encounter with a New Yorker poem.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want a poem read as closely as it deserves.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The New Yorker: Poetry