The art of words | Jericho Brown | TEDxEmory

Overview

Jericho Brown, a poet, delivers an address and performs multiple poems at TEDxEmory. The talk blends lived experience—growing up in church, navigating family conflict, and enduring emotional hurt—with a craft-focused explanation of poetry as “oral art.” He frames poetry as something structured like worship, yet propelled by surprise, variation, doubt, and faith.

Artistic techniques, concepts, and creative processes shown

Poetry as oral performance

• Brown emphasizes reciting in front of an audience, highlighting the emotional vulnerability of public speaking.
• He foregrounds rhythm, delivery, and performance beats (including moments marked by pauses and a sense of “climax” in the flow).

Church/service structure as an artistic analogy

• He treats the order of service like a poem:
  • It has structure/pattern (predictable elements).
  • It also contains surprise/variation (unpredictable content, congregational shouts, and ceremonial details).

Line-break technique: doubt and faith

• Brown describes line endings as moments of doubt.
• Readers must “step” into the next line by faith that the poem will resolve.

Poems as spiritual/emotional process

• He frames poems like prayer:
  • They can be infused with doubt, not purely certain.
  • They reflect an internal believer’s practice rather than rigid doctrine.
• Poetry also functions as breathing/continuance, helping sustain life and breath.

Memory transformation into art

• Childhood experiences—especially painful relationships and complicated family realities—are reused and revised through writing (“typing it all over again”).
• Poems operate as mirrors of life, holding tension between what happened and what the speaker can bear to admit.

Imagery built from bodily and concrete details

• He repeatedly draws on physical sensations and everyday objects—hands, belts, cheek, bruises, ingrown hair, typing, lawns, lightbulbs, clothing—to make psychological history tangible.

Themes of power, harm, and reconciliation

• Brown revisits trauma (abuse/violence) through metaphor and direct confession.
• He moves toward a belief in a “better” God than the one associated with his father, reframing spirituality through art.

Advice / steps (explicit or implied)

No checklist-style instructional steps are given. However, Brown outlines an artistic logic:

• Build poems with structure + variation (like a service).
• Let line breaks generate doubt, then rely on faith to carry the poem into its next moment.
• Use poetry to transform memory into something the speaker can live with and communicate.

Creators / contributors featured

• Jericho Brown — poet and speaker; featured creator of the spoken poems.