[Jericho Brown is the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry for his
collection, The Tradition. Here is a review of that volume.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TURNING AND TURNING: JERICHO BROWN’S THE TRADITION  
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Rebecca Lehmann
November 8, 2019
The Rumpus
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_ Jericho Brown is the 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry for his
collection, The Tradition. Here is a review of that volume. _

, Copper Canyon Press

 

_The Tradition_
Jericho Brown
Copper Canyon Press
ISBN: 9781556594861

_The Tradition,_ Jericho Brown’s third collection of poetry, is, as
its title suggests, a book steeped in traditions.

First, this is a book in direct conversation with literary tradition.
Like the best poetry, these poems know, and call back to, their
ancestors: Wheatley, Whitman, Dickinson, Brooks, Baldwin, and all the
great sonneteers. These poems are formally inventive, and this book is
worth reading for its “duplexes,” deconstructed mash-ups of the
sonnet, ghazal, and blues lyric, alone. The “duplex” is a form
invented by Brown, and he employs it artfully in five stunning poems
that form the backbone of _The Tradition_. Written as a set of seven
couplets, each duplex is full of turns, as the second line of one
couplet is reworked into the first line of the next. Take the first
duplex in the book, “Duplex (A poem is a gesture…),” which
begins:

_A poem is a gesture toward home._
_It makes dark demands I call my own._

_             Memory makes demands darker than my own:_
_             My last love drove a burgundy car._

_My first love drove a burgundy car._
_He was fast and awful, tall as my father._

_             Steadfast and awful, my tall father_
_             Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks._

These poems feel deeply personal, grappling with domestic violence,
rape, love between men (both familial and romantic), chronic illness,
and the speaker’s own mortality. Yet, there is also something
profoundly hopeful here, such as the last lines of “Duplex (I begin
with love…):”

_Here is one symptom of my sickness:_
_Men who leave me are men who miss me._

_             Men who leave me are men who miss me_
_             In the dream where I am an island._

_In the dream where I am an island,_
_I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there._

In the last two lines of this poem, the speaker presents a hopefulness
that he’d like to believe is there, growing green like Whitman’s
blades of grass from the graves of babes, but which even he cannot
completely trust as a paradisiacal ending.

The final duplex in the book, “Duplex: A Cento,” also the final
poem in the book, pulls lines from the other duplexes to create a sort
of uber-duplex, reminiscent of the final sonnet in a crown that is
made from the repeating lines of the previous fourteen sonnets.
“Duplex: A Cento” calls back to the previous poems’ major
themes, linking them together in a devastating fever-dream, seen here
in the first and last lines of the poem:

_My last love drove a burgundy car,_
_Color of a rash, symptom of sickness._

_             We were the symptoms, the road of our sickness:_
_             None of our fights ended where they began._

_[…]_

_             He was so young, so unreasonable,_
_             Steadfast and awful, tall as my father._

_Steadfast and awful, my tall father_
_Was my first love. He drove a burgundy car._

The poem’s last two stanzas are an acknowledgment of the larger
human condition Brown is addressing in all the duplexes: our
tendencies to repeat ourselves, our lives, our mistakes, our loves,
again and again, with some variation, turning and turning, but
ultimately revolving in circles, so that our most recent loves become
just another iteration of our most primal, primary relationships with
our parents.

The turning of these duplexes is what makes them so wondrous to read,
and the perfect form for deep psychological connections and
reflections on the human condition that Brown takes up in them. If
“stanza” comes from the Italian word for “room,” then these
duplexes really are “a gesture toward home,” as Brown writes in
“Duplex (A poem is a gesture…),” in that they are each made up
of seven stanza-rooms, split in the middle, like a house that is home
to more than one family, a thin wall separating the lives, loves, and
dreams of one household from those of another, perhaps as thin as the
wall that separates this speaker’s past from his present.

