Brandon Brown Tangent Intro, Portland, 2/28/09

For Brandon’s Tangent reading in Portland on Saturday:

For a long time now, Brandon Brown’s righteous careen through poetry has been a model to me of how much the art can be. Curator, crooner, translator, blogger, linguist, scholar, Jam of the Year nominator, study group joiner, and all-around renaissance all-star, Brandon reminds me how “poetry” is really just shorthand for “people,” and how people are really just nodes in a debate about Aeschylus that lasts past 2 AM.

Earlier this year, Brandon helped out at a poetry fundraiser by transforming himself into “Dessert Storm,” a one-man mobile whisk-and-pastry unit that delivered emergency confections to listeners at the break. It’s a typical Brandon Brown effort, “dessert” being maybe like one of those scribal slips that goes viral across the centuries, or infects a bad translation, until the sweet you thought you wanted turns out to be the Sahara abutting Dad’s broken storm door.

That’s not such a bad analogy for tradition, as it gets handed down to us with key letters doubled or knocked out, but I wouldn’t have thought of culture or letters or Saharas in quite that way without Brandon there with a whisk and a lexicon to show me. Ladies and jihadis, let’s rattle the Sanskrit for San Francisco’s own Brandon Brown.