OLIO - TYEHIMBA JESS

Now this is what I’m looking for in poetry. Jess’ book got a lot of attention when it came out a few years ago, but I didn’t get around to reading it until just now. The book is poetry in the broadest sense, though, to be sure, it does include some straight-forward poetry; it is an exploration of Black music in the generation that straddles emancipation, it includes the aforementioned poems as well as fictional interviews, a running litany of attacks on Black churches in America, short biographies of real figures like the conjoined McKoy twins, Blind Tom Wiggins, Henry “Box” Brown and half a dozen others, fold-out sections, drawings, and a new poetic form (or, at least, new to me) which Jess calls a syncopated sonnet which involves two voices speaking at once, their individual lines are side by side, which can be read one then the other, or alternating back and forth or any number of even more creative ways. Olio, after all, is the name for the “medley” section of minstrel shows that eventually evolved into vaudeville. Jess does a great job of invoking this sense of lots of things going on a once that can cohere in all sorts of different configurations, the whole things sort of writhes. One of the central stories involves a Black, disfigured WWI veteran who travels around the country as part of his railroad job and tries to interview people about Scott Joplin, perhaps the best known of all the early musicians involved in this book. This is perhaps the deepest but hardly the only exploration of this generation of folks, people who had been born either right before or right after the end of the Civil War and what sort of art they were able to create. This is the explosion of creativity that will eventually yield Jazz, Country, Folk and Blues and through that basically all modern American music. It was so interesting to see this dynamic and era explored in poetry. The poetry itself doesn’t sacrifice erudition or get in the way of the real history he is talking about, nor does it prize poetic excellence over real facts. Jess does both. Imma keep an eye on him.