NO ONE HAS TO CONVINCE US
What is required to be an authentically original artist is an inability to think conventionally.
—Carl Phillips
Jericho Brown, The Tradition Paperback, 110 pages Copper Canyon Press, 2019
The world is not fair. Ta-Nehisi Coates in We Were Eight Years in Power writes: “Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world.” Jericho Brown’s astonishing third book of poems, The Tradition, is composed of wild music examining the world’s unfairness, the horrific way humans are complicit in evil. Somehow he surprises us with a lush lyric; given his theme, the work is hardly dour or bleak. Throughout the book, Brown strikes two notes repeatedly on his poetic piano scale: the evil of men who are not aware of when their masculinity harms and white people in America not aware of the consequences of their whiteness. “Ganymede,” the poem that opens the collection to this modern poetic symphony, grabs our attention like a cymbal smash.
Jericho Brown cannot think conventionally. The logic of his poems shakes his reader upside down. Swerves and detours happen as the lines swivel down the page. You do not end where you begin. You stop yourself. You say: Who is speaking here? You say: Do I think this? You leave the poem a little unnerved. Something awkward has taken place. Maybe you even blanch.
A twenty-two-line poem, “Ganymede” is in rough tetrameter, a beat Brown favors:
Ganymede
A man trades his son for horses.
That’s the version I prefer. I like
The safety of it, no one at fault,
Everyone rewarded. God gets
The boy. The boy becomes
Immortal. His father rides until
Grief sounds as good as the gallop
Of an animal born to carry those
Who patrol our inherited
Kingdom. When we look at myth
This way, nobody bothers saying
Rape. I mean, don’t you want God
To want you? Don’t you dream
Of someone with wings taking you
Up? And when the master comes
For our children, he smells
Like the men who own stables
In Heaven, that far terrain
Between Promise and Apology.
No one has to convince us.
The people of my country believe
We can’t be hurt if we can be bought.
The poem starts out quietly. By the end of the page, a stampede of sentiment and allusions. Or, to put it another way, the poem becomes a crazy signpost with several signs pointing
