#Tyehimba Jess

[poetsandwriters]

Announcing our March/April issue! Inside you’ll find a conversation between poets Patricia Smith and Tyehimba Jess, an interview with Rakia Clark of Mariner Books, Emma Hine’s lineup of 10 “award-winning” residencies, Gabriella Graceffo’s advice on surviving a toxic workshop, Jennifer De Leon’s tips on how to prepare for a writing residency, and more. Read more: at.pw.org/MarchApril2023

[blaqekklesia]

I'm made in the image of a God that knows flight but stays me rock still to tell a story ancient as slavery, old as the first time hands clasped together for mercy and parted to find only their own salty blessing of sweat.

Tyehimba Jess

[waywordsstudio]

Review: "Olio" by Tyehimba Jess -

Jess's poetry tests the limits of form, using those limits--just as that of black music does--as themselves meaningful reflections on African American ragtime and US reconstruction history, on the life of Scott Joplin and the strategies that counter cultural appropriation. Stunning.

[anomalocariscanadensis]

can anyone recommend me some poetry with interesting structural features? my touchpoint here is Tyehimba Jess's Olio, which contains some poems with split lines that can be read three different ways - the left component, right component, and full line all make sense in context, and the poem is different (but always coherent) depending on which path you take through it. anything even remotely comparable to that would be v appreciated since this is impossible to google

[sixtyfivehundredinvisiblebirds]

what I read in 2022

2022 We Ride Upon Sticks- Quan Barry How to Not Be Afraid of Everything- Jane Wong Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket: Stories- Hilma Wolitzer The Rabbit Hutch- Tess Gunty The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams- Jonathan Ned Katz AND Lesbian Love- Eve Adams (in same volume) Thistlefoot- GennaRose Nethercott Bluest Nude- Ama Codjoe The Master Letters- Lucy Brock-Broido (reread) Family Lexicon- Natalia Ginzburg (tr. Jenny McPhee) The Whole Story- Ali Smith The Rupture Tense- Jenny Xie Bad Rabbi: And other strange but true stories from the Yiddish press- Eddie Portnoy A Tale for the Time Being- Ruth Ozeki Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands- Kate Beaton Wandering Stars- Sholem Aleichem (tr. Aliza Shevrin)   Moldy Strawberries- Caio Fernando Abreu (tr. Bruna Dantas Lobato) Sarahland- Sam Cohen Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency- Chen Chen Elephant- Soren Stockman Craft in the Real World- Matthew Salesses Life of the Garment- Deborah Gorlin Olio- Tyehimba Jess In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen- Devin Kelly The Wild Fox of Yemen- Threa Almontaser Song- Brigit Pegeen Kelly Qorbanot- Alisha Kaplan w/ art by Tobi Kahn Gold that Frames the Mirror- Brandon Melendez Foreign Bodies- Kimiko Hahn A Little Devil in America- Hanif Abdurraqib Muscle Memory- Kyle Carrero Lopez not without small joys- Emmanuel Oppong-Yeboah Too Bright To See & Alma- Linda Gregg Borne- Jeff VanderMeer Harvard Square- André Aciman What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat- Aubrey Gordon The City We Became- N.K. Jemison Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints- Joan Acocella Vladimir-Julia May Jonas Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch- Rivka Galchen Lessons in Being Tender-Headed- Janae Johnson Against Heaven- Kemi Alabi How The Word Is Passed- Clint Smith Earth Room- Rachel Mannheimer True Biz- Sara Nović Motherhood- Sheila Heti The Fire Next Time- James Baldwin Diary of a lonely girl or the battle against free love- Miriam Karpilove tr. Jessica Kirzane Mezzanine- Matthew Olzmann Customs- Solmaz Sharif Edge of House- Dzvinia Orlowsky Only as the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems- Dorianne Laux DMZ Colony- Don Mee Choi Stay Safe- Emma Hine Spring Tides- Jacques Poulin, trn. Shira Fleishman (reread) No One Is Talking About This- Patricia Lockwood Unaccompanied- Javier Zamora Where I Was From- Joan Didion Air Raid- Polina Barskova tr. Valtzina Mort Dispatch- Cam Awkward-Rich Bury It- sam sax A Cruelty Special to Our Species- Emily Jungmin Yoon Homie- Danez Smith Dreaming of You- Melissa Lozada-Oliva

[rustbeltjessie]

Tyehimba Jess, “leadbelly: from sugarland” (from leadbelly)

