April 24, 2024: Climate Culture: “The Tradition”

[It’s hard not to think about the climate crisis every day in 2024, but it’s impossible not to do so on Earth Day. So this week in honor of that solemn occasion, I’ll AmericanStudy cultural works that represent and help us engage with climate change.]

On two complementary ways to read a climate change moment in a 21^st century sonnet.

I’ve written about the great contemporary poet Jericho Brown in multiple posts here, including this one on his wonderful TED talk and this one on a few different ways and settings in which he engages his audiences. As part of the latter post, I mentioned his poem “The Tradition” (2015), which was the first work of Brown’s I encountered (as the epigraph for Jesmyn Ward’s phenomenal 2016 collection The Fire This Time) and which I’ve had the chance to teach many times since. “The Tradition” is a particularly interesting poem from a contemporary poet in that it’s technically a sonnet, both in 14-line length and in terms of elements like the final rhyming couplet (an aspect of the Shakespearean sonnet in particular); but Brown also purposefully plays with that poetic tradition very fully, creating line and section structures that utilize yet also deconstruct the classical form, just as he brings into his diction both Latin words and deeply 21^st century details and names.

One of those 21^st century details is the poem’s allusion to climate change in its middle third (lines 5-8), where Brown writes (in between the names of flowers that are the poem’s most consistent throughline), “Summer seemed to bloom against the will/Of the sun, which news reports claimed flamed hotter/On this planet than when our dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks.” In a poem that’s so much defined by the relationships between tradition and change in all the ways I just highlighted, this moment certainly reflects how climate change functions as an overt disruption to even the most seemingly consistent cycles: how familiar, even indeed unchanging, elements like the sun and the seasons have become different as a result of this new reality. “News reports claimed” might make it seem that the poem’s speaker isn’t himself sure of the veracity of that reality, but the poem’s final couplet includes the phrase “Where the world ends,” so I’d argue that he is well aware of at least the possibility of those genuine changes leading to catastrophe.

On the other hand, the catastrophic losses with which “The Tradition” ends are due not to climate change or natural disaster but racist and institutional violence, as illustrated by the final line’s names of three young Black men killed by the police (“John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.”). And seen through that lens, the poem’s climate change lines read a bit differently: as not a radical shift so much as yet another unfolding history (not unlike the systems like slavery and sharecropping alluded to with “dead fathers/Wiped sweat from their necks”) that targets people of color and the disadvantaged far more consistently and destructively than it does the planet’s more privileged communities. That kind of discriminatory targeting is its own American (and really global, but this is AmericanStudier) tradition, after all, and one that doesn’t disappear with the emergence of new 21^st century issues. All of which makes Brown’s poem an even more multilayered and meaningful work of climate culture to add into this week’s series.

Next climate culture tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Climate texts of any type you’d share?