Elisa Gonzalez, Issue 36
An Interview with Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown’s second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014) boldly mixes the sacred and profane in arresting lyrics that take on, fearlessly, the great subjects of poetry: Death and Love.
The New Testament is a layered, complicated book, one that takes several readings to digest; fortunately, Brown’s ear for sound and rhythm keeps reading from becoming tiresome. The language shifts registers often, and many of the poems draw titles or language from the traditional New Testament. When poets use religion, it often feels like catechismal name-dropping, but this transgressive New Testament inhabits its frame of reference thoroughly. Brown knows his Bible, and knows how to use it.
Threaded through these tightly controlled poems are questions about how one can desire someone else, or recognize desire as a quality one’s own self deserves, as in “ As none of us knows the beauty / Of our own eyes / Until a man tells us they are / Why God made brown.” Desire and violence are knotted up all the way through. Brown never shies away from showing violence as something you can crave, and his poems pull away the curtain on the violence of the soul, which stands naked and angry. Yet still beautiful.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How did you come to see yourself as a poet?
JERICHO BROWN: That’s a good question because I think coming to see yourself as a poet actually helps you write poems. Once you start thinking of “poet” as identity, once you start thinking that being a poet is just like being anything else that you are, as being something else that you were born, then you can go about doing the things that poets do, and you can go about that more comfortably. Or at least I think so.
Or at least it gives you a rationale for why you’re doing what poets do. Like, “Why are you still in the dark, trying to read, at two o’clock in the morning?” “Oh, because I’m a poet.” “Why are you pulling your car over to write a line down and you’re already late to where you’re going?” “Because I’m a poet.”
So I think it’s a good question, and I think I didn’t really come to saying that about myself until I was just out of undergraduate school. I was very fortunate before that time to have all kind of training toward being a poet, but I had no idea that was the training I was getting.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What do you mean?
BROWN: Well, for one thing my mother couldn’t afford childcare so she would take us to the library, which was really smart on her part. She thought it was really important that her children spend time in the library, that that be one of the pastimes of our lives. She also allowed us a certain amount of freedom in the library. And because of that I had all of the stacks in the library as a wonderland. I had all of those books available to me. And I could just sit there for hours and read them. All the books, all the magazines, everything I ever wanted was right there.
The other thing is that my parents were—well, they are—really religious people, or at least they claim to be really religious people. You know, they’re evangelical fundamentalist Fox-News types. So they thought it was really important that we go to church every Sunday and that we be active in church. So we weren’t just there on Sunday, we were also there on Wednesday night, and for any other special program, like if there was a revival going on all week. So I was already around art because the black church is such a place of pomp and circumstance and pageantry, so I was always around the people who understood that an oral thing, a spoken thing, was an artful thing. That there was a way to deliver words. That there were certain words that could do certain things to the hearts of people in the congregation.
I was always around music because of church. I was always around plays. Even though they were church plays. I was always around plays because of the church. I was always around some situation where people were dealing with emotions, where people were reacting to things that they had seen. I think a lot of people have that experience, but I think if you couple that with the library and understanding certain things that I was understanding growing up, it becomes quite obvious that I’m going to become a poet.
When I got older, when I got to undergraduate school, one of my teachers, Mona Lisa Saloy, told me, she would look at my poems and she would say, “Oh, there’s a poem in there somewhere,” and I remember being really frustrated about my life as an undergraduate, as all undergraduates are, you know, because either you go to school thinking you need to know what you’re going to do—big D, D-O, do—or that you need to figure it out while you’re there. And I couldn’t seem to figure it out. I couldn’t put a name on it. And Mona Lisa Saloy was helpful to me because one day she said to me, “What are you gonna do with all this language you have?” And I said, “I don’t know.” And she said, “Well, I know exactly what you’re going to do. You’re going to be a poet.” And, you know, I don’t know . . . isn’t that funny? I pretty much said, “Ooookay.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How old were you?
