photo by Matt Wignall
Getting down with Derrick Brown
Issue #36
This rebel-poet is revolutionizing the spoken word — and he just might steal your heart along the way
By Sara Graham
Published: June 1st, 2008 | 3:55pm
It’s Valentine’s Eve in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and I may be the luckiest girl in town. Tonight I’m meeting Nashville-based rebel-poet Derrick Brown for dinner while he’s visiting for a publicity tour. Writer, performer, and charmer, Brown is leading a revolution to inject poetry, both written and spoken, with the raucous and booze-infused spirit of rocknroll. Better yet, his good looks and indie cred have him poised to become the next It Guy for thinking girls everywhere.
“I feel like a sissy quite a bit,” he says. “I don’t know why I’m drawn to poetry. I do know that it keeps me out of therapy.”
The former paratrooper, magician, and fired weatherman, Brown married rock and verse when he opened for the Cold War Kids during the band’s fall 2007 tour. Drenched in a spotlight and alone onstage, he wooed huge venues of drunken hecklers, college kids, and hipsters alike into listening to poetry at a rock show. Quite the accomplishment. “I would tell a story between each poem in case people were like, ‘What’s this asshole up there for?’ So I’d say, ‘Hey, this is a strange idea, we’re gonna make this night like a living room kind of show. I know you want to see the Cold War Kids, but I’m gonna be your foreplay,’” he says.
Brown’s quirky sense of humor sets him apart from the somber, buzz-kill politics of slam poets. He says words like “nifty” and “have a hoot” in conversation. He once threw a burning box of Snickers bars into a room of praying boys at camp (a fact proudly noted on the back of a press photo postcard). And then there’s that side project, Spring Hill Spider Party, his “gay dance rock” band, which emulates Erasure.
In addition to his poet-rocker persona, Brown is a DIY maven, founding the Write Bloody publishing company, which came from his desire to give a platform to like-minded poets and artists. His recent edited The Last American Valentine is a compilation that boasts non-sappy love poems that promise to seduce and destroy.
“I’ve met so many writers who tackle [love] in a way that is not super sentimental. I love it,” he says of the collection. “Its got darkness and humor and spastic strangeness, drug-induced romance and tenderness and honesty.”
With a bevy of new releases on Write Bloody, including a second Brown-edited poetry comp Scandalabra and an upcoming book tour, consider yourself warned. If you catch a live reading, you may just fall in serious like with the poetry and the man behind it. Brown describes the female experience — everyday images like tampons, and purses pop up in his work — in a way that makes you want him as your boyfriend, too. “I guess being raised by a woman, certain things about women are demystified,” he says. “And nothing is gross or strange.”
—
an excerpt from "Kurosawa Champagne"
By Derrick Brown
Tonight
I think it is safe to say we drank too much.
Must I apologize for the volume in my slobber?
Must I apologize for the best dance moves ever?
No.
Booze is my tuition to clown college.
I swung at your purse.
It was staring at me.
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