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spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘I begin with love, hoping to end there,’ writes Jericho Brown in his marvelous, Pulitzer Prize winning collection The Tradition, ‘I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.’ The task of a poet is often to take in the world and transform the truths into art, a harrowing task when there seems to be a shadow of violence devouring the horizon. Jericho Brown, who is arguably one of the most important voices in poetry today, takes an imploring look into violence, from the personal to the cultural and political, and renders it into unflinching prose that dances to an introspective beat of resilience. There is an urgency to the work that warns against the normalization of the violence, brutality, and racism addressed within the book. In an interview with Michael Dumanis for the Bennington Review Brown discusses how the book is not only a warning against evil but also ‘the ways in which we are all complicit in many of these situations, however reluctant we may be to admit it.’ Brown gives us powerful perspectives on the evils in the world and asks us to not wash our hands of responsibility and allow evil to be normalized but to stand in defiance against it. A harrowing and necessary collection, what resonates from The Tradition is a clear precision of emotions across a wide-range of subjects and the poet’s voice as something approaching holy as he guides us through the horrors of the modern day with a steadfast belief that, if we can come from a place of love, there can be hope.
I am not a narrative
Form, but dammit if I don’t tell a story.
This collection is quite the important journey through modern day society told through a vulnerable honesty that will make you swoon even in the bleakest moments. Divided into three sections, The Tradition moves the reader across three different forms of identity in the world. As he examines in an interview with Beth Golay for NPR, the first section deals with domesticity and community, the ‘second section has much more to do with the world, the way capitalism oppresses us, real and figurative rape.’ The final third of the book ‘looks at an individual and some of the instances of that individual's life — ultimately of my life.’ While much of the work deals with difficult and violent subject matter, there is a sense of hope and ‘by the end of the book, what I hope I do is that I end in a note of celebration and in praise.’ The use of language is stunning, with complex metaphors, greek mythology and a strong sense of musicality in tight and tidy structures. These are poems that look so crisp on paper you practically hear the crunch of an apple when you bite in. Brown has a distinctly beautiful prose style that incorporates elements of the blues, pays homage to traditional forms while forging in bold new directions that are ripe for a graduate thesis paper to truly examine for all their wonders.
Perhaps most notable is his use of the Duplex, a form invented by Brown. The Duplex is what Brown terms as a bit of a “mutt” form. In his Invention, he says ‘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?’ The answer was the Duplex, a 14 line creation part sonnet, part pantoum, part ghazal and a healthy rhythm of the blues. Interested yet? He even graciously provides a prompt for creating one:
I love a man I know could die
And not by way of illness
And not by his own hand
But because of the color of that hand and all
His flawless skin…
In The Tradition, violence is examined from all angles. ‘I am a they in most of America’, Brown writes, ‘...lost in a forest / of we’. In a nation with a strong Us vs Them mentality, being a ‘they’ tends to mean anything outside a social power structure that places white, heteronormative patriarchy at the top, a social power structure that eagerly weaponizes fear and normalizes violence to oppress anyone perceived as the “they”. What is truly powerful in The Tradition is the ways Brown examines the intersections of marginalization, from being black in a world dominated by violent whiteness to being gay in a world still blind in hate towards anything outside of heteronormativity. ‘Blk is not a country, but I live there’, Brown writes, perfectly capturing the way blackness is both a beautiful identity to be a part of, but also looked at as a foreign country to direct aggression toward by a white society. The sonnet from which the collection takes its name is perhaps the best demonstration of the collection as a whole with regards to this idea:
Philosopher [a:Hannah Arendt|12806|Hannah Arendt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1608634661p2/12806.jpg] spoke against the ‘banality of evil’, something very much present in the evils examined within this work. Arendt warned that evil is perpetuated by the complicity of those who stand by, who just follow orders, who wash their hands of responsibility and allow it to continue. She wrote how totalitarianism, bureaucracy and all evil institutions ‘functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them’--we normalize violence when we act as if it is just part of life and happening outside ourselves. Perhaps a person does not think of themselves as evil but, as [a:Plato|879|Plato|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651532170p2/879.jpg] warns ‘The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.’. Brown looks at the way this works in our modern life, and says to Michael Dumanis that ‘The Tradition is ultimately about evil and the normalization of evil. I was thinking about the ways we are complicit in the same evils, the ways I am complicit.’ We cannot be witness to this world and simply continue on as normal, we have to stop perpetuating violence by being complicit in the banality of evil. ‘no such thing as good white people,’ Brown concludes at the end of the poem ‘Good White People’, a powerful line we must take to heart. Whiteness itself becomes an identity rooted in racial oppression and even the ideas of ‘good white people’ tends most often to be mere signalling and posturing. It is not enough to not be racist, but one must be anti-racist. This also means having difficult conversations with yourself and acknowledging implicit biases. Nobody can ever be perfect, but flaws are a point for growth if we meet confrontation with a mind to listen, learn and grow instead of argument and defensiveness. The world is bigger than the self and the ego, and we must recognize this because, as [a:Claudia Rankine|157979|Claudia Rankine|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1198758892p2/157979.jpg] writes in Citizen: An American Lyric, ‘because white men can't police their imaginations, black men are dying’.