BROWN: At that time I must have been twenty-one, closer to graduation. I knew in my heart that I wanted to be a writer. I knew in my heart that I wanted to be a poet. I knew that I had always been attracted to the music of language. I had some idea of what a poet was. Obviously Mona Lisa Saloy was a poet. There had been poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, like Amiri Baraka, like Nikki Giovanni, who had come to our university and given readings. So it wasn’t as if it was completely foreign to me, but her saying that gave me a different kind of access to it. As if I needed permission to seek that out. Whenever I would say something like that to my parents, they would say, “That’s fine, baby, what do you want to do for your real job?” Or, “What do you want to do for your first job?” And I think it was probably a good thing that my relationship to my family became more and more volatile the older I got because it put me in a position where I began to understand that I didn’t have to wait to have, do, or be anything I wanted. So that’s probably how I became a poet.
I think the day I decided I was a poet I was twenty-three years old. I was at a reading by a man named Niyi Osundare at Xavier University, and Terrance Hayes was living in New Orleans at that time. This is the other thing that I should mention here, just to interrupt the story a second—I believe in providence. All of this was going on at the same time that Terrance Hayes, Yona Harvey, Toi Derricotte, and Major Jackson lived in New Orleans, coupled with Mona Lisa Saloy being there, Brenda Marie Osbey being there—this huge tradition of poetry already. Everywhere you went people wanted to have conversations about Tom Dent. You know what I mean? It was that kind of thing that led to me not really having a choice. I had never met Terrance before in my life, and there was an open mic either right before or right after the reading—I think right before. And I was with a friend of mine, and she was like, “Oh you should read that poem.” And I was like, “Really?” At the time I’m thinking, “Poems are something you play with.” I was like, “OK.” And after the reading, Terrance walks up to me and he says, “So where the poets at in New Orleans?” And I’m like, “Huh?” He’s asking me all of these questions, one right after another, about poetry and New Orleans, as if I should know the answer—and I realized he was asking me those questions because of the poem I read. That obviously because I read that poem, I was a poet, and I would have answers to these questions. That was the most amazing thing that had ever happened to me. Because I knew exactly who he was. And so I thought to myself, “Oh, this is a sign that I can actually do something, that I can be identified in this way.” I probably at that point began to take it on as an identity.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, and then you lived in New Orleans—
BROWN: I lived in New Orleans about eight years or so.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What is the role of place and the South in your work? How do you, or don’t you, understand your writing in relation to where you came from?
BROWN: Oh, I definitely understand it in relation to where I came from, but then again, I’m not afraid of that. There are people who are afraid to say that their life somehow informs what they do, and I don’t understand why that’s a problem. I think my work is informed by the vernacular I heard so much growing up. When I think about the music of language that I attempt to employ in my poems, I know it’s the same music of language that so many people in New Orleans just simply have. They would call it their accent, you know what I mean?
I find that all of that is a benefit, all of that is an opportunity, all of that is something else I get to pull from. I hope I’m a Southern poet. I have to say I also hope that that doesn’t stop anyone from believing that I’m a love poet, or that I’m a poet of the body, or that I’m a poet of grief, or that I’m a poet of celebration, or that I’m any other kind of a poet.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: They’re not exclusionary categories.
BROWN: You know, that’s a weird thing that we do.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Region, race, and sexuality tend to be the things, as I see it, that crowd out other things in people’s minds.
BROWN: Well, it’s funny because race doesn’t crowd out anything in anybody’s minds. The only time race crowds out anything in anybody’s mind is if you’re black, or if you’re Latino. Other than that, race is totally cool. Do you know what I mean? You know, I’m not white, so I don’t know, but if I was white I would be all excited about it. Like, look at what they get!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You might only have that feeling if you went from being a person of color to being white, though.
BROWN: Well, maybe, maybe, or you could just open your eyes and look at history. They ain’t doing too bad. They have plenty to be proud of. They wanted to go to the moon. That is an example. This isn’t to say that there aren’t black people, or Latino people, or Asian people who aren’t interested in science or aren’t interested in exploration. But you know, white people pretty much got that down. Like, white people are like, “Wait, what’s over there? Let’s just keep going and see!”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: A long history!
BROWN: Yeah, they got a long, long history. And there’s one way we can look at that—pejoratively, yes, but we can also look at that in a positive way. You know, white people were interested in going to the moon. To this day, I don’t know why anybody would be interested in going to the moon, or why anyone would celebrate that, but my understanding of that event is that it was celebratory, that people were excited. I mean, I didn’t make this race thing up. It wasn’t my idea. So you know, that’s sort of how I feel about that.