Buttressing the duplexes of _The Tradition_ are half a dozen other
sonnets or near-sonnets, including the title poem of the collection,
“The Tradition.” This heartbreaking sonnet points to two other
traditions that the collection takes up: traditions of gardening and
tending to the earth, and repugnant “traditions” of white
supremacy and violence toward black people in America. The sonnet
opens with a short list of flowers, “_Aster. Nasturtium.
Delphinium_.” This list continues throughout the poem, and is
interspersed with contemplations of working the ground, “We thought
/ Fingers in the dirt meant it was our dirt,” “Summer seemed to
bloom […] hotter / On this planet than when our dead fathers / Wiped
sweat from their necks.” The poem’s second half depicts men
“like me and my brothers” making videos of their garden plots
“for proof we existed,” then playing the videos at an accelerated
speed to show the flowers manically blooming, “colors you expect in
poems / Where the worlds ends, everything cut down.” In the final
line, these cut-down flowers, the “_Stargazer. / Foxglove_,”
“_Cosmos. Baby’s Breath_,” from earlier in the poem, become the
names of black men killed by police: “_John Crawford. Eric Garner.
Mike Brown._” Here, the idea of tradition is tripled. There is the
tradition of gardening and beautifying the world, the “tradition”
of police using lethal force against black people, and the tradition
of memorializing the dead.

This isn’t the only poem in the _The Tradition_ to link together
tending the earth with racial oppression, and this is fitting, as one
of the book’s major themes is race in America, and underpinning this
theme is the history of slavery, in which enslaved Africans and their
descendants performed backbreaking labor working the land to grow
cotton, sugar and other cash crops at a huge profit for white
plantation owners. Brown references this history in poems
“Ganymede”—a retelling of the Greek myth of Ganymede, who is
abducted by Zeus to be his cupbearer, but who in Brown’s poem is
sold by his father; and “Crossing,” which calls out imagistically
to the Middle Passage. But, these poems also speak to the present and
reference contemporary racism and white supremacy, as in “Foreday in
the Morning,” in which the speaker’s mother plants and tends
morning glories which she never sees bloom, because she has to leave
for work at such an early hour that she misses their temporary
blossoms. This leads Brown to a larger contemplation of what it means
to be black in America, and the poem confronts and refutes racist
stereotypes unflinchingly:

                                             
    _I’ll never know who started the lie that we are lazy,_
_But I’d love to wake that bastard up_
_At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under
God_
_Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk_
_Waiting to go to work for whatever they want. A house? A boy_
_To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave things
green._

If _The Tradition_ is a book that offers razor-sharp social critiques
about race in America, then perhaps one of Brown’s most compelling
points is showcasing the paradoxical and dehumanizing experience of
black Americans being simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible.
Poems like “At Foreday in the Morning” highlight the invisibility
of black people and their labor, while poems like “Bullet Points,”
a sort of anti-suicide note that alludes to Sandra Bland (“I promise
if you hear / Of me dead anywhere near / A cop, then that cop killed
me.”), reference the constant policing of black people. Other poems
in the collection tackle white supremacy and its dehumanizing effects
on black Americans even more directly, like “Riddle,” a poem
spoken from the perspective of white Americans, which opens with the
lines:

_We do not recognize the body_
_Of Emmett Till. We do not know_
_The boy’s name nor the sound_
_Of his mother wailing. We have_
_Never heard a mother wailing._
_We do not know the history_
_Of this nation in ourselves. We_
_Do not know the history of our-_
_Selves on this planet because_
_We do not have to know what_
_We believe we own. We believe_
_We own your body but have no_
_Use for your tears._

This poem questions how white Americans can be so oblivious to the
system of racial inequality in which they are complicit, and from
which they benefit.

_The Tradition_ is a book that confronts the issues of our time,
including race and sexuality in America, living in a post-AIDS-crisis
era, police brutality, and sexual violence and assault. Jericho
Brown’s poems engage these issues with nuanced deftness, all the
while confirming Brown as the formal powerhouse he has shown himself
to be in his previous collections. Yet, despite the seriousness of the
themes of _The Tradition_, it is positively threaded through with hope
and love, particularly in its third section, where even the proverbial
rabbits in the poet’s lawn in “The Rabbits” are engaged in
vigorous lovemaking—where what’s loved most reveals itself to be
sound, music, and the poet’s own working of words into a poetry of
joyous creation.

Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections _Ringer_,
which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was published by
University of Pittsburgh Press in 2019, and _Between the Crackups_
(Salt, 2011). Her poetry and creative nonfiction has been published in
_Tin House, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Boston Review_, and other
venues.

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