Sep 21, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min · 12 segments
Can poetry help us heal from trauma? Q sits down with author and spoken-word poet Brandon for an honest conversation about mental health, sexuality, sexual assault, domestic violence, grief, therapy…
So is, is B notes a collection of poems or is it an autobiography?
Um, Both.
Yeah.
Because, and it's funny, the one, I think it's the introductory poem, B notes.
And, um, what's that line? It says something about not being able to write fiction.
I cannot off the top of my head right now, but it's like, I think I maybe wrote one poem that wasn't off of a specific situation.
And that's because I was, um, collaborating with somebody and they had asked me to like write something.
So I did that.
But everything that I write really comes from like raw emotion, raw experience, things that really have been impactful to me.
Like I said, this therapy, poetry started as a form of therapy and that carries through onto all of my work.
It's really hard for me to just write about, and as bad as it is, whimsical shit or random things, I have my poetry, my sex poems, and that's one thing because, listen, I love trauma and I love fucking.
But those are pretty much the easiest ones to write, but I rarely have any happy poems.
Really? I don't have a lot of love poems.
No, because if I'm writing, I'm venting for the most part.
Yeah.
There were some love poems in B-Notes.
Yes, there were.
Yeah.
love poems so to speak
yeah that was a little tumultuous a little stressful yeah so was recording it a lot different than writing it
oh my god um yes uh primarily because by the time i started recording it there were poems about people in there that had once played significant parts of my life and then by the time that i was recording it they they no longer did
so it's like
getting back into that emotion while performing because like if it was it's one thing i'm gonna do i'm gonna perform down like every time so i had to when i was recording the audiobook i'm like i need to put conviction into like every single one like it's not like uh just reading the poems, like regular speaking voice, the audio book is like a performance of every single poem.
So I really had to get in it, which means getting back into the mental space of that, which was like, yeah,
a lot.
So is, is B notes a collection of poems or is it an autobiography?
Um, Both.
Yeah.
Because, and it's funny, the one, I think it's the introductory poem, B notes.
And, um, what's that line? It says something about not being able to write fiction.
I cannot off the top of my head right now, but it's like, I think I maybe wrote one poem that wasn't off of a specific situation.
And that's because I was, um, collaborating with somebody and they had asked me to like write something.
So I did that.
But everything that I write really comes from like raw emotion, raw experience, things that really have been impactful to me.
Like I said, this therapy, poetry started as a form of therapy and that carries through onto all of my work.
It's really hard for me to just write about, and as bad as it is, whimsical shit or random things, I have my poetry, my sex poems, and that's one thing because, listen, I love trauma and I love fucking.
But those are pretty much the easiest ones to write, but I rarely have any happy poems.
Really? I don't have a lot of love poems.
No, because if I'm writing, I'm venting for the most part.
Yeah.
There were some love poems in B-Notes.
Yes, there were.
Yeah.
love poems so to speak
yeah that was a little tumultuous a little stressful yeah so was recording it a lot different than writing it
oh my god um yes uh primarily because by the time i started recording it there were poems about people in there that had once played significant parts of my life and then by the time that i was recording it they they no longer did
so it's like
getting back into that emotion while performing because like if it was it's one thing i'm gonna do i'm gonna perform down like every time so i had to when i was recording the audiobook i'm like i need to put conviction into like every single one like it's not like uh just reading the poems, like regular speaking voice, the audio book is like a performance of every single poem.
So I really had to get in it, which means getting back into the mental space of that, which was like, yeah,
a lot.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
