Tradition (2015)

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A young poet from Louisiana, the 2009 American Book Award was won by Jericho Brown's debut poetry collection. His third compilation is The Custom, the book in which the titular poem appears. "The Tradition" parallels the tradition of planting and caring for the environment with aggression against African-Americans using a sonnet structure. Throughout the item, Brown lists flowers. The names of John Crawford, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown, in the last line, take their place.

Poetry

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.

(Jericho Brown, 2015. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 7, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.)

Summary

American poet Jericho Brown discusses the intersecting' histories' of blackness, whiteness, and queerness, of radicalized and sexualized violence, of American myth-making, and of American literature in his poetry collection The Tradition (2019). In the metaphor of flowers, many of these traditions are explored: their elegance, their fragility and their recurrence year after year. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award was Brown's third collection, The Custom.

Author

On April 14, 1976, Jericho Brown was born. He is an award-winning author, LGBTI activist, and community builder, and a beloved college professor.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, Jericho Brown was born Nelson Demery, III, to Nelson Demery, Jr. and Neomia Lenoir Demery, who made their living cutting lawns and cleaning houses and other structures. The filmmaker, Nequella Demery, is his girlfriend. Brown was expelled a number of times, attending five elementary schools and two middle schools because of his family moving too much and his own actions. Brown credits his enthusiasm for language as a child to time spent in his local library.

Racism Issue

A dark American past and a dark American present clash with a realm of myth in In The Tradition. The tales that Brown gives us are old, and our tactics for telling them decide how we perceive the shame of others' pain. Brown wryly recasts Ganymede's rape by God in the opening poem as the wages of immortality. "That's the version I prefer," his speaker says, "I like it / the safety of it, no one at fault, / rewarded everyone." So often these myths stand for history in the collection. Our understanding of transactions of violence and damage forms the stories we tell: namely, slavery, imperialism, HIV, capitalism, and police brutality.The poem, so far away from the world of Olympus, ends with a direct comment. For Brown's novel, this is a piercing and unforgettable thesis: "The people of my country believe / If we can be bought, we can't be hurt."

Remarkably, the mythical retellings of Jericho Brown question the myths behind them and the ways in which they explain historical and contemporary abuse. There are eerie evocations of lynching and enslavement in a poem in the voice, probably, of Leda,

Brown merges the names of flowers, "classical/philosophers said could change us," and the death-bound subjectivity of black men, "Men like me and my brothers," in the title poem, a remarkable sonnet condemning Age of Enlightenment notions of taxonomy. Brown draws a distinction between "the tradition" of natural science and "the tradition" of brutality at the hands of the state against black men. The flowers, imagined flowering as "proof we existed" in glorious and ephemeral colors in a video, yield the names of the missing men in the chilling final couplet of the sonnet: "Where the world ends, all is cut down." / Crawford, John. From Eric Garner. Mike Brown.”

Reference

  1. Brown. Jericho. 2015. The Tradition. Poets Org. Retrieved January 1 2021.
  2. The Tradition by Jericho Brown. Super Summary. Retrieved January 1 2021.