Watch Jericho Brown perform 'Stand' from The Tradition
The Tradition is the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry-winning collection from Jericho Brown. Discover, in his own words, Jericho's motivations behind the book and enjoy a reading of one of the new poems.
Here, Jericho Brown introduces his prize-winning collection, The Tradition, and tells us more about the motivation behind it. Watch Jericho read ‘Stand’, one of the book’s stirring poems, in the video below.
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'I grew up landscaping for my father’s “yard business” and spent the winter months at the public library where I fell in love with poetry. I think the work I did in the heat prepared me for the work I’d have to do as a reader, understanding labor as a property of beauty and beauty as a property of the organic.
I think of my writing as an opportunity to make a reader – oh, any one human heart at a time will do – more aware of the fact that emotions wield some power over our lives. These emotions lead to questions, and steady questioning leads to changes in one’s thought, and then in one’s life.
In many ways The Tradition is a book of pastoral poems that make a garden of the ways we’ve sadly become invested in normalizing evil. These latest poems were written with an abandon I had never experienced. The writing asked something different of me because the stakes were higher than ever. These latest poems are proof to me that I am a poet no matter what!'
Stand
Peace on this planet
Or guns glowing hot,
We lay there together
As if we were getting
Something done. It
Felt like planting
A garden or planning
A meal for a people
Who still need feeding,
All that touching or
Barely touching, not
Saying much, not adding
Anything. The cushion
Of it, the skin and
Occasional sigh, all
Seemed like work worth
Mastering. I’m sure
Somebody died while
We made love. Some-
Body killed somebody
Black. I thought then
Of holding you
As a political act. I
May as well have
Held myself. We didn’t
Stand for one thought,
Didn’t do a damn thing,
And though you left
Me, I’m glad we didn’t.
The Tradition
by Jericho Brown
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY
The Tradition by Jericho Brown, is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while revelling in a celebration of contradiction.
His poems address fatherhood, race, queerness, worship, trauma and more with precision and clarity. In his own personal style, the duplex – a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal and the blues – Brown has created a daring and revolutionary collection.