The Process of the Duplex Project

I have been somewhat superstitious about writing a blog post about my seminary project that involved writing duplexes in the style of Jericho Brown. I didn't want to write until I got feedback and until the work was graded--I'm not really sure why. But yesterday, our teacher returned our work, and so I wanted to write this follow up.

I wrote a series of duplexes for my Religion and the Arts class, Speaking of God in a Secular Age. Throughout the semester, we circled back to the work of Jericho Brown, and I remembered various articles I had read about his process in writing the duplex.  I remember reading that he went back through all of his old notebooks and copied out lines that he hadn't been able to use in publishable poems. At the time, I thought that was a marvelous idea. I loved the idea of cutting out the lines and strips of paper that I could then arrange and see how they spoke to each other. I wanted to do something similar.  But life being what it was at the time, I never got around to trying it.

For our final paper in my seminary class, we could do a creative project, so early on I proposed writing duplexes, and happily my professor approved. I spent a few hours going through poetry notebooks from the past 10 years looking for evocative lines of 9 to 13 syllables, which I typed into a Word document.  I had every intention of cutting them into slips and arranging them. My rough draft process for poetry has always been a handwritten process, and that's what I envisioned with this project.

I did not anticipate breaking the wrist of my dominant hand three weeks before the end of the term.  I had papers due for a different seminary class at the time that I had my injury, and I experimented with the voice recognition software that's part of my Word program.  I was able to write those papers more easily than I anticipated, so I chose not to ask for any extensions.

I decided that I needed to try a different way of writing these duplexes. I was not going to be able to cut my lines into strips and hand write other lines around them.  I decided to try writing with a combination of cutting and pasting lines into a Word document and using the dictate function to speak lines that would join them. 

I looked through the document of lines that I had created and chose one that spoke to me.  I started with this line:

This body, a country with no maps,

Then this line came to me:

A patchwork of loose scraps and poor stitches.

I continued to create this way. I would go back to the document of evocative lines when I got stuck. I consulted a few of the duplexes written by Jericho Brown, but it became clear I wasn't following his model exactly. However, I liked the work I was creating, so I continued.

We had to write an essay to go along with our creative project, an essay where we showed how are creative work was informed by the theological work that we did. I decided to make it clear that I knew that I wasn't following the duplex model as precisely:

“As I have been working on writing duplexes of my own, my brain has come back to the difficulties of writing both duplexes and theology. I think that I understand the form, but the longer I work with individual pieces, the less sure I am. I take risks and go in different directions--am I writing a new form of theology/duplex or am I demonstrating my lack of understanding? Each line of my duplex speaks to the previous line, but it's in a different way than the way that Jericho Brown does it. I am following the model, yet I am not following the model. In the end, I am pleased with my poems, and I have stayed true to the idea of a duplex as Jericho Brown has explained it in numerous places.  Similarly, we think we know how to talk about God, but the more we do it, the more we discover all there is to say and what must be left unsaid. We work within a form like the duplex, and we find it both liberating and maddeningly--much like writing theology, much like talking about God in a secular age.”

I am happy to report that I got a good grade on my project. In fact my teacher said, 'While these 5 duplexes may not conform to Jericho’s rules with exactitude, the more impressive achievement here is that you have melded your own unique writerly voice with the haunting-ness of the duplex form. And while each poem stands well on its own, what makes the series particularly impressive is the way you weave them together through common threads, themes, and images.”

Since this post is already quite long I won't post the 5 duplexes here. Later I'll create a separate blog post around them--something to look forward to!