“A Poem Is a Gesture toward Home”: Formal Plurality and Black/Queer Critical Hope in Jericho Brown’s Duplex Form

Abstract

Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, includes four duplexes, a poetic form of Brown’s own invention that combines the sonnet and the blues. Made of fourteen lines separated into seven couplets, the duplex is a complex structure comprised of sets of indents and repeated lines. Brown’s use of disparate source forms to create a new form altogether challenges the supremacy of a singular, white American literary tradition, putting it into conversation with other traditions in order to critique its historically racist and heterosexist boundaries. As he does so, Brown works not to abolish “the tradition” or canon but to expand it beyond reductive ideas of who and what is allowed into this historically exclusive space. The complexity of Brown’s formal project mirrors the nuanced and critical hope the duplex form expresses and evokes in readers; in contrast to queer theory’s focus on negativity, Brown’s duplexes align with the work of José Muñoz and Mari Ruti, who assert that hope is equally as important as negativity. The duplex form holds the positive and negative together in both form and content, and seeks to expand emotional experience and the canon, ultimately attempting to change the way readers feel and act.