Coverage of Tyehimba Jess's Olio

Beginning in September, I'll coordinate an online reading group on Tyehimba Jess's Olio. In the meantime, I've been re-reading the book and also looking over reviews and interviews. Here's a round-up of pieces I've read.

2017
• July 15: The Unconventional Poetry Of Tyehimba Jess - Dan Wanschura - NPR

2016
• August 9: Olio - Douglas Luman - Found Poetry Review
• August 1: Tyehimba Jess - Olio [interview] - Anne Rasmussen - Late Night Library
• July 26: On Poetry - Michael Andor Brodeur - Boston Globe
• July 15: Poets Take Cues From Journalism In Recent Collections - NPR 
• July 9: Book Review: Olio - Shani Jamila - African Voices
• July 6: 20 Fun Fiction Books to Read at the Beach, As Chosen by Authors - Maris Kreizman - Vulture 
• July 5: Remixing the Resistant Voices of Black Musical Performance in the US - Scott Borchert - Hyperallergic
• June 27: Jess Honors Sissieretta Jones, First Afr-Am to Perform at Carnegie Hall - Stephen Raskauskas - 98.7wfmt
• June 21: DOGBYTES Interview: Tyehimba Jess - Cave Canem 
• May 5: Tyehimba Jess on Excavating Popular Music Through Poetry - Adam Fitzgerald - Lit Hub
• April 27: Voicing Counterpoint - Kyla Marshell - Poetry Foundation
• April 13: On Olio by Tyehimba Jess - Evie Shockley - On the Seawall
• April 9: Olio by Tyehimba Jess - Rob Fields - Bold as Love
• April 8: Book Covers of Note April 2016 - The Casual Optimist
• April 6: Olio - Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib - The Rumpus 
• April 5: The Work of Reclamation - Kaveh Akbar - Oxford American
• April 5: New Book of Poetry Making Waves - Brookline Booksmith
• April 4: Olio - Stephen Burt - Poets
• March 18: 13 Poetry Collections To Read For National Poetry Month - E. CE Miller - Bustle
• February 15: Olio - Publishers Weekly

Poems by Jess from Olio 
• "Blind Boone's Vision" - Poetry Foundation
• "Freedsong: Dream Song" - Poetry Foundation
• "Sam Patterson, Harlem, NY: Dec. 12, 1924" - Poetry Foundation
• Two Poems ("Alabaster Hands" and "Indian Combat") - Granta
• "Blind Boone's Apparitions" - The Spectrum

Related:
• Tyehimba Jess's Olio: African American cultural & historical studies 
• Tyehimba Jess's Olio and contemporary African American poetry
• Tyehimba Jess and the outstanding Olio
• Tyehimba Jess

From Leadbelly to Olio

Since 2005, I've been been reading and writing about Tyehimba Jess's book Leadbelly. I taught the book to various classes; used the book in reading groups; and blogged about the book on multiple occasions, including a crown of blog entries on the book last November. In retrospect, the concentrated attention on Jess's work prepared me to engage his powerful new volume Olio.

Jess's Leadbelly and Olio correspond to each other in all kinds of important ways. Both books concentrate on aspects of black music history. Both books present us with these fascinating cultural figures. Both books include interrelated sequences of poems. But in the end, Olio is a more ambitious book, covering a more multifaceted cast of characters and revealing Jess working through more poetic and prose modes of writing.

That's not a slight on Jess's first book, which remains one of my all-time favorite volumes of poetry books. I'd even go so far to say that Leadbelly served as the crucial gateway volume for getting me into contemporary poetry. Before that, I was deep into black arts poetry, and I read poets here and there. But Jess's work really prompted me to pay much closer attention and start charting what was taking place.

The cool thing about reading Olio is that you get a chance to see Jess developing ideas that he began experimenting with in Leadbelly. For instance, the end of his first volume includes a sequence of interrelated sonnets. In Olio, there's a sequence of sonnets focused on the Fisk Jubilee Singers that runs throughout the course of the book. There's a sequence on "Blind" Tom Wiggins as well.

In Leadbelly, Jess includes various contrapuntal poems, juxtaposing Leadbelly's and John Lomax's perspectives such as "leadbelly vs. lomax at the modern language association conference, 1934." Olio includes a variety of contrapuntal poems, and those poems achieve their most pointed effect as Jess presents accounts from of Millie and Christine McKoy, conjoined twins. What it means to encounter their linked and separate thoughts in individual poems is really captivating.

