“Oh, it’s a big deal, a great honor,” replies poet Jenny Browne, asked about her appointment as San Antonio’s new poet laureate. “I’ve been working for years in all kinds of capacities in schools, trying to engage people in reading and writing poetry—which I’m passionate about. So I truly appreciate the recognition that the title brings.”

Browne succeeds Laurie Ann Guerrero and inaugural laureate Carmen Tafolla in the position. During her two-year appointment, she will receive an annual stipend of $3,500, with the expectation to hold readings, workshops, and educational programs. She also plans to collaborate on a major project about environmental issues because, she says, “we live in a time of environmental crisis, and the matter is pressing.” She hopes to make a complex issue “human-sized.”

Author of four collections, Glass, At Once, The Second Reason, and Dear Stranger, Browne is an associate professor at Trinity University, dedicated to helping her students “deepen their experience of language.”

“Poetry isn’t frivolous or self-indulgent,” she says about teaching the composition of poetry.  “It helps students make something from their experiences. It is affirming.”

Browne earned the MFA in poetry from the University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded the James Michener Fellowship. Earlier, as an undergraduate, she traveled to Sierra Leone, and it was there that she first composed poetry, partly in response to being a white exchange student in West Africa. She was evacuated just prior to the 1991 coup.

The 2015 January / February edition of American Poetry Review features a new long poem by Browne, based on her ten months spent in Sierra Leone, “Welcome to Freetown.” Here are the closing lines of the poem’s first section:

My first love was Sierra Leone, her exile, tight jeans

& low stringy mangos, her shredded cassava leaf

to float the palm oil sea. Such slow laterite roads.

I’m not fast, but I am predictable, freckled

and dripping up the hill.

& so your tribal name will be White Woman Jogging.

Within these lines, Browne nimbly crafts a sensual portrait of Sierra Leone while reckoning with how she is viewed by locals—and by herself—as she struggles to fit in, accepting with humor and grace the name seemingly conferred upon her: “White Woman Jogging.”

The ability to adapt, to inhabit new identities, and to write from the perspectives of multiple personae are habits of mind Brown values. In fact, her volume The Second Reason begins with “an overarching idea” from the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa: “Be plural like the universe.” Brown remarks that Pessoa “wrote under many pseudonyms and was said to be the four greatest Portuguese poets of his time. Here in the U.S.,” she adds, “Walt Whitman said, ‘I contain multitudes.’”

How does Browne convey to her students the virtue of remaining flexible about self-identity?

“It’s important,” she says, “that they learn to pay attention to their capacity for experiencing mixed emotions, and to recognize that they may not know what comes next. They should trust themselves to be open to surprise.”

Browne’s pedagogical approach is likely influenced by her experience as a community activist. She has taught poetry through the San Antonio Housing Authority, and at the Good Samaritan Center and other venues; more recently, she has worked with the Borderlands Collective to document the experiences of refugees.

Now in her role as a civic poet, Browne would like to create “a shared poetry” that leaves people “more intimately connected and able to empathize with one another.” She is troubled that “ours is an empathy-deprived time. And we focus a lot on anger.” A shared poetry, in contrast, “gives us the opportunity to make our lives or someone else’s life visible. It has a unique way of illuminating our common humanity.”

For more information, visit Browne’s web page: www.jennybrowne.com

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