Radical Stasis: Jericho Brown’s Duplex Form

In the years since Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book The Tradition was published, one element of the work in particular took hold in poetic consciousness: the creation of the poetic form called the Duplex. The Duplex is a form consisting of fourteen lines arranged in alternating couplets, where each line repeats twice in a row, and the first line is also the last line. By my own impression, the Duplex has caused a reconsideration of the use of form among poets. 

The magic of the Duplex as a form is that it is the familiar made strange: through repetition, the form manages to capture a sense of a surprise alongside a deep sense of the inevitable. In this familiarity, the form of the Duplex is immediately understandable even to those not well-versed in poetic forms; yet it beguiles as much as it appears straightforward. Unlike many forms, a Duplex announces itself as clearly formal on the page: anyone would identify a Duplex as a poem ‘in form’ from a cursory glance alone. That simplicity of appearance lends a Duplex a sheen of ease—as if anyone could write a Duplex—yet it also comes across as a conscious crafted thing, a poem that wants you to be aware of the hand of the poet behind it. 

In an oft-quoted definition of the Duplex provided by Jericho Brown, the form is described as a mixture of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues. The form, made of seven couplets with repeating lines, is perhaps most interesting to me in relationship to the sonnet, as Brown says in an interview with The Rumpus that part of the intention of the form was to “gut the sonnet.” I want to look critically at the form of the Duplex: what it does and doesn’t do, how it subverts previous forms, as well as where the form might open to in the future. 

The poem that perhaps best demonstrates the excellence of the form in The Tradition is the very first “Duplex”:

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. 

This poem, this very first introduction to the form of the Duplex, has a deep sense of inexorableness in large part due to the lack of enjambement: nearly every line is end stopped. There are only two lines that do not conclude definitively (lines 7 and 9), and only one line that ends in what I consider a “soft” end stop of a comma (line 11), and all of these exceptions occur in the first line of the couplet, resulting in each stanza still being end stopped. Further, this sense of inevitability is enhanced by repeating lines that reverberate rather than precisely replicate: “My last love drove a burgundy car. // My first love drove a burgundy car;” “Like the sound of a mother weeping again. // Like the sound of my mother weeping again.”

This sense of inevitability is crucial to the success of this poem. Not only does it enhance the formal experience by teaching the reader what to expect from this new form without any prior knowledge, it also enhances the emotional experience by making the reader feel as if they understand the poem immediately. This emotional resonance allows the reader to feel as if they comprehend the poem’s complexities and shadows, even if they cannot articulate exactly what they are. Porous emotional resonance is perhaps the key to the success of any Duplex, for with repetition the poem simultaneously remains in stasis while tumbling down the page.

The most significant technique of the Duplex that creates emotional understanding is the repeated first and last line of the poem. In this Duplex: “A poem is a gesture toward home.” At once, this line engenders an aphoristic quality: it suggests a large statement about the work of poetry that seems imminently wise. It is simultaneously expansive and diminutive in its aphorism: a poem is merely “a gesture,” but that gesture is expansive, intellectual and heart-held “toward home.” There is something universal about this line—a sense that anyone reading it might nod their head yes—yet this line is ultimately particular, singular to the poet himself, the poet who is subject to poetry’s “dark demands.”

What does it mean for a poem to be a gesture toward home? To me, I read this statement as suggesting that a poem is an expression toward wholeness (the sound similarity of ‘home’ and ‘whole’ aids in that reading). An argument could be made that this line suggests a poem provides a possibility of return to a ‘home,’ as in memory, childhood, family, or the origins of the self. Maybe extrapolating further, ‘home’ might be a stand in for safety, security, love. I think many people read this aphoristic line, think these sorts of windy explanations, and then stop there. 

But this line is more complex than it first appears; in fact, it suggests that a poem does not fully succeed in its efforts—the poem will never reach home, but only gesture toward it. The word choice of “gesture” particularly beguiles me, as gesture is rooted in a physical sense of movement, of bodily gesture, even as we colloquially use the word often to mean verbal gesture. Indeed, this ghostly physical presence—the hand of the poet behind the poem—seems apt to me to consider in the work the poem does to reach its conclusion.

So, what if home is a place we don’t want a poem to reach? What if home is a bad place? The home of this poem, as uncovered line by repeating line, is filled with an abusive father, a weeping mother, and a speaker forever changed by those experiences. But a poem is not home, it’s only a gesture. The people written about in this poem are not physically here, they are only represented or gestured at. Perhaps the real meaning of the line “A poem is a gesture toward home,” is that a poem is the writer’s own action. The poem is not home; the poem is whatever home the writer wants to craft and shape. In a poem driven by verbs, in which the speaker is only embodied once in the form of an “I,” this spectral gesture of poetic creation seems tantamount to the poem’s argument. 

What might it mean for the Duplex to “gut the sonnet”? A sonnet is a formal container of fourteen lines, traditionally written in iambic pentameter. To me, the most crucial element of what makes a sonnet in fact a sonnet and not a random gathering of 14 lines is the volta, which is the turn of the poem that happens historically either before the final couplet (as in the Shakespearean sonnet form) or before the sestet (as in the Petrarchan form). The intention of the volta is for the poem to change, to “turn” as it’s often called, away from the initial intentions of the poem to the surprising conclusion or to locate an element of expansion of poem as it has been. The volta takes the poem somewhere else; the volta is supposed to take the top of your head off. 

To gut a fish, one must slit the fish’s belly, pulling out the guts. Afterward, to the outside eye, the fish remains whole, but its inside is empty. How I think this applies to Brown’s Duplex: the form has the appearance of the Shakespearean sonnet, 7 couplets in an approximation of iambic pentameter (technically, a syllabics of 9-11 per line). In this form, we might expect the volta to occur before the final couplet. And yet this is where the form of the Duplex radically subverts expectations: there is no volta, as the closing line of the poem has already announced itself in the first line. Thus, there is no “turn” in the poem, except for a return at the end to the beginning. The poem makes a circle in which to start is to end, to end is to start. To gut the sonnet then, perhaps, might mean to eliminate the volta, or at least to steal the surprise from the volta. 

I would also like to identify another key formal element as per Brown’s rendition of the Duplex: stasis. Though couplet by couplet the poem provides new information, ultimately the poem contains no specific narrative or forward plot progression. The poem’s movement is propelled only by the repetition of the lines, how they occasionally transform time (“my first love” / “my last love”) which suggests narrative progression. Yet much of the momentum of the poem is due to the shifting appearance of the couplets across the page, how they look almost like steps. Of the five Duplexes that appear in The Tradition, I would argue that only has more traditional narrative movement, in “Duplex [Don’t accuse me of sleeping with your man],” where a narrative about a specific relationship is the driving force of the poem. This poem, I would argue, is the weakest of the Duplexes presented in The Tradition not because it is a bad poem, but because the forward movement of its narrative eliminates some of the claustrophobic tension of the Duplex form at its best.

It is hard to write a Duplex. Brown himself includes only five in his book. As I reflect on Brown’s desire to subvert the sonnet, the key I believe is to look past one’s enchantment with the first/last line and to probe the revelations of its repetition. If it could be said that the sonnet begins with a concept, develops it, and then transforms it via the volta, then the Duplex might be described as beginning with an idea, moving away from the inciting concept, then returning to the beginning with greater understanding. Perhaps this is how it subverts the sonnet: we end where we begin. But by returning to the beginning, we are changed. We bring the entirety of the poem back to the first line. If the Duplex as a poetic form creates a circle with no clear end or beginning, then at the heart, the Duplex is rooted in an oscillation between stasis and transformation.