The Tradition

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2015

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Poem Analysis

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Related Poems

"Bullet Points" by Jericho Brown (2019)

Like “The Tradition,” “Bullet Points” addresses the murders of Black people at the hands of the police; and like “The Tradition,” this poem is also included in Brown’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection. While “The Tradition” employs the first-person plural, “Bullet Points” employs the first-person singular.

"Duplex" by Jericho Brown (2019)

While “The Tradition” is written in a traditional poetic form (the sonnet), Jericho Brown has also invented new forms of his own. One such form, the duplex, is composed of repetitive couplets; the first line of each couplet repeats the last line of the previous couplet, and the last line of the poem repeats the first line of the poem. Brown’s book The Tradition (which contains the poem of the same name) has a duplex poem in each of its four sections—the final section contains three duplexes. This poem, “Duplex,” is the first example of the form in the book.

Further Literary Resources

The Tradition by Jericho Brown (2019)

The poem’s eponymous full-length collection (published in 2019) won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The prize committee describes The Tradition as “a collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and violence” (“The 2020 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry.” The Pulitzer Prizes).

"To win justice for George Floyd, we need the rage that abolished slavery" by Jericho Brown (2020)

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Brown wrote this op-ed for The Guardian. In it, Brown writes, “I mean to remember that the worst thing about the current moment of protest is that it wouldn’t have happened had George Floyd lived. History should tell us that whatever anyone does in the present moment to express rage at the police state is as necessary as Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831.”

"The Art of Words" by Jericho Brown (2015)

“The Tradition” is about racism and state-sanctioned violence against Black men, but it is also about the power of language. “The Art of Words” is a TEDx Talk that Brown gave about language at Emory University, where he is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Creative Writing Program.