Interview: Tyehimba Jess
Portions of this interview have been condensed or lightly edited for clarity.
I first saw Tyehimba Jess read in 2017. His roots in slam poetry were evident in his thoughtful intonation and irregular emphasis, though I most vividly remember his performance of “The Dunbar-Booker Double Shovel,” a contrapuntal poem written and formatted in such a way that it could be folded in half, looped into a cylinder, and even twisted into a möbius strip while still functioning as a poem. This live demonstration mesmerized me and a crowd of fellow high-schoolers.
While known in part for his creative forms and syncopation, Jess’ work is also dense with history, exploring Black American performance, protest, and music in his books leadbelly and Olio, the latter winning the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Next semester, Jess will join the Yale English Department, teaching a class in the Beinecke Library that reflects these interests (ENGL 464 – Diggin’ in the Historical Crates: Breathing Poetry into the Archives). I was fortunate to get to discuss several of these themes with him, and I look forward to seeing him around campus in the spring.
Bryce Morales: First, I just wanted to say welcome to Yale! What are you looking forward to? What drove your decision to join us?
Tyehimba Jess: One thing that really does interest me is the Beinecke collection and the archives there that have all kinds of treasures in them. There are some historical issues I am interested in researching and exploring there. I also have a connection with the Beinecke through Cave Canem, which is the organization that really helped foster me quite a bit. We are actually working in some capacity with the Beinecke in terms of storing our archives there. I have some now twenty-four-year-old photos that I’d like to see put in the archive, and just to explore and see it for myself, because I’m Board President of Cave Canem now. I’ve been doing that for—coming up on about two years now. And, of course, the students sound very interesting over there. There should be some interesting conversations and some challenging subjects to come up and explore with them, while they explore their own histories or the histories that they choose to explore.
BM: Definitely. You’re teaching a class next semester in the Beinecke about merging history and poetry writing. What do you find valuable about that approach, and why do you draw so much from history in your own writing?
TJ: You know, there’s a lot of great stories in history, and particularly as a Black poet, I think there’s a lot of Black history that has been left to the wayside, ignored and whitewashed and destroyed and erased in so many different ways. Poetry is a great way to explore the cracks and crevices and truths of those histories, and bring them to a more popular audience. So that’s what I’m really interested in. In a lot of ways, I’m just a storyteller that happens to use poetry as my medium.
BM: That makes sense. It’s pretty clear, both in leadbelly and in Olio, you have dug up a lot of specific characters. Some are already well known, but you’re trying to either write through their voices or write about them. Could you talk a little about how you deal with creating specific voices and adapting primary source information to verse?
TJ: I think the primary thing is doing a lot of research and trying to explore what the subject matter is. That means getting multiple original sources from different perspectives, exploring them as much as possible, and also understanding the era you’re writing in, in order to get a better understanding of the nuance of the people you’re dealing with and the rationale behind their decisions. And finally, the reality is that there’s gonna be a bunch of you in their voice. But what I try to do is imagine myself in the position that the subject finds themself in, and try to write from that perspective. I’m still there, but I guess I’m cloaked, in a certain kind of way. So it becomes a way of exploring history, but also exploring the possibilities of oneself and the ramifications of the history as it ripples through time, from a hundred years ago until today.
BM: I’m a history major, but I also love poetry writing, so this is fascinating for me to hear about. Something you mentioned is trying to get students to think about their own histories as well. Why do you take that approach? And how do you deal with that in your writing?
TJ: I think one thing that we write about is to figure out who we are. No matter the question we’re approaching, part of what we’re asking, I would suggest, is who we are. The other part of that question is ‘What is going on? Why are these things happening around me?’ History is a great way to figure out the cause and effect of why we got to where we are, and how I have been shaped to react or to understand the world in the way that I understand it. So I think history teaches a lot of great lessons in that way.
BM: Another thing I wanted to ask about was how formally interesting your your poems are, in terms of space on the page—the multi-directional poems like the McCoy twins syncopated sonnets, or the foldable poems like “The Dunbar-Booker Double Shovel” and “The Bert Williams/George Walker Paradox.” All of those seem incredibly innovative and frankly unusual— What is that sort of formal innovation trying to reflect?
TJ: I think there were a few things I was trying to reflect. One of them was a dialectic. In other words, those are contrapuntal poems. They’re one dialogue. They’re one voice against another, and they form a counterpointed conversation, and that became a theme of the book. It also became a theme because we were going back in time, excavating people who did not have a voice, and enabling them to encounter people and be in dialogue with them in a unique way, to give them an opportunity to shout back, so to speak. Another issue I was looking at was the phenomenon of ragtime and syncopation, because syncopation is a distinct characteristic of ragtime. So I wanted to explore that syncopation in terms of digging into that idea and exploring how it illuminated our understanding of not just the music but the people in the music. And lastly, it became a kind of thesis for the book, a kind of question for the book: How far can one push a contrapuntal poem? Can you push it beyond the borders of the page, so that the reader gets to take the page out of the book and explore new forms? Does manipulation of the form enhance our understanding of the subject at hand? So it’s always about form following function, and function answering form for me. If it doesn’t, then it teeters on the edge of being a gimmick, so it’s really about making as much of the form answer issues or questions that the subject raises.
BM: Right. I guess I’m wondering what units you think of, then, when assembling a poem. Do you just have to see the whole structure ahead of time for the entire poem? Are you able to think one line at the time, or one couplet at a time, or one stanza at a time? How do you go about that genesis of a poem?
TJ: I think I do have an idea for generally what the poem is going to look like. But when you get into it, line by line, you don’t really know exactly what’s going to happen. I mean, you have a vague idea of ‘X is going to be on this side, Y is going to be on that side, and there’s going to be these various points of discussion.’ But I think part of the energy of that kind of exercise is letting go of what you may think the possible responses or possible questions will be that come out of that experiment. And also, when you go back and revise, it could go in a few different directions.
BM: I wanted to go back to something you mentioned earlier, which was around sound. I’ve heard you read in person and in videos, and clearly you pay a lot of attention, both in the contrapuntal poems and just generally, to rhythm and sound. How much priority do you give that while you’re writing, and how do you craft a distinct sound?
TJ: Well, I came up through slam. I was on the Green Mill poetry slam team in ‘99 and 2000, and one of the great things I learned through that experience was the way you can change the tone of a line or a poem through the way you deliver it aurally, into the room. Also, I think it’s influenced a lot by the music that the poem is trying to be in conversation with, and the possibilities of the instruments in that music. In the end, it’s an opportunity to talk to the audience. I like to feel like I’m being talked to versus at, and that’s where I like to take my work. I think it’s a different answer for everybody, regarding how they want to bring their poems into the air, so to speak. For me, I really enjoy coming close to inhabiting the personas, because that’s really what I’m doing. I’m doing a lot of persona work as much as I can.
BM: One last question. You mentioned music as one source of inspiration. I’m wondering, generally, what else inspires you, whether it’s music or perhaps things you’re reading these days?
TJ: I think that whenever I’m writing about the past, I’m thinking about the present and the future. So I’m definitely thinking about the current political landscape, and how what’s in the past is resonating today. For instance, we’re teetering on the brink of World War Three at this very moment, as they were—in Olio, they’re coming out of World War One. There’s a lot of similarities, if you look at the ways these things escalate and happen, it’s unfortunate. So I look at things like that, and I feel like I’m trying to speak into the headlines of today using the headlines of yesterday.
Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named Leadbelly one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER | Bryce Morales is the Editor-in-Chief of The Yale Literary Magazine.