I just feel that all of those identifiers are ok when they’re not being used against, when people understand that your poems can be made of those things, that your poems benefit from your use of those things. You know, James Baldwin said, “I thought it was a gold mine” when someone asked him about the experience of having to become a writer but being black and gay. He was like, “Oh, it was the most wonderful—look what I got! I’m black and gay and poor. I got plenty to pull from.” And that’s what being a writer is about. Wherever you are you have plenty to pull from, so why not pull from all that you can? That’s really important to me in my poems. That’s something that—maybe not consciously when I’m writing the poems, but when I go back and I read them, and read them out loud, I realize that over and over again I am trying to write a black and gay poem that is also a bunch of other things. That is also a nature poem. That is also an elegy.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I do really see that in your work. Your poems are pushing a lot of different things up against each other and creating tension through language, but also tension through, for instance, the sacred and where sexuality land against each other in these poems, in The New Testament, which is for me very compelling.
BROWN: Thank you. I am so happy to compel you. I live to compel you, my darling.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I’m glad—you should!
I was really interested in the element of faith that’s in the book. You’ve said in other interviews that you’re a person of faith, and I wonder how you understand yourself as a person of faith now, and how that works itself into this, and how you thought in particular about creating a book called The New Testament.
BROWN: Well, part of the reason I’m a person of faith is related to me being an artist because I think what artists do is we create worlds. And world-creation, whenever you’re in the midst of world-creation, I think you have to be aware of the fact—for me at least, I become aware of the fact that if I can create a world, I can be a part of somebody else’s world, that somebody can have a perspective on me. Or that I could have been made. That I am made. Or as the Bible says, “wonderfully and beautifully made.”
What I believe—and maybe it’s easier for me to believe this because I’m an artist—I believe that there’s a God, that God is everywhere, and if that God is everywhere, then that God is even in me, that that God is definitely in you. What I have to do walking around every day is to allow that God in me to recognize that God in you, but even more than that because I have God in me, I have all of the things that I associate with God in me. I think of God as being all good, all abundance, all joy, and if God is all those things, then I can create that in my life. If God is all creation, then I become a co-creator with God of what I do. And I think that is related to my poems because ultimately when you write a book, that’s what you’re doing. You’re trying to create an experience that is real at least for the moments that you read the pages, but hopefully for more than that. That that experience moves beyond those pages into a reader’s emotions. And there’s a lot said about political poetry, but I don’t see how it’s possible for a poem to not be political. If poems are meant to move us emotionally, if poems are meant to stimulate us intellectually, well then what’s the next step? You’re moved emotionally, you’re stimulated . . . You do that enough, then your actions change. I mean, that’s just ABCDEFG, right?
And so I think if there is any relationship between my work and my faith, that’s the relationship. That our thoughts lead to our lives. And I want to write poems that help people along their way toward new thoughts. And maybe because I can put things in a certain way, they can get to some of those old thoughts that before they may not have been able to get to. That’s what happens to me when I read a poem. There’s so much to be learned from poetry. I just think it’s the greatest thing ever. I learn so many things. Just on the level of the word.
I talked about when I was kid—I remember reading Langston Hughes in the library, this poem called “Suicide’s Note,” and before that poem I had no idea that “suicide” could be a noun as well as a verb. What I mean by that is that I didn’t know that a person could be a “suicide.” I was like, “Oh, wow.” And I remember falling in love with that poem in spite of having no idea what it was about. I saw that “apostrophe S” after suicide and was like, “What? Suicide is note?” So I think that is just one of the levels at which poetry leads us to an expansion of our minds. And I’m happy to be a part of that. I don’t think I’m the only person who’s doing that. I think many people are doing that. I think this has been a really great season for it, and I’m really glad that this book has been a part of that season.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You said, interestingly, “I want a poem to be clear but not obvious,” which I think is very beautiful and interesting. All of what you’re saying is making me wonder about your process of writing poems.
BROWN: Yeah, clarity is really interesting to me in poetry. That you can come across a line, and it can have great meaning in the context of other lines, but when you really look at it it’s sort of odd. It’s hard to pin down.
