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. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series and was named one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005” by The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review. A Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, Jess is the recipient of a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2006 Whiting Award in Poetry, a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. His fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
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leadbellyPoemsFrom"Governor Pat Neff / August 25, 1924 "
Dear Yu Honor
Yu may rmember me when yu visits prison
here I am Walter Boyd Leadbelly #42738
yo best big niger from Sugarland Farm
wit my stella guitar and songs yu like
I play it all like a black machine for yu loud an slow
Down in the valley What a frend we have in
Jesus an I Sugarland shuffle like pickin cotton far as
eye cn see I need my freedom like yu said yu was gone give me
yur honor all I need a second chance rmembr me
yu sed I was som niger som niger need they pardon
GOVERNOR
thank yu for yo kind kind hand yo wisdum.
Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.
leadbelly:Poems -
leadbellyPoemsFrom"Ethnographer John Lomax Speaks of His Vocation"
This country needs a Columbus like me.
I have sighted a dark territory
to map, mount, and measure: its fat, prickly
fruit weighed for value and veracity.
I stake my claim on the breath of each Black
willing to open his mouth and spit out
southern legend’s soiled roots. I will blue
the pale ears of Ivy League lecture halls
with secrets snatched from between Negro jaws.
They seek primitive man’s oracle,
covet my careful codification
of these ethereal chants born from strife,
the way I pen it down in black on white
page and bid it dance; the feral language
of a folk bent and broken as the notes
grinding up through marrow and memory.
Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.
leadbelly:Poems -
leadbellyPoemsFrom"lomax v. leadbelly in new york: letters to home, 1934"
i am disturbed and distressed at this man messin’ with my music,
his beginning to show off preachin’ how a songster gotta be pure
in his songs and talk —like he got a deed to folkways,
when his money value is the way blues sweats out a man
to be like prayer
natural and sincere set free from smotherin’
as he was while in prison: in a solitary cell.
of course, fact is,
as this tendency grows, this two time jailbird loser –
he will lose his charm he ain’t ‘bout to lose nerve, too,
and become only an
ordinary, old timey,
low ordinary busted out,
harlem countrified
nigger.
Copyright 2004 by Tyehimba Jess. Published by Verse Press. Reprinted with permission of the author and Wave Books.
leadbelly:Poems
“Tyehimba Jess, like the subject of his National Poetry Series-winning debut, coaxes an astonishingly rich world from the wood and steel scraps of the life he finds before him. Employing an impressive variety of voices and forms, he plays all twelve strings strapped to the box, all the bars of the jails Huddie Ledbetter lived within: ‘sit down and let me tell you mama, / ’bout the worry iron wrought on a man.’” —David Daniel, Ploughshares [on leadbelly]
“ . . . while the classic binaries—black and white, man and woman, powerful and powerless—play their part, the collection’s strength lies in its contradictory forms; from biography to lyric to hard-driving prose poem, boast to song, all are soaked in the rhythm and dialect of Southern blues and the demands of honoring one’s talent. Readers will notice these poems teach us how to read them, but more so, these poems demand performance, recalling that space beyond the page: the stage. Jess has crafted this collection in the logic of its subject, that is, rhythm and performance, proving that a good poem—slam or not—neither needs nor abandons its poet once on the page.” —Publishers Weekly [on leadbelly]
“There is an orality in Jess’s prose poems that lends itself directly to this project. A powerful intertwining of history and blues told through poetry. Jess has created a unique book with a distinct voice that any lover of blues or student of American history needs.” —Booklist [on leadbelly]
Selected Works