Moving from the domestic, the national to the personal, Brown looks at the ways we have allowed violence to be normalized in society. There are discussions on police brutality, particularly those directed at the black community, such as when Brown imagines a death at the hands of the police:
Scared to see a movie
All the way through
I don’t have kids
Cuz I’d have to send them to school
My body is a temple in disrepair
The opposite of rape is understanding
This is what makes The Tradition so unbelievably urgent and authentic--it mixes and juxtaposes all the social, personal and political levels of daily life into a poem. It is a successful achievement of what Brown himself says he looks for in poetry:
I’m more than a conqueror, bigger
Than bravery. I don’t march. I’m the one who leaps.
The Tradition is a masterful work that continues to cement Jericho Brown’s place as an essential voice in our world today. The prose flows into you like a strong beat that you can’t help but dance to, and the messages it brings are urgent and necessary. The first step to recovery, they say, is admitting you have a problem. On a social level, this requires admitting that you are inherently complicit in the problems and recognizing the ways this allows evil to grow. This becomes a message of love, of growth, of hope that--despite the deep looks into violence throughout the book--are the shining light that emits from The Tradition. We must all learn to listen, to empathize, to recognize and grow. This will easily be one of the most important books from 2019 and I can’t recommend it more highly.
5/5
In the dream where I am an island,
I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.
I am not a narrative
Form, but dammit if I don’t tell a story.
This collection is quite the important journey through modern day society told through a vulnerable honesty that will make you swoon even in the bleakest moments. Divided into three sections, The Tradition moves the reader across three different forms of identity in the world. As he examines in an interview with Beth Golay for NPR, the first section deals with domesticity and community, the ‘second section has much more to do with the world, the way capitalism oppresses us, real and figurative rape.’ The final third of the book ‘looks at an individual and some of the instances of that individual's life — ultimately of my life.’ While much of the work deals with difficult and violent subject matter, there is a sense of hope and ‘by the end of the book, what I hope I do is that I end in a note of celebration and in praise.’ The use of language is stunning, with complex metaphors, greek mythology and a strong sense of musicality in tight and tidy structures. These are poems that look so crisp on paper you practically hear the crunch of an apple when you bite in. Brown has a distinctly beautiful prose style that incorporates elements of the blues, pays homage to traditional forms while forging in bold new directions that are ripe for a graduate thesis paper to truly examine for all their wonders.
Perhaps most notable is his use of the Duplex, a form invented by Brown. The Duplex is what Brown terms as a bit of a “mutt” form. In his Invention, he says ‘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?’ The answer was the Duplex, a 14 line creation part sonnet, part pantoum, part ghazal and a healthy rhythm of the blues. Interested yet? He even graciously provides a prompt for creating one:
Here are the boundaries:The delivery is astonishing, with the poem constantly building yet simultaneously returning to itself like an M.C. Escher of prose that brings you full circle while reaching out all the while. If Brown is anything, it is precise, and while the Duplex feels very controlled there is also an inherent freedom blossoming within.
Write a ghazal that is also a sonnet that is also a blues poem of 14 lines, giving each line 9 to 11 syllables.
The first line is echoed in the last line.
The second line of the poem should change our impression of the first line in an unexpected way.
The second line is echoed and becomes the third line.
The fourth line of the poem should change our impression of the third line in an unexpected way.
This continues until the penultimate line becomes the first line of the couplet that leads to the final (and first) line.
For the variations of repeated lines, it is useful to think of the a a’ b scheme of the blues form.