As for how I build poems, how I make poems happen, I try not to. Particularly for this book, I really do think that it’s a book where I concentrated on line-writing, and that line-writing would become poem-building.
I’ll give you an example. A good example is a poem like “Obituary.” That poem is completely made of lines that I had written that I later smashed together because they were there. They didn’t have to have anything to do with one another. I didn’t know if they had anything to do with one another. I just imagined that they must have had something to do with one another because they were all sitting in the Notes app on my iPhone. And I wanted to write another poem so I put them on a sheet of paper. So I said, “Okay, let’s put these in an order. Now let’s see what sounds . . .” Often that’s how I am making poems happen. I write a line and then I write another line because I think that line sounds good behind that line. Then I write another line because that line contradicts the line before it. Then I write a line because musically the sound of that line riffs off the sound of the line before. Then I write another line because musically that sounds just like that line. Then I write another line like nothing I’ve written before in any of those lines. And I do that until I’ve exhausted myself. And then once I see what I have in front of me, I move from that point into trying make that a first draft. I don’t think of that as a first draft, I just think of that as a good time. And I try to push that from that point into a first draft. In order to make it a first draft, I start asking it questions. And the questions I ask it are the same questions that we ask abstract art—or even if we’re just in a park and we see two people across the way, and they seem to be having a heated discussion. We start giving it story, we start giving it “this happened because . . . ,” “this happened before . . . ,” and “this is what is going to happen after because . . .” I said abstract art, but even when we look at art that is not abstract, we look at figures and we say, “Oh, this is what that’s about.” We start giving it story. We start giving it narrative. And in actuality it’s just a painting of figures. There is no story. There is no narrative other than the one we create for it in our heads. That’s what I try to do. I try to ask myself those same questions. What is the personality of those words? What is the personality of this poem? What is the tone? Who is the speaker? A poem from my first book, “Track 5: Summertime,” which is a persona poem in the voice of Janis Joplin—I had written most of that poem before I understood that Janis Joplin was the speaker of the poem. Even the “I’m such an ugly girl, I’m such an ugly girl.” I didn’t need Janis Joplin for me to say that. Sometimes I feel like that.
Quite honestly, it was after I had a certain number of lines that I could go back and I could look and I could say who would be saying these things, how do I make this make sense for me, Jericho Brown, how do I make this more grounded? And that’s what I do.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: And then revision is just more and more of that?
BROWN: I guess revision is more of that, yeah. Revision is calling my friends and reading poems to them over the phone, or them calling me . . . Revision doesn’t just happen. Don’t get me wrong, it’s work. We sit down and we stare at a computer screen or at pages. We stare at them for however long. That’s work. The ways we push a poem, the direction we decide it might need to go can be influenced by anything, from going to a reading to having a conversation to making love to whatever it is that we’re doing while we’re working on a poem.
For a poet, and this is why it’s so great to have it as an identity, you become fully aware that some part of your head is working on it all the damn time.
This is why that essay by T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” was so important to me. It helped me understand that the work that we do is work we can’t help but do. And it also helped me understand that this thing that I’m saying about “poet” as identity, that it’s sort of like a calling. That it’s not something we go after. I mean we can go after being better at what we’ve been called to do, but ultimately we’re going to do it at some level or another. It seems to me.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I agree with you, but I also have a religious background, so I wonder if I’m primed to see things as “callings.”
BROWN: It’s interesting that you say that because I had a recent conversation over email, which isn’t really much of a conversation, but there’s a poet whose work I like a lot—her name is Carrie St. George Comer. When I was a poetry editor at Gulf Coast, we published some of her poems. She has a book that came out from Sarabande a few years ago, a good few years ago. I think she’s a really good poet, and she told me she wasn’t going to write anymore—and it has been a while. I’ve been like, “Wait, I’ve been picking up these journals and I haven’t seen any of Carrie’s work in it.” But I just don’t believe her. But it is true that there are people who have a book or two books and they put it down and they’re like, “Hey, okay.” I sort of feel that way right now. But whenever I tell people I feel that way they roll their eyes at me, so I’m not telling people, except for you. Because I know that I have written poems since this book came out, I know that I’m working on something, but I don’t think I’m necessarily working on a book. I’m just sort of having a good time because I like writing. I mean, I enjoy writing poems. It is work but it’s a good time for me. I feel like I figure a lot of stuff out while I’m in the midst of writing poems. I feel like it helps to make me a better man.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Did you feel with The New Testament and Please as if you were making a book the whole way? Or was it like this period now?
