Jericho Brown
Quick answer: Jericho Brown craft guide: how the duplex form works, what The Tradition teaches about repetition and myth, and how to write your own duplex poem.
Inventing a form is the rarest achievement in poetry, and Jericho Brown did it in plain sight. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1976, Brown won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for The Tradition, the collection that introduced the duplex: a fourteen-line poem built from couplets whose lines echo forward, part sonnet, part ghazal, part blues. The form has already been adopted by classrooms and journals across the English-speaking world.
Brown's work fuses subjects that polite poetry keeps separate: religious language and desire, the pastoral and racist violence, tenderness and threat. His books argue that beauty is not a refuge from history but a way of surviving it, and his craft, musical, repetitive, mythically charged, gives working poets tools they can actually pick up.
From gospel cadence to Pulitzer
Brown grew up in Louisiana church culture, worked as a speechwriter for the mayor of New Orleans, and brought both trainings, sacred cadence and public rhetoric, into his poems. His debut Please, from 2008, won an American Book Award and used music, radio and Diana Ross as frames for desire and family violence. The New Testament, from 2014, pushed the religious register further, rewriting scripture-shaped language around illness, race and love between men.
The Tradition, from 2019, gathered all of it. Its title poem plants murdered Black men among the names of flowers, and its duplexes demonstrated the new form's range: love poem, elegy, testimony. Brown directs the creative writing programme at Emory University, and his teaching voice, exacting about the line, audible in every interview, is worth seeking out.
The signature moves
Four techniques organise his work.
How to write toward his lessons
Write a duplex. Compose seven couplets; make line two of each couplet reappear, modified, as line one of the next; end by returning to your first line with its meaning changed. The form forces you to hear what your own lines contain, because each must survive being repeated and rewritten, and weak lines fail the audition immediately.
Beyond the form, study his conviction that music is meaning. Read your drafts aloud for cadence, and try borrowing the rhythm, not the words, of a text you grew up hearing, a prayer, a chant, a commercial jingle, and filling that rhythm with your most serious material. The friction between borrowed music and new matter is where Brown's power lives.
Where to start reading
The Tradition first, reading the duplexes in sequence to learn the form from its source. Then The New Testament for the scriptural register, and Please for the musical beginnings. His widely taught title poem The Tradition and the duplex beginning from a line about a stereo are the pieces most classrooms start with, and his interviews on the duplex's invention are freely available and genuinely useful.
What poets can take from this
- Write a duplex: seven couplets, each echoing a line forward, ending where you began with the meaning changed.
- Repeat a line twice in a poem, altering one word each time, and let the alterations tell the story.
- Borrow the cadence of a text you grew up hearing and fill it with your hardest material.
- Put one beautiful natural image and one act of harm in the same stanza without adjudicating between them.
- Test every line by reading it aloud twice; a line that cannot survive repetition is not finished.
Try it yourself
Write a duplex about an inheritance you did not choose, a name, a temper, a town, letting each couplet's echo push the meaning one step further from where it began.
Questions
What is a duplex poem?
A form invented by Jericho Brown: fourteen lines in seven couplets, where the second line of each couplet returns, varied, as the first line of the next, and the last line revisits the opening line. He describes it as a merging of sonnet, ghazal and blues.
What is The Tradition by Jericho Brown about?
The 2019 Pulitzer-winning collection weaves the pastoral with racist violence, desire, faith and survival, and introduces the duplex form. Its title poem sets the names of murdered Black men among flowers.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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