Tyehimba Jess earned his BA from the University of Chicago and his MFA from New York University. He is the author of leadbelly, a biographical poetry collection about the history of the blues musician, and his most recent book, Olio, for which he received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Olio is a selection of poems that tell the true tales of real characters who performed in minstrel shows at the turn of the nineteenth century.
I attended one of Jess’ readings at NYU in late January. A crowd of about thirty listened in stunned silence as Jess read a selection from Olio. The poem,“Millie and Christine McKoy,” was projected onto the wall. He demonstrated the versatility of this specific poem by reading it from the top left to the bottom right, then from the bottom left to the top right and down again. He explained how this particular contrapuntal poem–a multidimensional piece constructed out of two or more poems–could be read in a variety of different ways at the discretion of the reader.
A few weeks later, I got on the phone with Jess to talk about his writing process.
12TH STREET: When you wrote the contrapuntal poems, were you actively thinking about the possibility of reading them in multiple directions?
JESS: Yeah I was. Not initially but you know, sometimes you start an experiment and you discover things you didn’t intend on discovering. That was part of the issue with dealing with contrapuntal poems. Basically, I decided early on that there were going to be some contrapuntal forms. Particularly in the sonnet. The sonnet is a very amenable, flexible, forgiving form. If you can’t get it said in 14 lines, then you really… you know. That’s just enough room and it’s not too much. So I started with sonnets and the idea became to explore how far I could push the contrapuntal poem. And as a result, the poems in the book were generated. There were others that I could have added, but at a certain point I was just like, “I need to write the rest of the book.”
STREET: What do you think the form of the contrapuntal poem does for the stories themselves? How does it relate to what you’re trying to say?
JESS: Yeah, well there are a few different concepts at play. One is the idea of double consciousness. W.E.B. Dubois wrote about the idea of double consciousness: that black folks have one consciousness that is employed under circumstances when they are around their community and another when they are in a hostile, racist environment. It’s essentially about having two minds.
The other is the idea of dialogue as a dialectic–a historical dialectic. Imagine a conversation between two people, but one is disenfranchised and the other one is privileged. And they are meeting on an equal playing ground–on equal footing–in the context of a poem. And it’s also the idea of call and response, you know? The idea of “clapback” as they call it today. Or in the case of the poems that use excerpts from other texts. Those are found poems. Like the one with Mark Twain, the one with Irving Berlin, you know. Those are really about historical call and response, or “clapback”. The idea of someone going back and resurrecting the voice and seeing the ways that it can communicate with the text of the privileged. So there are all kinds of ideas that are attended to the contrapuntal poem. And the other one is giving the reader a different kind of agency. You can go sideways and down and up and diagonal and the reader can experience a different kind of freedom and agency in their exploration of the poem. That’s about play. Simply play. The idea that you can improvise within in the text and have fun and play around. Take it into the idea of dimensionality. Taking it from a caricature to a character. You know, taking a poem that’s on the X-Y axis, and bending it into a torus. Something that has multiple dimensions.
STREET: On the subject of the minstrel shows, where did you come up with the inspiration?
JESS: The initial impetus of the book was black musicians before the era of recording. There wasn’t a popular or large-scale commercial industry in music recording until around the second decade of the 20th century.
I was interested in the black musicians that were making sounds before then. And when you’re studying folks from back in that time, it’s really hard to ignore the minstrel show because it was the premier form of American entertainment. It became clear to me that any musicians working in that era were in conversation with, or challenged by the minstrel show in various ways. It was almost impossible to get away from because it was so pervasive. So it became really also kind of stage in which to present the various characters in Olio. The Olio means a mixture of ingredients to come together to form a meal. In the context of the American theater, the Olio is a mixture of performances that fill out the middle part of the minstrel show. This is a mixture of folks from different artistic disciplines. It just became hard to ignore the influence of the minstrel show. So I just decided to make it the foundation of the text.
It was really the foundation of the of the American entertainment industry. When I say that I mean that it was pervasive, it was all over the place, it was very common to find minstrel shows. Minstrel shows essentially became the foundation of Broadway. Because the Olio was essentially involved in the Vaudeville, and Vaudeville is critical to our understanding of Broadway. So you know, when you’re looking at the minstrel shows you’re really looking at a kind of entertainment that is… or really I should say a kind of psychological warfare that is both political and social, and that had been hoisted as American “wholesome entertainment”. You look at old cartoons from the 1920s, and 30s, and 40s, they have all kinds of references to the minstrel show. You look at all kinds of old movies, the very first talkies ever produced, the very first motion pictures with sound–that was Al Jolson jazz singing, and he played a minstrel. He played a minstrel with blackface in a minstrel show. You look at all the major film stars, the first film stars of the millions of them either depicted minstrelsy in their movies or came from a minstrel kind of background. So they’re really… It’s really in the DNA, the foundation of the DNA of American entertainment.
STREET: How do you think that this book’s message fares in a more modern context?
JESS: Well, I think about the kind of choices that I’m making in regards to my art, and in regards to my decisions to work around, through, with, and against stereotype. And under what circumstances. I have a lot more agency than the folks in the book, but at the same time, there are some of the same ethical questions at play. You know, to what degree am I going to sell out, to what degree am I going to engage in the hypocrisy of stereotypes? I think that these are the same questions that pertain to black artists today. But also I think, on a wider scale, these are the same kind of issues that are attended to, or that are in the purview of, any artist trying to honestly approach their existence in the world. Because there are all kinds of stereotypes that you can fall into. What are your ethical lines, and what are you willing to do and not to do? If you choose to do it and you do feel as if you’ve compromised yourself, then, well, is it worth it?
I don’t know the answer to all of those questions. There is a lot of ugliness in terms of the oppression or the kind of atmosphere of degradation that the minstrel show brought, and the way that it was a kind of vehicle for discrimination. Jim Crow was the very first character of the minstrel show. The very very very first minstrel show character. And later on, Jim Crow was the term used for the last segregation. That’s the kind of psychological warfare that I’m talking about, because behind the title of Jim Crow laws is a caricature. And which is really an excuse for the idea that it is essential to separate from someone that looks like a Jim Crow or people that act like a Jim Crow: feeble-minded, weak, low morals, etc. All of that is present. All of that oppression and that kind of psychological pressure is present throughout the book.
But at the same time, there are people attempting to follow their artistic views in the very beginning, the very first generation of freed black people. How do they approach that? What do they do? How is their hitherto captive genius expressed outside of the field, outside of the plantation, outside of bondage? What is this blocking of creativity, what does it look like? How do they manage it under these very difficult circumstances, where they’re almost required to perform in a minstrelized way? They come up with answers over and over again to preserve their dignity and to also ply their trade and art. So I think that that was really the key thing that I was interested in. The way that these folks were able to use ingenious and innovative methods in order to overcome the difficult circumstances they were in.
This is part one of a two-part interview with Tyehimba. For part two, check back June 18.