Jess clearly pursued serious research on Huddie Ledbetter to produce that first book. He went even further in Olio. He traces the lives and envisions the thinking of an even wider array of characters, including John William "Blind" Boone, Wiggins, the McKoy sisters, Scott Joplin, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, singer Sissieretta Jones, sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and performers Bert Williams, George Walker. I've been writing about contemporary poets as historical researchers for years now, and what Jess does in Olio is the case and point for that.    

Leadbelly, we're even clearer on now, was a testing ground for what Jess would get to now. The book -- even the extended size to make room for those contrapuntal poems -- gave this former spoken word artist important opportunities to figure out the possibilities of performing on the page. In Olio, Jess extends across the page and includes perforated pages in a few instances allowing readers to remove and rework select works.

And Leadbelly wasn't just a testing ground for Jess. That first book also did important work preparing some of us for Olio. I'm still in the early stages of taking in all that's happening here in this new volume. Some of what I'm grasping, though, is a result of what I learned re-reading Leadbelly over the years. Who knows what I'll be ready to do once I've fully absorbed the lessons of Olio?

Related:
• A Notebook on Tyehimba Jess
• Tyehimba Jess and the outstanding Olio

Tyehimba Jess's Olio: African American cultural & historical studies

Tyehimba Jess's new book converses with a range of contemporary volumes of African American poetry. At the same time, Olio also converges with a range of other works on African American culture and history. The book touches on histories of black music, entertainment, migration, and more.

Jess's focus on black music, for instance, reminded me of Amiri Baraka's work, such as in his book Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (2009) and long before that Black Music (1968) and before that Blues People (1963). In Olio, Jess takes us on journeys with several different black musicians: Scott Joplin, John William "Blind" Boone, Sissieretta Jones,The Fisk Jubilee Singers, and "Blind" Tom Wiggins.
 
There's also a story of migration or travel embedded in Olio. Jess presents this figure Julius Trotter traveling across the country interviewing people about Scott Joplin. The Trotter thread caught my attention as the idea of African Americans and movement, of a different kind, coincides with what I've been learning while covering Isabel Wilkerson's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). 

And you know it's difficult, while considering all those characters, histories of black performance, representations of blackface and the stage in Jess's Olio, to avoid considering Middleton Harris's The Black Book, which Toni Morrison served as editor for while working at Random House in the early 1970s. The Black Book offers these really rich, nonlinear, and sometimes hidden histories. And so too does Olio. 

But why stop with The Black Book? Jess covers the kind of historical ground and abundance of characters that will prompt you to flip through the pages of reference works like Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. That, or Wikipedia.  

Either way, when you're reading Olio, you'll realize that the book results in part from a poet pursuing extensive research. During or after the reading, I was prompted to  pursue more research on the intriguing figures Jess introduced. 

Related:
• A Notebook on Tyehimba Jess
• Tyehimba Jess and the outstanding Olio

A visual recap of blog entries on Tyehimba Jess's Olio

Tyehimba Jess's wonderful book Olio is a finalist for a National Book Critics Award and for the Kingsley Poetry Award and for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. You know I'm excited. Here's a recap of blog entries I produced on Olio some months back when it was released. Click on the links to go to the posts.   

• August 10: Coverage of Tyehimba Jess's Olio  

• April 11: Poets as Researchers: Tyehimba Jess and Robin Coste Lewis

• April 3: Amiri Baraka and Tyehimba Jess: on the Music and Musicians 

Tyehimba Jess and the outstanding Olio

Tyehimba Jess's new book Olio (2016) is really a remarkable feat of scholarship and artistry.  On the one hand, the book reveals careful attention to historical records, noting a variety of important events and cultural figures. At the same time, the volume displays an inventive mind highly capable of imagining -- in eloquent verse -- the unrecorded musings of extraordinary people.

Henry 'Box' Brown, the Fisk Jubilee Singers,  Paul Laurence Dunbar, Scott Joplin, Sissieretta Jones, Booker T. Washington, "Blind" Tom Wiggins, Bert Williams, George Walker, and Edmonia Lewis are among the main characters in Olio. Their stories correspond to specific moments in history. Jess clearly pursued an extensive amount research in order to bring so much information together in a single volume.

