Duplex
Quick answer: The duplex is a 14-line form invented by Jericho Brown, blending sonnet, ghazal and blues: couplets echo forward until the last line returns to the first.
A duplex is a fourteen-line poetic form invented by Jericho Brown, written in seven couplets in which the second line of each couplet is echoed, with variation, as the first line of the next, and the poem's final line returns to its opening line. Brown describes it as a fusion of sonnet, ghazal and blues: the sonnet's fourteen lines, the ghazal's leaping couplets, the blues habit of repeating a line and twisting it.
The form debuted in Brown's collection The Tradition, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, and it has been taken up quickly by other poets and workshops. Its appeal is the way repetition drives transformation. Because every stanza must pick up the previous line and bend it, the poem cannot stand still, and because the end circles back to the beginning, the opening line means something different once the poem has passed through it.
How It Works
The rules: fourteen lines in seven couplets, lines of roughly nine to eleven syllables, each couplet's second line varied into the next couplet's first line, and the final line restating the first. The variation is where the poetry happens; you repeat enough to be heard as echo and change enough to advance. An invented pair of couplets shows the hinge: My mother kept the phone beside the bread. / She fed whoever called her after dark. Then the next couplet opens on the bent echo: Whoever called after dark got fed a story, / and the story was the house we could not sell. Each echo mutates the line, and mutation carries the poem somewhere the first couplet could not see. Because couplets leap like a ghazal's, adjacent pairs need not share a scene, only the handed-over line.
Where You Will See It
The Tradition contains several poems titled Duplex, including one that opens by declaring that a poem is a gesture toward home, and Brown has published essays and interviews explaining how he built the form by writing sonnets, ghazals and blues poems, then splicing their machinery together. He has framed the invention partly as an argument about tradition itself, an American Black poet engineering a new fixed form from inherited ones. Since 2019 the duplex has spread through journals, prize anthologies and creative writing courses, and it is already among the most imitated forms invented in the twenty-first century.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Write a first line you can live inside, since you will meet it again at the end, then let each couplet's second line be a genuine step sideways: new image, new room, new decade. When you echo a line, change its verbs or swap its subject and object, and watch what the alteration confesses. Keep the syllable counts close to ten so the couplets share one breath length. The duplex suits obsessive material, family, desire, injury, anything the mind circles, and its combination of tight structure and emotional charge is exactly what contest scorers, Writory's included, mean when they talk about structure serving feeling.
What poets can take from this
- Draft all seven second-lines first if you get stuck; they are the poem's rungs.
- Keep lines between nine and eleven syllables so the couplets stay metrically kin.
- Change one strong element per echo, the verb, the owner, the tense, rather than shuffling word order.
- Choose an opening line that can read as both promise and verdict, since it must serve as both.
- Read Jericho Brown's duplexes aloud before writing one; the form lives in its momentum.
Try it yourself
Write a duplex that begins with a one-line rule from your childhood household. Bend the rule slightly with every echoed line, so that when the rule returns as the final line, the reader understands who it was really protecting.
Questions
Who created the duplex form?
The American poet Jericho Brown introduced it in his 2019 collection The Tradition, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He built it deliberately from the sonnet, the ghazal and the blues, and has written about the process in essays and interviews.
Is a duplex a type of sonnet?
It shares the sonnet's fourteen lines and argumentative compression, and Brown has called it a kind of mutated sonnet, but its engine is different: ghazal-style leaping couplets and blues repetition, with a circular return to the first line instead of a closing couplet's verdict.
Do duplex lines have to rhyme?
No. The form's binding comes from echoed and varied lines between couplets, not rhyme. Lines usually run nine to eleven syllables, which keeps the couplets rhythmically matched without any rhyme scheme.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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