Lamont Poet Tyehimba Jess Performs Poems from Olio
Flat cap atop his head, this year’s fall 2017 Lamont Poet Tyehimba Jess ripped a page from a copy of his Pulitzer-Prize-winning poetry collection Olio. The audience watched as Jess folded and unfolded the sheet to shape a cylinder, a donut and finally a mobius strip to demonstrate the infinite dimensions of storytelling. His Wednesday night poetry reading in the Assembly Hall was met with an immediate standing ovation, with many students returning the next morning for his question-and-answer session and book-signing.
In addition to Olio, which chronicles the plight of first generation freed slaves, Jess is the author of leadbelly, a poetry collection recounting the life of African-American folk musician William “Huddie” Ledbetter. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review named leadbelly one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” His work has been featured in numerous anthologies and at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. He received the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in 2004, among other honors and fellowships. Jess has taught at the Juilliard School, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is currently teaching English at the College of Staten Island in New York City.
Jess began his Wednesday night presentation by reading selections from leadbelly, which many students had analyzed in their English classes prior to Jess’s arrival on campus. He recounted stories from Ledbetter’s biography through a series of personal poems ranging in form from lyrical, prose, boast and song, all reminiscent of the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues.
“There were a lot of myths about him [Leadbetter]. People were indulging in the myths but didn’t seem to be very interested in the facts of his life,” Jess said. “ I wanted to get the facts as clear as I could get them, then read between the facts and look for the places where imagination could illuminate the issues that he was dealing with. I wanted to set the record not necessarily straight, but create something that explored Leadbelly’s full humanity.”
Students found Jess’s lyrical deliverance of the poetry especially meaningful. Upper Niko Amber enjoyed his poem leadbelly sings to his #1 crew, as Jess incorporated the lyrics of the southern folksong Pick a Bale of Cotton into the poem’s stanzas, which reflected on his imprisonment and labor. “While I had read those exact same words in English class, it was a whole new experience listening to Tyehimba sing the words we had so passively glossed over,” Amber said. “He was a captivating performer, engaging both our senses of sight and hearing for a more complete understanding of Leadbelly’s life.”
Jess also presented excerpts of Olio, a collection named after the theatrical term meaning a hodgepodge of varied theatrical acts. Fitting its namesake, Jess examined minstrel performers’ transition from plantation slavery to a less overt servitude where, marked as entertainers, overburdened black women and men mocked themselves for the audience’s merriment.
“Minstrel shows shrouded a lingering white ownership of the black body,” Jess said. “I wanted Olio to give witness to the shows’ effect on specific performers and humanize them beyond their particular talent. I wanted to breathe life into these two-dimensional black caricatures, make them three-dimensional characters.”
Jess impressed students in attendance with his application of various literary forms and craft elements. Senior Ivy Tran praised Jess’s two-sided concrete poem detailing the lives of conjoined minstrel twins Millie and Christine McCoy. One side of the poem reads as Millie’s voice, while the other reads as Christine’s voice, but Jess’s adept arrangement of the poem enabled readers to read both sides of the poem as one cohesive narrative.
“I was amazed by his McCoy twins poem and the voicing and counter-voicing in it,” Tran said. “The twins’ double consciousness contributed to the complexity of the poem, while its multi-faceted legibility maintained clarity.”
At his question and answer session, Jess explained his writing process. Both Olio and leadbelly are grounded in history, so Jess had to balance factual accuracy with artistry. “The form has to complement the context and the purpose of the poem. Each decision is made taking the other factors into account, aimed at creating the maximum impact of the poem,” he said.
Jess also discussed his research process, saying, “[leadbelly] was more than seven years of writing and research. More time was spent on research. One of the driving factors in choosing each of [my subjects] was their obscurity and whether I could do a good job of representing them.”
English Instructor William Perdomo, who has known Jess since the 1990s when they both read their poetry at the Guild Complex in Chicago, commended him for his unique merging of history and visionary verse. “He’s a historian, a legislator, a fact checker, an innovator,” Perdomo said. “His poetry fuses classic, formalist tendencies with a blues sensibility. He’s a poet of the re-imagination.”