[Related: From Leadbelly to Olio]

The book contains persona poems, contrapuntal poems, imagined interviews, interrelated series of sonnets, and poems that appear on fold-outs. The links between the many poems indicate that Jess was doing more than simply writing poems; instead, he weaved together a tapestry of compositions. The intricate design and interconnections of the poems also speak to the poet's creativity, not to mention his intense focus on detail.  

One central purpose of Olio is to illuminate the experiences of African American artists who may have largely been lost to history. Jess takes up the noble and trying effort of filling in all the spaces and silences surrounding figures like Wiggins, Joplin, Williams, and those various other historical figures. Jess presents the imagined ruminations of Millie and Christine McKoy, conjoined twins and former slaves, and he also offers poetic accounts from paradoxical performers such as Williams & Walker, and Ernest Hogan.

The book contains photographs of some of the key figures in the book, line drawings by Jessica Lynne Brown, an extended timeline, bibliographies of books and newspaper sources for the project, and explanations for the pages that are perforated for easy removal. All these parts contribute to the overall complexity of the volume.

In the coming weeks and months, I'm looking forward to reading, re-reading, and blogging about this powerful book, Olio. 

Related:
• A Notebook on Tyehimba Jess

Tyehimba Jess's Olio and contemporary African American poetry

Tyehimba Jess's remarkable book Olio didn't come out of thin air. In addition to emerging from Leadbelly and Jess's extensive scholarship and artistry, the book connects to a wide range of contemporary volumes of poetry.  As I reflected on Olio, I thought about several books from the past several years that got me to this point. Books like:

2008 - Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler
2009 - Rita Dove's Sonata Mulattica
2009 - Marilyn Nelson's A Wreath for Emmett Till
2010 - Elizabeth Alexander's Crave Radiance
2011 - Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split
2011 - Evie Shockley's the new black
2012 - Lucille Clifton's The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010
2012 - Monica Hand's me and Nina
2012 - Reginald Flood's Coffle
2012 - Patricia Smith's Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah
2013 - Jason McCall's Dear Hero,
2013 - Adrian Matejka's The Big Smoke
2013 - Frank X. Walker's Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Ever
2013 - Reginald Harris's Autogeography
2013 - A. Van Jordan's Cineaste
2014 - Marilyn Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry
2015 - Major Jackson's Roll Deep
2015 - Amiri Baraka's S O S: Poems 1961-2013
2015 - Robin Coste Lewis's Voyage of the Sable Venue
2015 - Treasure Shields Redmond's chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer

 In small and large ways, those books paved the way for me to absorb Olio in the ways that I've have. Some sonnet sequences here. Some thoughtfulness about design there. Persona poems over here. Those ongoing engagements with black histories, everywhere. All those things seemed to be working on my mind as I thought about ways that Jess's new book entered and began reshaping the networks.   

Related:
• A Notebook on Tyehimba Jess
• Tyehimba Jess and the outstanding Olio

A Notebook on Tyehimba Jess

2021

• January 5: Well-traveled poets Patricia Smith and Tyehimba Jess in conversation

2019
• February 8: Tyehimba Jess's Leadbelly and Black Book History

2017 
• April 10: Tyehimba Jess wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

2016
• August 10: Coverage of Tyehimba Jess's Olio  
• May 29: Black men writers and creativity, 1995 - 2016
• April 11: Poets as Researchers: Tyehimba Jess and Robin Coste Lewis
• April 3: Amiri Baraka and Tyehimba Jess: on the Music and Musicians 
• April 2: Tyehimba Jess & Sterling Plumpp: Synthesizing the Blues 
• March 30: Tyehimba Jess's Olio: African American cultural & historical studies 
• March 29: Tyehimba Jess's Olio and contemporary African American poetry 
• March 26: From Leadbelly to Olio
• March 26: Tyehimba Jess and the outstanding Olio

2015
• November 9: A crown of blog entries for Leadbelly: project overview 
• November 9: 10 years reading Leadbelly, Pt. 7: discoveries with students 
• November 8: 10 years reading Leadbelly, Pt. 6: Jess, Shockley, and Lewis
• November 8: 10 years reading Leadbelly, Pt. 5: Eady, Jess, and Matejka
• November 7: 10 years reading Leadbelly, Pt. 4: Those multiple voices
• November 6: 10 years reading Leadbelly, Pt. 3: In the mix   
• November 6: 10 years reading Leadbelly, Pt. 2: The poetry volume as gateway
• November 3: 10 years reading Leadbelly, Pt. 1: Amiri Baraka and Tyehimba Jess
• August 19: Tyehimba Jess readings in 2005 and 2015
• July 26: Kent Foreman, Tyehimba Jess, and the histories of spoken poetry
• May 12: Digital Creativity: Tyehimba Jess's "Another Man Done" 
• January 6: Poetry and Ingenuity: Tyehimba Jess and #BlackPoetsSpeakOut