[Text ID under cut]

i push groan from gut, birthing a bloodlight into song, black wave of texas roil rippin’ cross cane field, heat mirage of field holler syncopation, missin’ link in a chain of gospel moans. i stand here gideon sung, swinging sickle across cane where i record the roadmap of pain, the way this confection bends my back to a blood brown halo of motion, fills my grip with blistered flesh, twists the sun into high noon heat from dawn ‘til dusk. every day marches crushed and crippled into sin sugared misery, bottom lands blessed with our sweltered hymn curse.

i will tell you now and only once: only one way out. past bloodhound and 20:20 gunshot, past swamp and gator tooth, past lynch rope and lash: work these muthafuckas down. outsweat and outshine even the hardest cracker smile, ‘til they think you death’s scarecrow, ‘til your grin tilts itself into their daydreams, and your field holler moves the white chalked nerve in them to wonder black, pauses, tells them the truth in the lie they wanna hear: how you is more a man than they ever wet dreamed to be, how your voice carves the bludgeon of legend into a bent down sound that sways up earth. how one black sound can tremble down these walls, how i’ll pick up each and every one of the twelve humming strings and make a chorus of auction blocks and mama wails, how the midnight special cries for me in a single streak of smoke headed north.

[keplercryptids]

What the Wind, Rain, and Thunder Said to Tom

Hear how sky opens its maw to swallow Earth? To claim each being and blade and rock with its spit? Become your own full sky. Own every damn sound that struts through your ears. Shove notes in your head till they bust out where your eyes supposed to shine. Cast your lean brightness across the world and folk will stare when your hands touch piano. Bend our breath through each fingertip uncurled and spread upon the upright’s eighty-eight pegs. Jangle up its teeth until it can tell our story the way you would tell your own: the way you take darkness and make it moan.

Tyehimba Jess From Olio Wave Books 2016

[stevepotterwrites]

Tyehimba Jess reads his poem, “Mercy,” and talks about the blues.

[amillionmillionvoices]

Idioglossia ❤️

By Tyehimba Jess in Olio. They’re syncopated sonnets.

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935 --Tyehimba Jess

when your man comes home from prison, when he comes back like the wound and you are the stitch, when he comes back with pennies in his pocket and prayer fresh on his lips, you got to wash him down first.

you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism back into what he was before gun barrels and bars chewed their claim in his hide and spit him stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.

you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s stench loose from his hair, scrape curse and confession from the welted and the smooth, the hard and the soft, the furrowed and the lax.

you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face between your palms, take crease and lid and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water, and when he opens his eyes you tell him calm and sure how a woman birthed him back whole again.

[smallpressdistribution]

8 SPD Books Regarding Song

In This Month's SPD Clickhole by Lizzy Lemieux

The other day I saw that Lana Del Rey's Summertime Sadness had made its way back onto the (or at least, some) charts, despite coming out SEVEN years ago. This begs important questions, namely "Is Hot Girl Summer canceled???", and if so, "How many Reese's Peanut Butter Cups can I eat in bed while rewatching Euphoria before summertime sadness turns into year round chronic depression?" 

Basically, good music has a staying power. Even bad music has a staying power. (I just saw EW put out a "Friday" themed playlist to celebrate Rebecca Black's viral video released in 2011.) I'm not sure why. Maybe because we project our emotions onto it and factor it into our personal identity. Maybe because it marks important life events, i.e. weddings, breakups, funerals. Maybe because some songs trigger certain memories. For me, Hozier recalls the Staten Island Ferry. Dynamite conjures a middle school assembly. 

Which brings us to this month's handpicked theme: Song. From John Lennon to Buzzcocks to Nicki Minaj to Bob Dylan, these 8 books will get lyrics stuck in your head and help you ace Lana Del Rey trivia bowls (if they aren't already a national event, can anybody get on that?) 

Lana Del Rey: Her Life in 94 Songs (Squint Books, 2016): Lana Del Rey is elusive. She seems to inhabit an "violently kitsch" other-world. As Mannan, whose thesis was on "academic notions of authenticity in 'Born to Die'", writes in his forward, "I find myself in [her world] too-- sad and sexual and slipping between reality and another time." The book feels like liner notes, if liner notes traced the artist's origin back to demos and Elizabeth Grant and considered how the music industry and her poetic predecessors shaped her verse. 

