The duplex is a poetic form invented by poet Jericho Brown that subverts or is a “mash-up” of older poetic forms, such as the pantoum, the sonnet, and the ghazal. Brown first used this form in his third collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In his blog post, “Invention,” which was featured on Harriet Books, Brown writes, “I decided to call the form a duplex because something about its repetition and its couplets made me feel like it was a house with two addresses. It is, indeed, a mutt of a form as so many of us in this nation are only now empowered to live fully in all of our identities.” In the same essay, Brown defines the boundaries of the duplex:
Write a ghazal that is also a sonnet that is also a blues poem of 14 lines, giving each line 9 to 11 syllables.
The first line is echoed in the last line.
The second line of the poem should change our impression of the first line in an unexpected way.
The second line is echoed and becomes the third line.
The fourth line of the poem should change our impression of the third line in an unexpected way.
This continues until the penultimate line becomes the first line of the couplet that leads to the final (and first) line.
For the variations of repeated lines, it is useful to think of the a a’ b scheme of the blues form. For an example of the form, see Jericho Brown’s poem “Duplex (A poem is a gesture toward home).”
The first line is echoed in the last line.
The second line of the poem should change our impression of the first line in an unexpected way.
The second line is echoed and becomes the third line.
The fourth line of the poem should change our impression of the third line in an unexpected way.
This continues until the penultimate line becomes the first line of the couplet that leads to the final (and first) line.
For the variations of repeated lines, it is useful to think of the a a’ b scheme of the blues form. For an example of the form, see Jericho Brown’s poem “Duplex (A poem is a gesture toward home).”