Duplex by Jericho Brown
- marychristinedelea
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Duplex
by Jericho Brown
A poem is a gesture toward home.
It makes dark demands I call my own.
Memory makes demands darker than my own:
My last love drove a burgundy car.
My first love drove a burgundy car.
He was fast and awful, tall as my father.
Steadfast and awful, my tall father
Hit hard as a hailstorm. He’d leave marks.
Light rain hits easy but leaves its own mark
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.
"A poem is a gesture toward home" is such a powerful idea/statement, never mind a poem's first line. The implications could fill a dissertation.
You will immediately notice a few things when reading this poem: 14 lines, repetition, asimilar number of syllables in each line, and couplets. All of this is deliberate.
The poet, Jericho Brown, invented this form. It is a combination of a sonnet, a blues song, and a ghazal, and a pantoum. Here are the rules:
14 lines in 7 couplets
9-11 syllables per line
the 2nd line of each couplet is the basis of the next couplet's 1st line
the poem's 1st line is echoed in the poem's last line
each even numbered line (the ones that echo) "should change our impression of the (echoed) line in an unexpected way." --The Poetry Foundation
Even with only those first 4 rules, this is a tricky form. That last rule, however, makes it a great challenge and is completely necessary--without it, the poet is just saying the same thing over and over in 14 lines.
Also from The Poetry Foundation's website: “I decided to call the form a duplex because something about its repetition and its couplets made me feel like it was a house with two addresses. It is, indeed, a mutt of a form as so many of us in this nation are only now empowered to live fully in all of our identities.”--Jericho Brown
We know in the first stanza that the speaker will be facing some grim events from his past, and that this poem is an attempt to face those things he would rather try and forget.
Lines 4 and 5 . . . is the speaker saying those are the same man? He has not been in love with anyone else? Or that first love is still in his life? Since the speaker calls the man "awful" in line 6, I hope he is in the past.
Line 6 is also where we meet the father--line 5's "fast" becomes "steadfast," which I love. Line 8 gives us a simile:
hit hard as a hailstorm. He'd leave marks.
The introduction of hail leads to rain and that brings us to the speaker's crying mother. In just 5 lines we get a very clear picture of the speaker's home and his memory's dark demands. We can also play Psych 101 and surmise that an abusive father would, of course, lead to the speaker's first romance being abusive; maybe it was not physically abusive, but we were told that man was "awful."
Line 10 is something every abused person/people who work with/know abused people knows: the trauma of beatings and abuse continue long after the abuse ends. Line 11 continues with more hard truth--abused people are not the same before and after being abused.
The poem's last line repeats verbatim the poem's first, and it creates the truth of line 11 in itself--this line has a different meaning now, at the end of this poem, than it did at the start. It is an absolutely brilliant ending.
This poem was published in Jericho Brown's 2019 book, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press).
All poetry forms were invented by someone, and they all provide a challenge. In my own writing, I often revise unruly and wordy poems into a form, as that form helps me condense and contain and choose my words more carefully.
Here are some links to other modern poetry forms, starting with one of my own!
poem and explanation
poem
explanation
poem
explanation
fun and interesting story about the form Billy Collins "discovered"
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