Leadbelly (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2005): From Pulitzer Prize winning author Tyehimba Jess comes Leadbelly, a poetic unearthing of the blues and folk singer Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. Voices of multiple speakers weave together and layer the narrative, beginning with Leadbelly's mother and father and moving to his wife Martha and folklorist John Lomax. Poems which appear as dialogue allow the reader to listen in on conversations between famous artists, and others innovative forms, like the contrapuntal, invite the reader to lend their voice in personal performance. 

Collected Lyrics: Pete Shelley (Eyewear Publishing, 2018): For the first time Pete Shelley's lyrics, from both Buzzcocks and from his solo career, are collected in a single volume. Spanning over 40 years, allowing readers to return to Punk's first wave and to the singer himself who passed in 2018. Collected Lyrics also includes an introduction by Buzzcocks’ seminal designer Malcolm Garrett.

Cuntry (Trembling Pillow Press, 2017): Entirely uncensored and graphically shameless, Kristin Sanders poetry collection considers the nearly universal objectification of the female body, rendering the seemingly separate worlds of country music and porn as parallel universes. Sanders identifies each genre's female ideal, or, female "object". "The cuntry object has to a good one-- a very good girl", Sanders writes, making us to wonder, what makes a girl good? Many of the poems in "Cuntry" respond to existing country songs while responding to our questions about the female object herself. In "Daddy's Money Sung by Ricochet", Sanders upacks the hidden criteria for goodness found in the lines, "She's got her daddy's money, her mama's good looks. More laughs than a stack of comic books." Among those criteria? A cuntry girl must be: American, White, a child of a two parent household, etc. 

Album (Wendy's Subway, 2019): Album is a Mariana Valencia autobiographical solo-performance encapsulated in a book, compiling song, dance, and text. The reduction of an auditory and visual experience to a singularly visual creates a unique form in which musical direction floats in the margins and an entire section, entitled "THIS IS WHAT I LOOK LIKE WHEN I DANCE FOR MYSELF IN FRONT OF YOU", is devoted to black and white cut-and-paste freeze-frames on pale pink paper. 

Elizabeth Ellen Poems (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2018): Elizabeth Allen muses on music's saturation of our daily lives. From driving with the radio on, to asking our dates their favorite song, and judging them accordingly. In this 400 page collection Elizabeth Ellen riffs off songs by Nicki Minaj, Bob Dylan, Elliott Smith, and Riot Grrrl, using them as abstract entrance points into personal narrative on marriage, motherhood, and mental illness. 

UnNatural Music: John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Cambridge 1969  (Allardyce, Barnett, Publishers, 2016): "I do not have to tell you have disgraceful John's attitude was and Yoko's is", opens Anthony Barnett's concise tell-all on the famous coupling who bridged the avant-garde and pop-worlds. Barnett has long kept silent on the experience of producing Lennon's first public performance away from The Beatles, "UnNatural Music". This book serves to "set the record straight" though personal narrative, contemporary documents and ephemera.

Yr Skull A cathedral (Publishing Genius Press, 2018):  Param Anand Singh's Yr Skull A Cathedral is cacophony/symphony, an amalgamation of voices sourced from Hellraiser to Rumi in internet acronyms and traditional poetic forms. At the risk of being reductive, it is a collection of poetry which takes the form of sapphics, ghazals, translations and song lyrics. Among the source material are poems by Lorca, Alfonsina Storni, Gurdas Maan, Rumi, Bhai Nand Lal Ji, Caetano Veloso, Cesar Vallejo, and the authors own band, Nuclear Power Pants. 

[blaqekklesia]

My God is the living God, God of the impertinent exile. An outcast who carved me into an outcast carved by sheer and stony will to wander the desert in search of deliverance the way a mother hunts for her wayward child.

Tyehimba Jess, "Hagar in the Wilderness"

[waywordsstudio]

3 Word Review: “Olio” by Tyehimba Jess -

Fascinating genre-pushing poetry collection around African American music c. 1850-1930 and its cultural appropriation, including the story of Scott Jopllin. Extraordinary!

[melancholyessayist]

I’ve been really into poetry lately, and I’d really love some recommendations. Thus far I’ve really enjoyed Monica Ferrell, Erica Dawson, Mina Loy, and Tyehimba Jess. Please please, I wanna read more!

[among-the-ruin]

Tyehimba Jess’ Double Sonnet (with Kwame Dawes  and Rita Dove, Dodge Poetry Festival, NJ)

[whenharrymetsallys]

them old time reelers, they go down slow and ragged, howlin' life raw like a blues song 'til fever's run cold. till' the last breath's gone.

cab calloway on leadbelly in leadbelly by tyehimba jess