I love a man I know could die
And not by way of illness
And not by his own hand
But because of the color of that hand and all
His flawless skin…
In The Tradition, violence is examined from all angles. ‘I am a they in most of America’, Brown writes, ‘...lost in a forest / of we’. In a nation with a strong Us vs Them mentality, being a ‘they’ tends to mean anything outside a social power structure that places white, heteronormative patriarchy at the top, a social power structure that eagerly weaponizes fear and normalizes violence to oppress anyone perceived as the “they”. What is truly powerful in The Tradition is the ways Brown examines the intersections of marginalization, from being black in a world dominated by violent whiteness to being gay in a world still blind in hate towards anything outside of heteronormativity. ‘Blk is not a country, but I live there’, Brown writes, perfectly capturing the way blackness is both a beautiful identity to be a part of, but also looked at as a foreign country to direct aggression toward by a white society. The sonnet from which the collection takes its name is perhaps the best demonstration of the collection as a whole with regards to this idea:
"The Tradition"Expect to find this poem anthologized in the coming years. Blackness as a flower is one of the many ways Brown plays with the concept of blackness, juxtaposing it across the collection in ways that examine the identity as well as the connotations with death. 'Gratitude is black--' he write, 'Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. / Thank God. It can't get much darker than that.' This also brings up the notion of people as disposable to powers that be, particularly disposable if a person is a 'they'. It really can't get much darker than that.
Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought
Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning
Names in heat, in elements classical
Philosophers said could change us. Star Gazer.
Foxglove. Summer seemed to bloom against the will
Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter
On this planet than when our dead fathers
Wiped sweat from their necks. Cosmos. Baby’s Breath.
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we
Planted for proof we existed before
Too late, sped the video to see blossoms
Brought in seconds, colors you expect in poems
Where the world ends, everything cut down.
John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.
Philosopher [a:Hannah Arendt|12806|Hannah Arendt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1608634661p2/12806.jpg] spoke against the ‘banality of evil’, something very much present in the evils examined within this work. Arendt warned that evil is perpetuated by the complicity of those who stand by, who just follow orders, who wash their hands of responsibility and allow it to continue. She wrote how totalitarianism, bureaucracy and all evil institutions ‘functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them’--we normalize violence when we act as if it is just part of life and happening outside ourselves. Perhaps a person does not think of themselves as evil but, as [a:Plato|879|Plato|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651532170p2/879.jpg] warns ‘The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.’. Brown looks at the way this works in our modern life, and says to Michael Dumanis that ‘The Tradition is ultimately about evil and the normalization of evil. I was thinking about the ways we are complicit in the same evils, the ways I am complicit.’ We cannot be witness to this world and simply continue on as normal, we have to stop perpetuating violence by being complicit in the banality of evil. ‘no such thing as good white people,’ Brown concludes at the end of the poem ‘Good White People’, a powerful line we must take to heart. Whiteness itself becomes an identity rooted in racial oppression and even the ideas of ‘good white people’ tends most often to be mere signalling and posturing. It is not enough to not be racist, but one must be anti-racist. This also means having difficult conversations with yourself and acknowledging implicit biases. Nobody can ever be perfect, but flaws are a point for growth if we meet confrontation with a mind to listen, learn and grow instead of argument and defensiveness. The world is bigger than the self and the ego, and we must recognize this because, as [a:Claudia Rankine|157979|Claudia Rankine|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1198758892p2/157979.jpg] writes in Citizen: An American Lyric, ‘because white men can't police their imaginations, black men are dying’.
Moving from the domestic, the national to the personal, Brown looks at the ways we have allowed violence to be normalized in society. There are discussions on police brutality, particularly those directed at the black community, such as when Brown imagines a death at the hands of the police:
He tookHave police killings become so normal that we just shrug it off? Are the frequency of them leaving people to spend so much time protesting the specific officer in the incident--who are far too often let off--instead of the systemic issues that are leading to violence? Violence seems around every corner and we all seem to proceed with gallows humor, normalizing it in our music, our films, our daily lives:
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we’ve been taught,
Greater than the settlement
A city can pay a mother to stop crying,
And more beautiful than the new bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain
Scared to see a movie
All the way through
I got to scream each scene’Entertainment Industry’ takes a probing look into the way violence has been normalized for profit in many industries, and how it often relies on stereotypical representations that further stigmas of marginalized communities. The idea that a gunshot on screen resonates so powerfully because being packed into a movie theater is willingly placing yourself in conditions ripe for a mass shooting is absolutely horrific, yet we live with this truth every day. A few stanzas later he addresses the way gun violence is now normalized as a common event in children’s schools:
Duck and get down
Mass shooting blues
I don’t have kids
Cuz I’d have to send them to school
Aint’ that safe as anyWe live in a society where resisting systemic violence is met with powerful institutions that value profit over people and have financial incentives to perpetuate the normalization, and then take the vulnerable-minded and propagate them until they do the defending of violence for them. Look at any facebook argument and you’ll see someone raging against their own self-interest to defend gun profits or racist institutions because they have been weaponized by their oppressors. Think of how often we allow ‘ a violence I mistook for desire’ into our lives, from personal injury to national injury. This is a society that has slaughtered in order to build itself on the bones of the dead. ‘Riddle’ addresses how we only value what society has determined is valued for it’s own profitable growth and perpetuates itself by responding with violence to anyone who they deem is out of line:
Plan for parenthood
Mass shooting blues
We love land soWe have allowed ourselves to be marketed into a corner, and this daily life we bemoan in opinion pieces is of our own making. The banality of evil has crept in and our silence allows it to continue.