2013
• March 9: ARCs: Works by Kevin Young, Tyehimba Jess & Adrian Matejka
• January: Tyehimba Jess, Leadbelly, and that Haunting Lesson -- Taos Journal of Poetry & Art

2012
• February 17: Tyehimba Jess: The Poet as Human iPod
• February 3: 5 Reasons Tyehimba Jess's Leadbelly Matters

2011
• June 30: Tyehimba Jess & Treasure Williams on Anti-Black Racism as Ugly Envy
• June 30: The Folk Consciousness of Tyehimba Jess & Treasure Williams
• April 4: Tyehimba Jess & the Persona of a Blind Black Man

Related:
An Extended Notebook on the works of writers & artists

Blogging about Poetry in March 2016

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• March 30: Tyehimba Jess's Olio: African American cultural & historical studies 
• March 29: Tyehimba Jess's Olio and contemporary African American poetry 
• March 28: Toward Histories of Contemporary Black Women's Poetry 
• March 26: From Leadbelly to Olio
• March 26: Tyehimba Jess and the outstanding Olio
• March 26: Those Jet beauties vs. Emmett Till
• March 26: Marilyn Nelson & Philip Kolin on Emmett Till
• March 24: Philip C. Kolin fuses art and history in Emmett Till book
• March 21: Reginald Harris, Jericho Brown, Tee-Tee, Keyshawn, and 'N'em 
• March 15: Reginald Harris & Rickey Laurentiis: on injured male bodies
• March 14: Reginald Harris & Phillip B. Williams: Witnessing lost boys & men
• March 11: A Notebook on Robin Coste Lewis
• March 4: Poets as Catalogers: The Cases of Robin Coste Lewis, Kevin Young, and Amiri Baraka 
• March 1: Blogging about Poetry in February 2016

Tyehima Jess's Innovative Sonnets

Let's get straight to the point: Tyehimba Jess's innovative sonnets are works of wonder. 

Last week, I was viewing his online reading for "Poets, Presidents, and Pandemics: A Reading for These Times" sponsored by One Book One New Orleans. He read "Millie and Christine McKoy," one of the sonnets from his book Pulitzer-Prize winning volume Olio (2016), and as I was reminded, as I listening to his reading, how inventive he is as a creator. 

Here's a printed version of "Millie and Christine McKoy."

Jess demonstrated multiple ways of reading the poem. You can read the middle lines as a stand-alone seven-line poem; then Millie McCoy's side with the middle, then Christine's side with the middle, and then read them together from top to bottom, and then finally, the poem can be read from bottom to top. 

During the twenty-first century, several Black poets, including Nikky Finney, Marilyn Nelson, Allison Joseph, John Murillo, A. Van Jordan, and Patricia Smith have produced sonnet sequences. Jess produced a sonnet sequence at the close of leadbelly (2005), and with several poems in Olio, he extends and really innovates the practice sonnet-making. 

Jess's ability to produce these fantastic, multidirectional poems on the page is quite remarkable by itself. However, the achievement of his print-based work is even more amazing when we consider that he first gained acclaim as a performer. He emerged in a realm of poetry that was and is sometimes thought of as alternative to print-based poetry. 

Spoken word is known for personalized poems where poets discussed aspects of their identities. In her book, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry (2009), Susan Somers-Willett explained that slam poets or spoken word artists would often “linger on personal and political themes,” with many poets producing work that expresses “marginalized identity,” usually the poets' own identities. Accordingly, one of the most viewed poems on YouTube is Jae Nichelle's "Friends with Benefits," where she discusses her struggles with anxiety. 

In his public readings though, Jess moves beyond the usual personal focus by inhabiting the personas of varied cultural figures. He takes the dramatized nature of spoken word art and applies it to different historical figures. 

The McKoy twins

The McKoy sisters, whom Jess writes about, were Pygopagus conjoined twins and former slaves. They were forced to perform in fairs and freak shows throughout the world. After the Emancipation Proclamation provided them freedom from slave status, the twins performed with the Barnum circus. 

