BOOK REVIEW
Form and Body:
Jericho Brown’s The Tradition
The first lines of verse to appear in Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), are not his. They come, instead, from Mari Evans in the epigraph to Brown’s book:
I will bring you a whole person
and you will bring me a whole person
and we will have us twice as much
of love and everything
Taken from the opening of “Celebration” in Evans’ 1970 collection, I Am a Black Woman, these lines place Brown’s most recent work directly in the genealogy of the writers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) in the mid-twentieth century. Brown, born in 1976, brings The Tradition to life as part of another tradition he inherited at birth: one in which African-American and Black writers lift their voices to share authentic experiences, cultural pride and ongoing injustices through a distinctly new aesthetic. For these writers, creation is a powerful, political act. Poet, music critic and political activist Amiri Baraka, generally recognized as the foundational theorist of BAM, set the often defiant tone for the movement’s political trajectory and its active rejection of many traditional forms. Acknowledged for his remarkable command of various poetic techniques, Baraka knew exactly what he was pushing against to create a new cultural expression of Blackness. (Brown and Baraka both rejected their original nominal forms by changing their names, an Adamic poetic act to be sure).
But Brown is, among so many other things, a formalist at heart. He deftly engages various poetic forms to disrupt them, to dislodge them from their traditions, and make them part of his own, renewed. The collection is studded with modified sonnets, both Shakespearean (“The Tradition,” “The Card Tables”) and Petrarchan (“The Water Lilies”) among them. Brown’s mastery of poetic form is never more dazzling, though, than in his invented duplex poems, which surely signal a distinctly new aesthetic. Weaving together elements of sonnet, pantoum and ghazal, Brown’s new form blends both Western and Eastern traditions into one that feels decidedly Southern in its colloquial tonality and blues-inspired, jazzlike variations.
The first of the duplex poems is a sort of ars poetica showing Brown’s desire for the work of poetry itself to return the poet to his origins. “A poem is a gesture toward home,” he opens with, even if that home offers the unsettling presence of the “Steadfast and awful, my tall father / Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.” The “sound...sound...sound” of the beatings and a mother’s weeping introduce a poetics to the violence, an effort to transform the abuse that transforms the victim:
Like the sound of a mother weeping again.
Like the sound of my mother weeping again.
No sound beating ends where it began.
None of the beaten end up how we began.
A poem is a gesture toward home.
Like the thin walls and shared doors defining most duplex structures, these poems put their lines into unexpected contact and dialogue, with echoes, overheard tones and (re)interpretations bringing each duplex back to its own beginning. The duplex form seems to be Brown’s illustrative application and advancement of Frost’s definition for the sound of sense: “The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.” Brown’s exceptional musicality and the physical feeling or sense of it are most evident in the duplex poems and prove Frost’s point plainly.
It seems clear Brown intends to work in the tradition of what has been considered the accepted canon of poetry, and to make room for himself and others in it. Black poets, Queer poets, inventive or experimental or disruptive poets: these are to be included among the major voices of American poetry. Brown has shown how repurposing accepted forms opens space to include who and what were once dismissed as unacceptable. Yes, poetry is a powerful, political act. It is a gesture toward the poet’s rightful poetic home.
Poetic genealogy and influence, though, are just the context for understanding what has perhaps most informed Brown’s approach to this collection. Biological and chosen family connections, dynamics and legacies shape much of his work in The Tradition. In his take on paiderastia, the culturally acceptable relationship between an older male and a younger male in Classical Greek society, Brown gives us “Ganymede,” a mythic retelling in which paternal abandonment is not a moral failing but a transactional necessity. “A man trades his son for horses. / That’s the version I prefer. I like / The safety of it, no one at fault, / Everyone rewarded”:
...When we look at myth
This way, nobody bothers saying
Rape. I mean, don’t you want God
To want you? Don’t you dream
Of someone with wings taking you
Up?
Opening his collection with “Ganymede,” Brown gives us an overture of sorts for the poems to come, which often address the complex, sometimes dangerous relationships and power dynamics between men: fathers and sons, masters and slaves, police and the men they murder, intimate partners. In Brown’s poems, various forms of violence – mythic, historic, familial, sexual – spread across these forceful relationships. “As a Human Being” follows “Ganymede,” and brings the mythic back down to the earthly personal, with retribution and release the goal: “...you’ve done what / You always wanted, you fought / Your father and won, marred him.” The poem concludes: “No matter how sore the injury / Has left you, you sit understanding / Yourself as a human being finally / Free now that nobody’s got to love you.”
