The Tradition by Jericho Brown

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Tradition by Jericho Brown Jordan Charlton (bio) Jericho Brown. The Tradition. Copper Canyon Press. In one of the most anticipated books of poetry this year, Jericho Brown returns to his typical prowess in his third full-length collection, The Tradition, published by Copper Canyon Press. Brown, an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University, is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award, an American Book Award for his first collection, Please (New Issues, 2008), and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014). Brown’s poems have a history of focusing on the intimate and erotic aspects of life, the spaces that typically evade public discussion. In The Tradition, Brown once again shows the importance of permeating these spaces for exploration and creative expression. In this collection, Brown creates a personal and public space for the speaker and the reader, a garden, a shapeshifting space that is at times a metaphor for the speaker’s imagination, like in “Foreday in the Morning” (14), [End Page 201] where the speaker contemplates the expanse of the observable world. At other times, the garden seems to be a literal space, like in “The Trees” where the reader is invited in the speaker’s front yard to observe (“In my front yard live three crape myrtles, crying trees / We once called them, not the shadiest but soothing”). One major preoccupation for the poet in this collection is the idea of legacy, which might be the inspiration for the title. Lyrically, this collection features an attentiveness to blackness, masculinity, and their unfortunate relationship with harm, and additionally the ways that many Black Americans, regardless of gender, have been damaged and have had their tenderness and virtue lost or especially taken away from them. More than anything, this collection is one that is a celebration of black beauty and authenticity throughout. Like in a poem such as “The Legend of Big and Fine” (33), where the poet writes: Long ago, we used two wordsFor the worth of a house, a car,Awoman—all the same to menWho claimed them: thingsTo be entered, each to suffer A reader of this book is welcomed into the space the poet invites them to, into the celebration that is very much centered around black identity, like in the poem “Monotheism” (57), where Brown writes “Some people need religion. Me? / I’ve got my long black hair.” or in “A Young Man” (24), where he writes “We stand together on our block, me and my son / Neighbors saying our face is the same, but I know / He’s better than me: when other children move”. What Brown maneuvers toward consistently in this collection is the beauty he finds in his identity and hopes to make a consistent aspect of the black experience. This collection certainly gives an honest look at the ways Black Americans have been mistreated. However, it also does a considerable work to redefine the misunderstandings of a complicated history, riddled with persecution. Brown does not hesitate to engage directly with this country’s history with white supremacy in poems like “Good White People” (29), “Dear Whiteness” (40), or “After Avery R. Young” (22). This is most true in a poem like “Bullet Points” (16), where Brown takes on the subject of the unjust murders of African Americans. In terms of its craft, one of the most notable features of this collection is the poets’ creation of a new form, what he has called the “duplex.” Poems titled “Duplex” make several appearances in The Tradition and serve as an underlying narrative thread for the collection. The duplex is described as “a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues”, and show the inventiveness of a poet in the peak of their career, not satisfied with just producing high quality prosody, but inventing it as well. Jordan Charlton Jordan Charlton is an ma student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a focus...