BROWN: I think I’m back to where I was originally. I think the worst thing about having a first book is that it makes you believe that every poem you write after that is a poem toward a second book. For me, at least, that was one of the feelings I was always running from when I was writing this book. I think, you know, I wrote a first book that a few people read, and I’m grateful for that. But I also think that what that did was put me in a position where I got the big head. I had a moment of ego, or I had several little bitty moments of ego that haven’t stopped yet, where I thought, “Somebody’s paying attention to me, and if somebody’s paying attention to me, then oh my God, I have to do this right.”
And I think if you want to be a poet it’s much better for you to be an artist first. It’s a really good idea. And that’s hard. And when I say that’s hard what I mean is, it’s hard on two fronts. It’s hard in particular I think when you are writing from the margins. Whenever you are a writer from the margins, you are automatically in the position of representative. You have put yourself in this position where you could in some ways be asked to speak for someone else. People will even send you emails saying, “I feel as if you speak for me.” And that, that’s a dangerous thing for an artist to have to go through because I think an artist actually needs to be free of that. But I think you’re a representative if you’re a poet in particular.
The other way you’re a representative is that we’re all ambassadors of poetry. It’s part of what I love about it. The most clannish of all arts. It’s so completely entrenched in its social way of being, in its community. And that is one of the best things about it, but it’s also one of the worst things about it. If you don’t believe me, check it. You’re doing this interview right now. That’s ambassadorship. I don’t know a poet who doesn’t teach a workshop, or run a reading series, or edit a literary journal, or do a series of interviews, or . . . at some level, every one of us is reaching out in a way to make poetry, to expand it. To make it either a more livable thing inside, or to make more people know about it. I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t do that who is a poet. Even our poets who we think of as established, poets who have really made it—the time that someone like Louise Glück spent with Yale [Younger Poets Prize] winners, helping them revise their books. That’s ambassadorship. She didn’t have to do that. That wasn’t in the job description. She does that because there’s something about poetry when you’re a poet you’re also dealing with this moral obligation to poetry. And it’s one of the best features of us.
Because it’s one of the best features of us, and because I’m a skeptic, I think it’s also one of our worst features. I think our strongest attributes are also the things that we sort of have to keep in check and wonder about. And I think that what’s most important is that we be artists for the sake of our arts first, that we be poets for the sake of the poem we’re working on that day first. And that although there are all these opportunities for ambassadorship, that we not be sidelined by those opportunities. And that we be committed to getting that poem right. That poem in and of itself is a bigger and better ambassador than we will ever be with our smiles and our handshakes. So that’s what I think about that. Did I answer a question or was I just talking?
WASHINGTON SQUARE: So, your ambassadorship: you’re teaching a workshop. So what do you teach them, how do you run your workshops, what do you think is important in teaching poetry?
BROWN: Oh, this is a good question. How do I run my workshop? Maybe if I answer this question I’ll figure out what the hell I’ve been doing.
So what I try to do is I try to give them examples of what poems can do, and I try to give them very different examples. I try to put them in a position where they look at all the Roberts from Robert Duncan to Robert Creeley to Robert Lowell. Every Robert who ever wrote a poem I want them to read. In one workshop one semester we really did have a “Robert” day because I kept telling them, “Whatever you do, don’t name your kid Robert! This is what’ll happen.” We had a good time that day. Robert Frost. Poetry has so many Roberts. This is why when I meet men named Robert I never give ‘em any. Like, “You’re not gonna write about what we just did.”
I try to show them that part of what they have to do is they have to make the poem that is the Elisa poem, that they have to make the poem that is the Fred poem, or the Cindy poem, or the Tamika poem, or whomever it is that they are. And making use of all of their imagination and all of their experiences, they have to push toward that thing, just as Robert Duncan very clearly pushed toward that thing.
