The New Testament and The Tradition by Jericho Brown Review by Issam Zineh

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The New Testament by Jericho Brown

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Publication Date: September 16, 2014

ISBN: 978-1556594571

Pages: 110

The Tradition by Jericho Brown

Publisher: Copper Canyon Press

Publication Date: April 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-1556594861

Pages: 110

On Hegemonic Masculinity: Revisiting Jericho Brown’s The New Testament and The Tradition

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I recently had the great privilege of moderating a panel called “Toward a Poetics of Tenderness: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Poetic Imagination.” Several poets contemplated what tenderness in writing might look like as a countervailing force to hegemonic masculinity (the version of “manhood” endorsed by the dominant culture and often violently maintained by institutional power). Jericho Brown was on that panel. He read new, tenderly reflective poems—poems that (among other things in their richness of texture) challenge inherited conceptions of manhood, which in the Western tradition is often characterized by hierarchical, gendered power, emotional inexpressivity, and violence (e.g., interpersonal, political, economic, ecological).  

It is against this backdrop that I revisit Brown’s The New Testament and The Tradition. From its opening poems, The New Testament signals it will be concerned with the varieties of violence mentioned above. The vulnerably self-reflective first poem “Colosseum,” for example, opens with the speaker admitting:

I don’t remember how I hurt myself,

The pain mine

Long enough for me

To lose the wound that invented it […]

He then alludes to a former lover who:

[…] says he lives to touch

The smoothest parts […] Him I will

Follow until I am as rough outside

As I am within.

Here, Brown locates love and violence in the same space—one in which intimacy is fraught with power imbalance, intermale dominance, and subjugation.

If Brown only subtly hints at the traumatic aftermath of violent masculinity in “Colosseum,” he is more expansive in that suggestion in the poem that follows (“Romans 12:1”):

A certain obsession overtook

My body, or I should say,

I let a man touch me until I bled,

Until my blood met his hunger

And so was changed […]

These lines suggest sexual violence and might be informed by Brown’s own experience with sexual assault and subsequent HIV diagnosis, which he has spoken about publicly.

While sexual violence is the precipitating event in “Romans 12:1,” the aftermath of that violence is propagated through the rest of the poem in a way that speaks directly to the insidiousness of idealized manhood and gendered supremacy. Specifically, the stigmas associated with queerness, being a victim of sexual violence, and being HIV+ converge in the lines “Hurt by me, they will not call me / Brother.”

“They” refers to “my people” (from a preceding line), which can signify the speaker’s family, friends, and/or community more broadly. The enjambment enables consideration of both personal isolation from familiars (they will not call me) and alienation from the broader community (they will not call me Brother). The poem continues:

[…] Hear me coming,

And they cross their legs. As men

Are wont to hate women,

As women are taught to hate

Themselves, they hate a woman

They smell in me […]

These lines confront several problematic attributes of hegemonic masculinity as a societal organizing principle: 1) misogyny (“As men / Are wont to hate women”); 2) female self-loathing (“As women are taught to hate / Themselves”); and 3) devaluing of feminine attributes in men (“they hate a woman / They smell in me”). Brown further enacts the proximities and inextricability of these violences by splicing them so closely to one another through his lineation and repetition.

This gendered violence, situated in the context of intimate relationships, pervades The New Testament in poems like “Another Elegy” (“Besides, your brother is much / Bigger than you—once you tried / Pulling him off the woman he loves / And lost a tooth.”), “Reality Show” (“It is like a love for men, this / Love of language, and we are / Men at war”), “Willing to Pay” (“It’s your face I wanted […] / Your face and that thing / You do with your eyes / When I get you livid.”), and others. From the craft perspective, these examples invariably locate violence and intimacy in extremely close proximity, often on the same line of the poem, thereby enacting the precarious intimacy on which they opine.

To the extent hegemonic masculinity underpins a social (and therefore political) order, Brown extends the violence of that framework even further beyond the interpersonally intimate. “Football Season,” for example, opens:

But the game includes killing

Boys in another country.

At the end of this beer,

I pay a tax, make sure

They’re dead.

Brown equates the ultraviolent, hypermasculine national pastime with state-sponsored violence. He further places this violence at the intersection of entertainment and symbolic jingoism (“I can drink / A few more, see the Patriots / Or the Cowboys”), and the speaker calls out his own privilege within that framework (“or another / Very long war right / Here on this stool, watching / My money work for me, the heat / Up and me comfortable enough / To complain about it.”). Brown conflates nationalism and the massive cultural phenomenon of American football; he also self-indicts within that conflation, drawing attention to how we who live within these hegemonic constructs are beneficiaries to the extent we subscribe to or reinforce the dominant narrative (whether explicitly or implicitly).

Brown continues this exploration of hegemonic masculinity in The Tradition. One aspect of both of these books I find particularly interesting is the symbolic frames of reference within which the explorations occur. In The New Testament, the Judeo-Christian scriptural context is the scene for much of the rumination on masculinity, intimacy, violence, and their intersections (e.g., in poems like “Romans 12:1,” “Cain,” “Paradise,” “The Ten Commandments,” “I Corinthians 13:11,” “Psalm 150,” “After the Rapture,” “Hebrews 13,” “Eden,” “At the End of Hell,” and “Nativity”). In The Tradition, Brown has substituted Greco-Roman myth for the Bible. Both traditions are replete with the ravages of cultures organized along hierarchies of masculinity and that engender a politics of marginalization.

The Tradition, like The New Testament, opens with a poem that lays bare questions of masculinity and intermale relations. The Greek myth of Ganymede is exceedingly troubling for its suggestions of abduction and pederasty. Brown employs this myth in his poem “Ganymede” to probe issues of power and subjugation. He further privileges the retelling of Ganymede to center agency and consent, even though we suspect the speaker knows this reframing is our way of deluding ourselves in the face of unassailable power:

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 […] When we look at myth

This way, no one bothers saying

Rape […]

“Ganymede,” then, becomes the departure point for many poems that contend with the simultaneity of intimacy and aggression.

Brown is arguably more explicitly concerned with oppressive American socio-cultural phenomena in The Tradition. While these poems do confront racism (“She was ugly. / I’m ugly. You’re ugly too. / No such thing as good white people.”) and American exceptionalism (“I am ashamed of America / And confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship”) for example, I don’t see them as pivoting away from Brown’s investigations of masculinity. On the contrary, so-called acceptable expressions of masculinity are reinforced, if not established, by the very systems of power that benefit from reductionistic, hierarchical framing of identity along racial, geographic, and ideological lines. This enables marginalization of the “other” whatever that other might be. In light of that, the poems of The Tradition are elegant extensions of Brown’s meditations on masculinity which began in The New Testament, and embodiments of the subversive vulnerability that might be required to break free from the narrowly circumscribed and destructive notions of “manhood” which pervade the dominant culture.

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Jericho Brown is the author of several books of poetry including The New Testament (Copper Canyon, 2014), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He also recently edited The Selected Shepherd (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), a collection of poems by Reginald Shepherd. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University. www.jerichobrown.com

Issam Zineh is the author of Unceded Land (Trio House Press, 2022), finalist for the Trio Award, Medal Provocateur, Housatonic Book Award, and Balcones Prize. His writing appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Yale Review, Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books), and elsewhere. He lives on Paskestikweya land. www.issamzineh.com     

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10 April 2024