Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Leads Student Workshop 

WThe Washington College Rose O’Neill Literary House transformed into a classroom space for a workshop with Jericho Brown as students spread throughout the enclosed porch, reader’s room, and library to lay out individual lines on separate strips of paper and combine them in new ways to create their own poems. 

Brown, who won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book The Tradition, led a dozen attendees through the creation of their own duplex poems—a form of Brown’s creation that debuted in that collection. 

“The hallmark of the Literary House series is that the literary stars we bring for readings also are excited to engage meaningfully with our fabulous students,” said James Hall, director of the Lit House. “The workshop was rousing and fun.” 

To kick off the workshop, Brown talked about the creation of the duplex and the poetic history he drew from to create the form. The duplex pulls from sonnets (14 lines with rules on meter), the blues (a poem with two repeating lines and then a third line that juxtaposes them, among other rules), and ghazals (a medieval Persian form that, among other rules, is made up of two line stanzas where the second line of every couplet features the same repeating word). 

“I was interested in writing a poem that was all repetition,” he said of creating the duplex. “Is it possible to write a poem where the lines just keep repeating themselves? And what would that effect be?”  

Brown’s visit to campus was part of the newly renamed Robert Earl Price Poetry Festival (formerly the Kent County Poetry Festival) at the end of March. Brown conducted workshops at both Washington College and Kent County High School, then read from and discussed his work with Hall as the keynote event of the festival.

—MacKenzie Brady ’21