I also try to help them understand that influence is the best thing that could ever happen to them. Many of my students are afraid of it. They don’t want to be influenced. But I insist on it. So what I do is—I don’t require this, but I do prod, I do move toward it—my students, ultimately, every time we read a book or a set of poems by a poet, they have to write a list of about seven strategies that the poet employs to make the poems happen, that the poet uses to make the poems work. What are the habits of this poet? And then using those strategies I ask them to write a poem. Not looking at that poet’s poem. They can’t use anything in subject matter, but they can use things, for instance, if we’re talking about someone like Sharon Olds, you don’t have to be—I don’t believe you have to be a woman to write a Sharon Olds poem. Not in my class anyway. You don’t have to lie down on the street and realize you haven’t had your period and therefore you’re pregnant. That’s the dramatic situation of what happens in “May 1968.” Oh my God, she wrote that poem, didn’t she? That moment at the end of the poem where she says, the horses dipping, drooping their heads, that making a circle moment . . . It’s such a surreal moment. It’s probably the most surreal moment in all of her work. I love that poem. Anyway, sorry, I just had a Sharon Olds worship moment.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I like the idea of the poets having habits, and trying to use those, and figuring out your own habits through that. That seems very powerful. It’s interesting that you say your students are afraid of being influenced because I do think that is maybe a common young-person fallacy, wanting to be entirely original and not understanding how originality actually works.
BROWN: I also think that my students, you know my students want to make sense, and they don’t understand that sense will make itself. So I think that’s the other problem that they have with influence. I think it’s that thing that you just said, but I think it’s also that they read really crazy stuff, or stuff that they think is crazy—I don’t think it’s crazy because I’m a poet, and I don’t even realize how crazy it is until they’re like, “Dr. Brown, seriously?” You know, they look at me upside my head. Like, “Dr. Brown, I don’t understand why you think this is real life.” And I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I guess this is kind of crazy.” But really I don’t know what to do about that other than to tell them, “Well you ought to try it out anyway.” Because you never know what might work for you. I teach undergraduates, so I’m lucky, because all they should be doing anyway is trying stuff out. The more they try the more likely they are to hit on the thing that will work for them. And along the way they’ll get an idea of other things that are going on, and they’ll gain respect for those other things.
As opposed to figuring out what works for you and thinking that what works for everybody else is evil. When I come across that in poetry it really disturbs me. And I still come across that. I thought that was over. I thought that was going to be over. You know, there was this lull between books when I wasn’t really going around and giving readings and I was trying to get fat and watch TV, and then when the book came out I hit the road again to promote the book, which I think is the right thing to do. I do that not just because I like giving readings. I do that because it feels like the right thing to do for the book but also for the press. I think it’s only fair that if they put the labor into the labor of love that it takes to make a book happen and get on shelves then I can at least go try to sell that mother. So since I’ve been doing this, I go school to school, and people who bring me, they say these things, and I’m like, “Are you serious? I thought we were beyond this thing where we think we’re like being attacked by some other group of poets.”
It is true—and this sort of gets back to what I was talking about with that social side of poetry and its dangers—it is true that sometimes people get to the point where—like I said we can be very clannish, and people think, “Well, all these poets who sit at this bar with me are the most important poets in the country.” I hate to tell you, but the country’s pretty big. There are a lot of poets in the country, and just because they happen to be at that bar with you doesn’t mean that they’re the most important poets in the country. It means that they happen to live in the same city where you live and that y’all like the same bar. That y’all enjoy each other’s company.
But sometimes we say things where it’s as if we believe that to be true. We believe that we’re surrounded by the best poets. What I actually like to believe is that I haven’t met the best poet yet. I like to believe that I’ve met some really damn good poets, but that I can always discover something else. There’s a poet named Christine Garren, who I discovered in the last few years who had been writing for a long time. The poet—oh I’m going to mix up his name, it’s either Edward Haworth Hoeppner, or is it Edward Hoeppner Haworth, but he’s a poet I’ve only recently discovered, which is why I’m mixing up his name, but I think he’s really good.
I’m saying there are always these people . . . There’s a poet right now in Boise, Idaho writing her ass off. And just because you don’t know who she is doesn’t mean she’s not there. So I think we have to keep our eyes open to that.