Workshop: Duplex with Jericho Brown

In this 90-minute virtual masterclass, poet and educator Jericho Brown will lead students through an exercise for writing a duplex poem – a form he invented that is featured in his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection The Tradition – that blends the ghazal, the sonnet, and the blues.

Each student should bring 14 lines of nine to eleven syllables for each line. The lines should come from the past and might be from sentences they take from their own prose as well as lines from poems that haven't worked. No two lines have to be from the same source or time, but they can. Don't bring poems; just bring disparate lines. It may be a good idea if some of them have images, but none of them have to have images. Each student should have fourteen lines and come to the workshop with each line on its own small piece of paper; that means come to class with 14 slivers of paper and a line on each sliver.

Note: Jericho asks that participants read this article on the duplex in advance of the workshop.