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Jericho Brown’s “Duplex”

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This morning I began reading a poetry book of 140 pages or so, and, about halfway through, decided to give myself two days. Reading all the poems is one thing, but rereading, thumbing back through, making notes, reflecting—those take a little more time.

Rather than skip a day, I’m offering an example of Jericho Brown’s invented form, “the duplex.” It’s been called a combination of sonnet (notice the 14 lines), ghazal, and the blues, but I see in it also the repetitive elements of pantoum and villanelle. Whatever it is, Brown includes several in The Tradition, and in journals I’ve come across other poets trying out the form.

Duplex

I begin with love, hoping to end there.
I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.

 I don’t want to leave a messy corpse
Full of medicines that turn in the sun.

Some of my medicines turn in the sun.
Some of us don’t need hell to be good.

Those who need most, need hell to be good.
What are the symptoms of your sickness?

Here is one symptom of my sickness:
Men who love 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.

                                —Jericho Brown

Okay, I’m officially frustrated. I can’t get every other couplet to indent, the way they’re supposed to. Here’s a picture of a page:

While looking for a new photograph, I discovered that my favorite podcast, On Being, has several poems recorded by Jericho Brown.

Jericho Brown, The Tradition

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THE TRADITION, Jericho Brown. Copper Canyon Press, PO Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368, 2019, 80 pages, $17.00 paper, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, The Tradition is about terrorism and love. It sounds like an unlikely marriage, but Brown makes it work. “Jericho Brown is a poet of eros,” the back cover material proclaims, and—rightly—that he “wields this power…touching the very heart of our cultural crisis.” It’s a moving, painful book. A book of witness. I came to it expecting confrontation. It doesn’t disappoint.

Correspondence

            after The Jerome Project by Titus Kaphar
(oil, gold leaf, and tar on wood panels;
7” X 10 ½“ each)

I am writing to you from the other side
Of my body where I have never been
Shot and no one’s ever cut me.
I had to go back this far in order
To present myself as a whole being
You’d heed and believe in. You can trust me
When I am young. You can know more
When you move your hands over a child,
Swift and without the interruptions
We associate with penetration.
The young are hard for you
To kill. May be harder still to hear a kid cry
Without looking for a sweet
To slip into his mouth. Won’t you hold him?
Won’t you coo toward the years before my story
Is all the fault of our imaginations?
We can make me
Better if you like: write back. Or take the trip.
I’ve dressed my wounds with tar
And straightened a place for you
On the cold side of this twin bed.

—Jericho Brown

In “Second Language,” Brown digs “Behind photographs” of ancestors and beneath the meaning of words. “In that part / Of the country, a knot / Is something you get / After getting knocked  / Down,” and “story means / Lie.” In “Bullet Points” and “Stake,” the reader is cautioned not to believe cultural stories about the speaker: “Someone planted / an idea of me. A lie.”

“A poem is a gesture toward home,” Brown writes in one of his “Duplex” poems (a form he created). In these poems home may be a necessary destination, but it isn’t an easy place to be.

You can find poems, videos, and commentary by and about Jericho Brown all over the web, but you might start by clicking, here.

Margaret Gibson: Not Hearing the Wood Thrush

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NOT HEARING THE WOOD THRUSH, Margaret Gibson. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2018, 80 pages, $18.95 paper, https://lsupress.org.

Today I have about a million things to do, but I’m glad the day began with this book. It was like having an hour of quietude, a meditative retreat from busy-ness. Rather than engaging with a world of objects—as so many poets do so well—these poems come at life from a different place, creating almost another world. It’s been a while since I read her Broken Cup, but I believe this book differs even from Gibson’s own earlier work. I like the way the LSU site describes it:

“I look about and find whatever I see / unfinished,” Margaret Gibson writes in these powerful and moving poems, which investigate a late-life genesis. Not Hearing the Wood Thrush grapples with the existential questions that come after experiencing a great personal loss. A number of poems meditate on loneliness and fear; others speak to “No one”—a name richer than prayer or vow.” In this transformative new collection [her thirteenth book], Gibson moves inward, taking surprising, mercurial turns of the imagination, guided by an original and probative intelligence. With a clear eye and an open heart, Gibson writes, “How stark it is to be alive”—and also how glorious, how curious, how intimate.