Long as we can take it. Shhh. We
Can’t take that sound. What is
A mother wailing? We do not
Recognize music until we can
Sell it. We sell what cannot be
Bought. We buy silence…
My body is a temple in disrepair
The opposite of rape is understanding
This is what makes The Tradition so unbelievably urgent and authentic--it mixes and juxtaposes all the social, personal and political levels of daily life into a poem. It is a successful achievement of what Brown himself says he looks for in poetry:
’So no matter the race of the poet, I’m much more interested in a poem that is like the life we live. I want the poem that is like, “I saw that people got shot at the synagogue today, and I had a sandwich, and I miss my daughter.” And in actuality, that’s what a day in our life looks like, and the poem has to carry the tones of all those emotions.’If recognizing that this is now our lives isn’t a cry to stand up, speak out and move with purpose and action, I don’t know what is. [a:Audre Lorde|18486|Audre Lorde|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1613651890p2/18486.jpg] once wrote that ‘silence will not protect you’, and no truer statement can be said today. When we see violence, our silence might seem like a good way of keeping the peace with family and friends, or keeping the aim of oppressors away from you, but it is allowing that evil the space to grow. ‘Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it,’ warned [a:Simone Weil|18395|Simone Weil|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1318043623p2/18395.jpg], and The Tradition echos this cry. We need action and Jericho Brown shows us the two inevitable options left: ‘Peace on this planet / Or guns glowing hot’
I’m more than a conqueror, bigger
Than bravery. I don’t march. I’m the one who leaps.
The Tradition is a masterful work that continues to cement Jericho Brown’s place as an essential voice in our world today. The prose flows into you like a strong beat that you can’t help but dance to, and the messages it brings are urgent and necessary. The first step to recovery, they say, is admitting you have a problem. On a social level, this requires admitting that you are inherently complicit in the problems and recognizing the ways this allows evil to grow. This becomes a message of love, of growth, of hope that--despite the deep looks into violence throughout the book--are the shining light that emits from The Tradition. We must all learn to listen, to empathize, to recognize and grow. This will easily be one of the most important books from 2019 and I can’t recommend it more highly.
5/5
In the dream where I am an island,
I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.
riveraanahiz's review against another edition
5.0
I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of poems. Brown writes beautifully and comments on various hard-hitting topics such as rape, homosexuality, and race and police brutality - all of which are based on his own life experiences. He also discusses various relationships in his life: mother and son (him), father (him) and son, lovers, and infidelity.
His use of repetition, rhyme, line breaks, alliteration, and allusions were all very well done in my opinion. Each poem, however long or short, told its own story. It is clear to see why this book won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.
His use of repetition, rhyme, line breaks, alliteration, and allusions were all very well done in my opinion. Each poem, however long or short, told its own story. It is clear to see why this book won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize.
hauntedhexgirll's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
3.5
This collection covers very important topics and has a lot of good moments and lines in it and I think it’s very good work, some of it was just not my style of poetry so some of it felt a bit off to me.
mineral9's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
therkive's review against another edition
5.0
Each poem had a striking line -- on love, on survival, on complacency, on growth -- and for that reason alone, I could not put the collection down.
trnolan's review against another edition
3.0
Different, unique and not the type of book I would normally pick up. Read as part of Philadelphia's One Book program and am excited to take part in some author events to get a better understanding of Brown.
jakekilroy's review against another edition
4.0
This collection carries with it the human experience, ranging from daydreams of love to bursts of violence. It reads thoughtful and pensive even when it comes impulsive and menacing. It paints a life, lyrically and blessedly, cherishing the social bestowments he so wonderfully enjoys, while putting weight and dissection to the magnificence and hardship of a gay black existence—and readily and heartily facing the historical manufacturing of looming white legacy and what arms of dominance that shall mean. At each step of every poem, it's abundantly clear that Brown knows what he’s doing, a balancing act that he's been training for, only seeming effortless because he's done the work—a wonder.