And so it goes across the collection as Brown navigates the complicated boundaries between male power and desire, and the often brutal performance of both. A young speaker in “The Microscopes” decides to “stab someone I secretly loved: a bigger boy.” In “Layover,” the speaker details:
Near everyone
In Dallas is
Still driving
At 3:24 a.m.
Off I-20 where
I was raped
Though no one
Would call it
That he was
Hovering by
The time
I understood
He thought it necessary
To leave me with knowledge
I can be
Hated I was
Smaller then
Or, in the second of the duplex poems, Brown integrates references to “Ganymede,” “The Tradition” and “Layover,” attempting to contain his fury at how men, often presented across the collection as perennial flowers, recurring blooms or resilient new growth, can misunderstand, harm or cut each other down:
The opposite of rape is understanding
A field of flowers called paintbrushes—
...
Men roam that myth. In truth, one hurt me.
I want to obliterate the flowered field.
Brown takes control of these experiences of the body exposed to violence and pain, and reshapes them to be his own, to make them more meaningful. In doing so, he transforms the human body just as he modifies poetic form for his own purposes: he turns both into carefully constructed and intentional scenes that present as something new and deliver an unexpected revelation. As in his previous collection, The New Testament, Brown reveals sadomasochistic sexual power exchanges as complex or confused acts of affirmation. In “Night Shift” the speaker confesses:
When I am touched, brushed and measured, I think of myself
As a painting. The artist works no matter the lack of sleep. I am made
Beautiful....
...I’d oblige because he hurt me
With a violence I mistook for desire. I’d get left hanging
In one room of his dim house while he swept or folded laundry.
When you’ve been worked on for so long, you never know
You’re done. Paint dries. Midnight is many colors. Black and blue
Are only two. The man who tinted me best kept me looking a little
Like a chore. How do you say prepared
In French?
In another S/M recasting of Greek myth and the work of poetic forefathers, Brown presents the rape in Yeats’ sonnet “Leda and the Swan” as a misunderstood moment of luck and act of care in “Of the Swan.” The poem presents “Bared skin a landscape prepared / For use—”:
The luck of it: my ordinary body
Once under
A god. No night ends his
Care, how
He finishes a fixed field, how he
Hollows
A low tunnel. He released me
After.
For Brown, the body transformed by intentional, controlled or accepted pain is tantamount to the masterful formal transformations across the body of work in the collection. In this case, both bodies are Black bodies being worked over and altered. Breaking form can be powerful, violent and rewarding all at once. Every tradition has its evolving rituals.
The tour de force of the collection comes at its conclusion with “Duplex: Cento.” The cento form adds another layer, another influence, to Brown’s duplex. His borrowed and collaged lines come from across the collection itself, making this final poem a meta-poetic act of intertextual bricolage that itself produces a new mythic expression of the self. With The Tradition, Brown has reconstituted the Black self and started a poetic healing of the broken or damaging dynamics between men. He addresses the distressing paternal disconnection presented in “Ganymede” through his final poem: “My last love drove a burgundy car.... // Steadfast and awful, my tall father / Was my first love. He drove a burgundy car.”
With “Duplex: Cento,” and indeed the entirety of The Tradition from which is it drawn, Brown has answered Mari Evans’ call in I Am a Black Woman to “bring me a whole person.” In this case, the whole person is a Black man reassembled and restored from bits of male myth, history and lived experience. That whole person, that Jericho Brown, brings us to the moment of deliverance “When black vocabulary heralds home- / made belief,” where he keeps “trying to be a sound, something / You will remember / Once you’ve lived long enough not to believe in heaven.”
We will remember the sound of Jericho Brown. With his extraordinary poems and new forms, we might learn to heal our own damaged histories and selves, to make our own new myths, and to bring our whole person to the world. If we do, “we will have us twice as much / of love and everything.” When we finally have that, as Brown declares in “I Know What I Love,” we will want for only the moving, transformative connection that “anyone / With an ear wants— / To be touched and / Touched by a presence / That has no hands.” Jericho Brown’s The Tradition is that presence.
Patrick Davis is a poet and essayist. His work has previously appeared in Provincetown Arts, and he has ghost-written five books for major publishing houses. He conducted his graduate research in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis under the mentorship of William H. Gass. He and his husband live in Atlanta with a bulldog named Ox.