So, before I rush off (again) to my errands, here is one poem.

The Cry

No longer any wish to give a name
to the one vine
that unfurls its many blooms
continually beside the door,
and whose tendrils
brush lightly at my sleeves,
coming and going. Sorrow daily
changes to wonder, and a cry—
windswept, and yet
particular as the click of a stone
footfall dislodges—
moves throughout space and time.
No hinge or heart-latch to it.
Unsought, it comes to you.
Unbinds and scours.
A residue of all that has been stored
as if in large clay jars
in the inner sanctum of a tomb. And it is
entirely and only what you are. A cry.

—Margaret Gibson

This is a gorgeous poem to read aloud, or for the “mouthfeel,” as some say. I love the line, “No hinge or heart-latch,” and the cascading sounds of “Unsought, unbinds, scours, residue, stored” that fall on the more solid syllables of “large clay jars.”

To learn more about Gibson, visit her webpage.

SETH, A Black Odyssey

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A BLACK ODYSSEY: COLLECTED POEMS, SETH. Mercury HeartLink, Albuquerque, NM, 2012, 108 pages, $15 paper, www.heartlink.com.

Gregory Seth Harris, the poet better known as SETH, has been attending the Chuckanut Sandstone Writers Theatre on

Cover art by Rein Whitt-Pritchette

Zoom for the last several months. He is now here in person, having trekked to the Pacific Northwest from Denver, Colorado, where he is a well known performance artist. I had the privilege of driving him to west Seattle’s C & P Coffee Company Wednesday evening for Poetry Bridge and a book-launch with featured reader and local poetry raconteur, Paul E. Nelson (more about him in a later post). We then took part in their first in-person “community mike”  in two years.

On Friday evening, April 15, he is the featured reader at Book Tree in Kirkland. (Click on the link to learn more.)

On April 23 he is giving a workshop on performance in Bellingham. (See the poster below.)

On the back cover, David J. Rothman calls SETH “a force of nature.” Art Goodtimes: “always an experimenter willing to push the cultural boundaries, happy to take the Apollonian crowd on tour…”  “Homer would clap,” is how Rosemary Wahtola Trommer chooses to begin her cover blurb, but so, I think, would Whitman. These poems are raucous with imagery and a wild, sometimes shocking, always entertaining excess. In the Acknowledgments, SETH explains the ordering of the book:

I have a reputation for taking risks. Truth is, I just don’t know any better. Ostensibly, this collection is my attempt to cram 30 years of poetry into one volume. Not wishing to publish them in chronological order, group them according to time period or by style and content, I opted to arrange them according to my favorite epic tale. Why not? Odysseus is my favorite literary hero. Many of my poems reference some aspect of his journey. Plus, his trials and triumphs have often served as a beacon to several of my own struggles, lighting a clear path during periods of uncertainty. (ix)

In the first poem, “A Poet Petitions His Muse,” that epic journey launches — almost “everyman” (or “every writer”) but with an insistence on this poet, specifically: “that blank page / a smooth flat placid white man / of a face / glowering up at me / eyes narrowed, mouth clamped shut / black dash / thin as an eyelash.”

From the section titled “A Gathering of Shades”:

Sometimes Up

Sometimes up is underground
On a subterranean verandah; new sound
Percolating new language; half mantra, half howl
When iambic pentameter has reached its limit
And a bloody continent eclipses the spastic sky
Where the sun wears false eyelashes
And every dandelion becomes a critic
When Humpty Dumpty is tumblin’ down
Sometimes up is underground

So when the heart’s voltage assumes fetal position
And the flies in your mustard crack a wan smile
Consult the long-haired spiders chewing cobwebs
Dance with roaches, chat with Frankenstein
Don’t let that cat in your tree fade with a frown
Get your soggy soul down under
Cause sometimes up is underground.

— SETH

You can learn more at https://www.wagingart.com.