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Michael
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Subverting the Tradition in The Tradition:
Jericho Brown’s Reconceptualization of the Sonnet
Jericho Brown’s Reconceptualization of the Sonnet
In discussing the process of writing his Pulitzer prize-winning collection The Tradition on the Poetry Foundation blog, Jericho Brown said he spent years thinking of ways of “gutting” the sonnet: “What does a sonnet have to do with anybody’s content? What is a Jericho Brown sonnet? I wanted a form that in my head was black and queer and Southern. Since I am carrying these truths in this body as one, how do I get a form that is many forms?”
This talk considers the effects of the structural decisions and innovations Brown has employed in writing out of the sonnet tradition as a means of subverting and repurposing the poetic form previously most synonymous with Western and white hegemony into a site for interrogating black, queer, and Southern experience. Particularly close attention will be paid to the composition of The Tradition’s title poem, published one year after the police killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which juxtaposes the sonnet tradition with the traditional exploitation and disenfranchisement of black men in American life, and only fully reveals itself as a sonnet in its abruptly rhyming final couplet (“…where the world ends, everything cut down./John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown”).
The talk also considers Brown’s tendency to reconceptualize the sonnet as a poem in seven discrete couplets. and address the innovative schemes of his sonnets “The Card Tables,” “The Water Lillies,” and “Independence,” a recent uncollected sonnet where twelve of the fourteen lines repeat the declaration, “I am not your Thomas Jefferson.”
The discussion concludes with Brown’s invention in The Tradition of the “duplex,” a fourteen line polyphonic poem of repeating lines that combines elements of the sonnet form with elements of the blues poem and the ghazal. Is the duplex a new contemporary type of sonnet? What are the political and cultural implications of this structural innovation, as well as of the name Brown has given to this new sonnet scheme?
This talk considers the effects of the structural decisions and innovations Brown has employed in writing out of the sonnet tradition as a means of subverting and repurposing the poetic form previously most synonymous with Western and white hegemony into a site for interrogating black, queer, and Southern experience. Particularly close attention will be paid to the composition of The Tradition’s title poem, published one year after the police killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which juxtaposes the sonnet tradition with the traditional exploitation and disenfranchisement of black men in American life, and only fully reveals itself as a sonnet in its abruptly rhyming final couplet (“…where the world ends, everything cut down./John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown”).
The talk also considers Brown’s tendency to reconceptualize the sonnet as a poem in seven discrete couplets. and address the innovative schemes of his sonnets “The Card Tables,” “The Water Lillies,” and “Independence,” a recent uncollected sonnet where twelve of the fourteen lines repeat the declaration, “I am not your Thomas Jefferson.”
The discussion concludes with Brown’s invention in The Tradition of the “duplex,” a fourteen line polyphonic poem of repeating lines that combines elements of the sonnet form with elements of the blues poem and the ghazal. Is the duplex a new contemporary type of sonnet? What are the political and cultural implications of this structural innovation, as well as of the name Brown has given to this new sonnet scheme?
Michael Dumanis is the author of My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and coeditor of Legitimate Dangers: American Poems of the New Century (Sarabande). He teaches literature and creative writing at Bennington College, and serves as editor of Bennington Review.