When the poet Jericho Brown got the flu in 2018 (long before the coronavirus burnt through the world), Brown wrote the following for the Poetry Foundation’s blog: “I was pretty sure I was going to die… I thought I was going to die because the illness puts those who have it in a proximity to mortality that only can be compared to certain kinds of near misses.” When Brown recovered, he didn’t want to go out and find love or go see the Grand Canyon. “I all the more wanted to use the time which now felt more precious to sit my ass down somewhere and write the poems of my life.” And so, in the wake of the flu, Brown set down to write “several of the sonnet subversions that were beginning to make their way into a book which is out now.” The book is The Tradition. It recently won the Pulitzer Prize.
Some of the most remarkable poems in this very good book are Brown’s “duplex” series—the new form Brown created. When I first read a “duplex,” I felt distinctly like I had never encountered a poem quite like this before, but there was an uncanny familiarity to the form despite its newness. What I read wasn’t quite a villanelle but had the relentless repetitiveness of a villanelle; it was like a pantoum, but shorter. It had the length of a sonnet, but was not quite a sonnet. In the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Brown writes: “One such subversion that I had thought through for about 10 years—while washing dishes and cleaning the tub and grading papers and falling asleep next to one form of earthly beauty or another—was a sonnet crown that only included the repeated lines of the sonnet. Yes, I’m so angry I spent years thinking of ways to gut the sonnet.” Beautiful.
The 14-line structure goes: ABBCCDDEEFFGGA, with each paired line being almost a perfect echo of the first line. The opening line closes the poem. The echo is a return to the initial thought, with slight transformations. In the first “Duplex” poem, the opening lines go: “A poem is a gesture toward home./It makes dark demands I call my own./ Memory makes demands darker than my own.” Memory picks up where poetry leaves off, and takes the poem to the abusive father, who “hit hard as a hailstorm.” The father becomes a force of nature, which leads us to the weeping mother, which leads us to the ultimate transformation: “None of the beaten end up how we began./ A poem is a gesture toward home.” The abused suffer transformation. And, when home isn’t safe, the only safe thing to do is to transform home into something else, to lock the father in 14 lines, to lock the father inside a gesture.
The second “duplex” in the book tackles rape as its subject, and the opening line is sharp and pitch-perfect: “The opposite of rape is understanding.” In a field of flowers “Men roam shirtless as if none ever hurt me./ Men roam that myth. In truth, one hurt me.” The wish for a field of harmless men is transformed into the truth that some of the men in the field might not be harmless. And it’s not enough to neutralize the men, the poet wants to obliterate the field, “To obliterate my need for the field.” On the field, the poet imagines the body as a house of prayer. But the temple of the body has been left in “disrepair.” The body becomes the obliterated place where the hope of understanding can begin, but only through transformation, only through turning the flowers to paintbrushes, the body into a temple.
Brown writes about his search for the “duplex” form for the Poetry Foundation. He asked himself: “What does a sonnet have to do with anybody’s content? And if the presumed content of a sonnet is that it’s a love poem, how do I—a believer in love—subvert that.” Maya Phillips, writing for the New York Times, reviewing The Tradition notes: “In ‘The Tradition’ Brown creates poetry that is a catalog of injuries past and present, personal and national…Brown brings a sense of semantic play to blackness, bouncing between different connotations of words to create a racial doublespeak.” Transformation comes at every level in this book. Brown’s transformations are semantic, formal, and syntactical. No aspect of language evades his transformational powers. On the “Duplex” form, the New York Times’s Phillips notes: “the repetition invites us forward only to push us slightly backward.”
So, the third “Duplex” starts with love: “I begin with love, hoping to end there. / I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.” But the poem, doesn’t end with love. The poem cannot transform into love, not yet. It will settle one step back, on hope instead: “In the dream where I am an island/ I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.” This Duplex is haunted. It is haunted by the black and brown men killed by police. It is haunted by racism, haunted by institutional violence. (“The Tradition,” the title poem of the book, ends with the names of John Crawford, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown.) The speaker dreams he is an island, which is, of course, an allusion to John Donne’s “No Man is an Island” where Donne’s writes: “Any man’s death diminishes me/ because I am involved in mankind.” Donne’s point is harnessed and transformed to Brown’s purposes—and beautifully so. Every death diminishes us all. Every person matters. The tradition will not get the last word: Crawford, Garner, and Brown will.
The fourth “Duplex” starts with the line: “Don’t accuse me of sleeping with your man” and takes the reader through a delicious affair, where “we’d make love on trains and in dressing rooms.” The man was “A bore at home, he transformed in the city. / What’s yours at home is a wolf in my city.” There are many facets to the self. Change in place or circumstance leads to transformation. Sex leads to transformation. Is there a side of the human less than human that is released through such forceful sexuality? The final transformation is away from the human: “You can’t accuse me of sleeping with a man.”
The final, and fifth “duplex,” the poem that closes the book, brings us back to the image of the father, who haunts Brown’s experience of love. “My last love drove a burgundy car” becomes “my tall father/ was my first love. He drove a burgundy car.” And in the middle of the poem, we return to the other duplex poems, the messy corpse: “Any man in love can cause a messy corpse. / But I didn’t want to leave a messy corpse.” Is the messy corpse the beloved or the self? Is the beloved the father or someone else? Does it matter?
In creating these duplexes Brown “wanted to highlight the trouble of a wall between us who live within a single structure. What happens when that wall is up and what happens when we tear it down? How will we live together? Will we kill each other? Can we be more careful?”
In his Poetry Foundation blog, Brown writes: “I should remind everyone who knows me that I do not believe that poems are made of our beliefs. Instead, I believe poems lead us to and tell us what we really believe.” The choices we make when we search for a rhyme, “tell us things about our individual and collective subconscious minds.” What we create, over time, tells us who we are and what we think. I love that idea, of poem and art serving as a teacher, guiding us toward our truest beliefs.
The Tradition is stunning. There is so much here beyond the “duplex” series, though the “duplex” poems are a perfect encapsulation of Brown’s lyrical, formal, and creative powers. This is a poet engaging the tradition and rejecting it, as it must ultimately be rejected. What emerges from the ashes is brilliant. Read The Tradition and take Brown’s advice that works well for this era of pandemic: “…stay alive. Drink water. Read poems. Be good to your friends. Take care of yourself.” And try writing a duplex. It’s fun.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.