By situating Baldwin’s Jimmy’s Blues and Other
Poems in conversation with Jericho Brown’s 2019 poetry
collection The Tradition, this article examines the theory of
love in their poetic thinking. It argues that in their poetry, love emerges as a
multifaceted mode of knowing and feeling, grounded in corporeal intensity and
imbued with sociopolitical and historical meanings. Both Baldwin and Brown view
love as integral to the understanding of queer sexuality and racial politics,
foregrounding at the same time the challenges of loving and being loved in a
historically anti-Black society. Their poetics of love coalesces the
intellectual and the affective, the erotic and the political, moving beyond the
conventions of inward-bound and personal lyric toward what Martinican
philosopher and novelist Édouard Glissant termed a “poetics of
relation.” Such transgenerational reading also allows us to explore
Baldwin’s and Brown’s poetry as acutely attuned to historical
moments which seem strikingly similar: Reagan’s and Trump’s
presidencies.