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Transcription: [00:08:39]
{SPEAKER name="Dennis Brutus"}

John Dunn down to Tennison on Browning.
[00:08:45]
So much of my work, I think, has a fairly conventional pattern.
[00:08:52]
But I was also exposed to the African tradition
[00:08:57]
A tradition of praise poetry, satirical poetry, poetry which deals with history, and indeed, occasional poetry
[00:09:07]

Poetry for a wedding, for a birth, for a death, for a birthday.
[00:09:13]

So I think my work is a fusion of these two streams.
[00:09:19]

The style I think has undergone a major change.
[00:09:23]

When I began, I wrote in a formal kind of pattern, of rhyme and metrical structure.

[00:09:33]

Um, partly because of the period I spent in prison, when I was in isolation and I had the time to reexamine my own work.

[00:09:46]

I decided that I needed to write a much more simple, more direct, a more immediate kind of communication.

[00:09:55]
So I think that there's less ornament and less self-conscious craft.

[00:10:05]

I like to think that the poems work better as a result of trying to be more direct.

[00:10:11]

{SPEAKER name="Brooks B. Robinson"}

In the future, where do you see your work going? Are you contemplating changing themes or will you continue to write basically about the same concept, issues, themes that you've been writing?

[00:10:28]

{SPEAKER name="Dennis Brutus"}

I think I live in the present.

[00:10:31]

I don't think I can predict. I don't think I particularly want to try to predict.

[00:10:40]

Um... In the past, there were many times when I--