Trinity Poet Receives Second Fulbright

When you're feeling something indescribable, Trinity professor Jenny Brownewants you to turn to poetry.

"Poetry is what we've always turned to when we feel at a loss for words," says Browne, MFA, now in her 15th year with Trinity's English department. "When you're viewing a total solar eclipse, for example, people say'there are no words,' but words are all we have."

Browne, for the past few years, has been on an international journey of describing the indescribable. After receiving a prestigious Fulbright Commission scholarship to teach at Queen's University Belfast in 2019 (a venture unfortunately cut short by a global pandemic), she's now won a secondFulbright award. In 2024, she will be traveling back to Ireland to continue spreading-and finding-the word about poetry.

For Browne, words have a heightened social and emotive importance, perhaps now more than ever.

"At a time where I feel like we are more and more polarized, Fulbright has continued to build exchange programs at all levels for public school teachers, for academics, for undergraduates to live and learn in new environments. This is about creating global citizens in the biggest sense, so it's just an honor to be a part of this," Browne says. "I think I feel honored that Fulbright also understands that the creative arts recognize how strange and powerful language is also an important thing to share."

In Ireland, Browne's Fulbright work will continue to explore the concept of ekphrastic poetry: a dialogue between poetry and other forms of art. In the past, this meant poets would describe sculptures, paintings, or other physical media for readers who couldn't observe these objects themselves.

"But more contemporary ekphrastic writing is more interested in the nature of the encounter. I just saw an eclipse yesterday, and I had a jaw-dropping experience. What am I bringing to this encounter, and how does that inform not only what I see there but what I put here?" Browne explains. "This type of writing has really opened itself up to thinking about how an encounter with the work of art can… almost completethe making of it."

And before she leaves for the beauty and mystique of Ireland, Browne is also determined to craft a poetry experience for her fellow Texans through a newly published anthology that she edited. Texas, Being: A State of Poemsfeatures more than forty-five poems concerning Texas' people, places, and environment, with works from authors such as Victoria Chang, Naomi Shihab Nye, Andrea "Vocab" Sanderson, and Jorge Luis Borges. The book is being published as part of Trinity Press' Maverick Book Series.

"This is a little book with a big sky," Browne says. "Texas is a state full of juxtaposition and contradictions. It's an immense place of incredible beauty, and it's also really inhospitable in both cultural and ecological ways. This book is a love letter, but it's one that recognizes the complexity of reality. This has something for the poetry-curious, for the poetry-ambivalent, and for the poetry-devoted."

Browne's second Fulbright (and new book) come as the latest set of accomplishments for an accomplished poet, teacher, and scholar.

Browne is the author of three collections of poems: Dear Stranger, The Second Reason, and At Once, and has published work that appears in publications such as the American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The New York Times, Tin House, and Threepenny Review. She's won numerous grants and awards and has served as the poet laureate for both the State of Texas and the City of San Antonio. A new collection of poems, I Am Trying to Love the Whole World, is forthcoming, Browne says.

Browne came to Trinity in 2009, right at the genesis of the University's Creative Writing program. In addition to classes within the English department, she teaches a First-Year Experience course on global climate change and had a hand in directing the Women and Gender Studies program for a five-year stint.

In many ways, Browne says she loves being at Trinity because of how busy she gets to keep herself.

"I've had my toe in a lot of areas at Trinity," Browne says. "I'm a poet, but I really love being at Trinity because interdisciplinarity has been a lived experience. I get to kind of 'constellate' poetry with a whole lot of other things."

For Browne, a liberal arts environment like Trinity is a place where poetry gets to become more than a career path or an academic field.

"A place like Trinity is where I get to teach undergraduates who don't necessarily want to be 'capital-P' poets," Browne explains. "We have students who are computer science majors, econ majors, or geology majors, but for some reason or curiosity, find their way to a poetry class. At Trinity, this isn't necessarily about the professionalization of poets, or even necessarily about literary criticism, at least in my classroom. It's about somehow creating this space where we can have a personal engagement with this tradition and be makers, make stuff out of language."

Whether in Texas or in Ireland, Browne wants to urge her readers, listeners, and students to see poetry as a radically essential tool for both listening and learning.

"I think that we're now more connected than ever through technology, but in a lot of ways, I feel like we're also profoundly disconnected from what I call a 'quality of attention,'" Browne says. "Poetry, both the reading and the making of it, demands a radical kind of paying attention to the possibilities and strangeness of language."

Whether or not her students want to become "capital-P" poets, Browne says poetry matters across all life paths and career fields, "not because it's going to solve the world's problems, but because it will help us pay better attention to who we are in this moment to encounter them."

Texas: Beingis available at local stores, as well as Trinity University Press.