In one interview, Jess noted that the twins "They have two separate heads, a joint body and two separate bases." Accordingly, his poem can be read and viewed as visual response and reference to the appearance of his subjects.  

When we talk about Jess's work, we rightly focus on his engagements with history. Olio and leadbelly are both comprised of poems that retrace and re-present the lives and experiences of several cultural figures. Jess is meticulous following historical records. 

Scholar Emily Ruth Rutter points out that although Jess thoroughly researches his subject matter, “his poems are not beholden to the historiographic methodologies of his sources. Instead, Jess uses his findings as a creative springboard, availing himself of both the formal flexibility and emotive economy of poetry in order to re-present” various cultural figures.

In other words, what makes his work so outstanding is how creative he is presenting what he has studied.

With "Millie and Christine McKoy" and many other Jess poems,  we're witnessing this special moment at the crossroads of history, poetry, performance, and representation. 

Related: 

• A Notebook on the poetry of  Tyehimba Jess

The year in African American poetry, 2017

Tyehimba Jess's Olio (2016) was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. 

Like in years past, I documented news items and publications concerning African American poetry. Here's a partial list of developments that caught my attention.

Select volumes of poetry published in 2017:
• Eve L. Ewing's Electric Arches
• Cortney Lamar Charleston's Telepathologies
• Airea D. Matthews's Simulacra
• Adrian Matejka's Map to the Stars
• Shane McCrae's In the Language of My Captor
• Aja Monet's My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
• Morgan Parker's There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
• Evie Shockley's Semiautomatic
• Danez Smith Don't Call Us Dead
• Patricia Smith's Incendiary Art
• Jerry W. Ward, Jr.'s Fractal Song
• Afaa Michael Weaver's Spirit Boxing

Edited Collections
• The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks Eds. Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar,‎ Patricia Smith
• Bearden's Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden Eds. Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda

************************

• February: Vievee Francis is selected as the recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

• February: Phillip B. Williams is selected as recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

• March: Ishion Hutchinson wins National Book Critics Circle award for poetry for House of Lords and Commons.

• March: Simone White and Phillip B. Williams awarded Whiting Writers Awards.

• March: Claudia Rankine wins the 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Citizen.

• March: Nathaniel Mackey wins the Bobbitt Lifetime Achievement prize.

• April: Ishion Hutchinson, Gregory Pardlo, Claudia Rankine, and Afaa M. Weaver receive Guggenheim fellowships.

• April 10: Tyehimba Jess's Olio is selected for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

• April: Patricia Spears Jones receives the Jackson Poetry Prize.

• April: Robin Coste Lewis named Poet Laureate of Los Angeles.

• June: Tracy K. Smith named U.S. Poet Laureate.

• August: Ed Roberson is awarded an Academy of American Poets Fellowship.

• September: Cortney Lamar Charleston receives Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

• November: Kevin Young becomes editor for poetry for The New Yorker.

• November: Poet Kevin Young published Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.

• November: Shane McCrae and Rickey Laurentiis receive Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry.

• December: Adrian Matejka named Poet Laureate of Indiana.

Related:
• The year in African American poetry, 2016
• The year in African American poetry, 2015
• The year in African American poetry, 2014
• The year in African American poetry, 2013
• The year in African American poetry, 2012
• The year in African American poetry, 2011

Tyehimba Jess wins Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Listen, Tyehimba Jess isn't the first black poet to win a Pulitzer Prize. But, I'd say he's the first one who was previously immersed in spoken word or performance circles and then came to represent in the so-called "literary" or print-based side of poetry. Today's announcement that Jess's volume Olio won in the poetry category is a plus for print-based and performance verse.

Even the Pulitzer Foundation, unknowingly I think, hinted at the tension between performance and literary in their citation about Jess's work. The caption for Jess's Olio reads, "For a distinctive work that melds performance art with the deeper art of poetry to explore collective memory and challenge contemporary notions of race and identity."

"Performance art" is less deep than "the deeper art of poetry"? Oh, no. In fact, what makes Jess's work so powerful and original is that he merges multiple realms, including performance and artistry on the page. At least we know there's more work to do in discussing the links and divergences.

I've been following and writing about Jess's work for a little over a decade now, so I'm especially pleased to see him earn this award, which I suspect means more attention for his powerful resonating and literary work.

Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad was awarded in fiction. Lynn Nottage's play Sweat was awarded in drama, and Hilton Als received the award for Criticism.

Related
• Tyehimba Jess

Poets as Researchers: Tyehimba Jess and Robin Coste Lewis

For some time now, I've taken note of contemporary volumes that were the result of poets pursuing extensive formal study. You get the sense that the poets spent considerable time covering historical documents and other materials in order to produce works that are artistic but at the same time thoroughly researched. Although we've always had poets who were cognizant of history, rarely have we had so many poets participate in the production of such intricate, painstaking, and lengthy poetry projects.

These days, Robin Coste Lewis and Tyehimba Jess come to mind when I speak of poets as researchers. Lewis's Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems (2015) and Jess's Olio (2016) typify and perhaps expand our notions of how poetry volumes can actively treat historical figures and events. In fact, while you'll likely find works by Lewis and Jess in the poetry category, it's not too much of a stretch to think about the ways that their works fit within or at least complement the "history sections" of bookstores and collections.

In the title poem for her volume, Lewis presents a narrative poem that "is comprised solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000 BCE to the present." It's one of our most extraordinary and ambitious long poems. 

In Olio, Jess narrates the experiences and inner thoughts of a wide range of historical figures, including Henry 'Box' Brown, Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Sissieretta Jones, Edmonia Lewis, George Walker, Booker T. Washington, "Blind" Tom Wiggins, and Bert Williams. The ability to transform historical research into evocative poems is one of Jess's most powerful skills.

What Lewis, Jess, and various others are doing with these representations in verse of history constitute really distinguishing approaches to the production of poetry. Their volumes give us new possibilities for envisioning the capabilities of poets and researchers.

Related:
• A Notebook on Robin Coste Lewis
• A Notebook on Tyehimba Jess
• Black Poetry and the History Section: a partial list

Black girls and book preferences

On October 18, during our conference for high school black girls, we hosted a free book fair. The only price for the book was the completion of a note card where students explained why those chose the book that they did. The books included novels, volumes of poetry, and trade paperback comic books.

Here are some of the various comments that students provided:

• "I picked this book because I saw someone who resembled me on the cover."*
• "I love poems so much much. Giovanni's hits my soul."
• "This book, Kindred looks very interesting, and I would love to read it."
• "I really think Kindred is going to give a great story from a black woman's point of view."
• "I like it because every thing she's saying the book is what's going on now."*
• "I like this book [Ironheart/Riri Williams) because she's capable of anything and is inspiring."
• "Olio, I like this book because it's about poetry and I like poetry so there may be poetry in the book that I can relate to."
• "I picked this book because I like the name of it--Brown Girl, Brownstones."
• "I picked the book "Storm" because I read a bio about Storm and the way she can have control of the weather sounds cool."
• "I like Nikki Giovanni, and I really love poetry."
• "I chose Kindred because I read it before, but I never had my own copy."
• "I chose Kindred because it seemed like a really good book. Reading the back book cover really caught my interest."
• "It has a beautiful young black woman on the cover."*
• "I want this book because I've heard it was a good book."*
• "Sister Outsider - cause the writer is black and different than the rest."
• "We read a poem by Nikki Giovanni, which attracted me to this book. It seems to have so much depth."
• "I love things Rap / Hip Hop, so the history and progression of artists over the years caught my attention. I'm also a rapper so it definitely caught my eye."
• "I picked this book because it looked like an interesting book to read."*
• "I saw a black woman on the cover. Sister Outsider."
• "I liked it because this book seems empowering."*
• "I want this book Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur because it seems very interesting, and I am glad that the main character is a black girl, and she seems very courageous."
• "I picked Brown Girl Dreaming because it is a book filled with poems."

Note: * connotes that the student did not state the book she selected.

The books at the fair included:

• Brown Girl, Brownstones
• The Hate You Give
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
• Brown Girl Dreaming
• Invincible Iron Man: Ironheart Vol. 1: Riri Williams
• Moon-Girl and Devil-Dinosaur Vol 1
• Storm Volume 1: Make it Rain
• Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal

Related:
• The Language Arts & Leadership Conference, Fall 2017

Blogging about poetry in January 2017

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• January 31: A checklist of Emmett Till poems
• January 28: Blogging about Elizabeth Alexander, Allison Joseph, Marilyn Nelson, Evie Shockley & Patricia Smith
• January 27: An Anti-War march, Amiri and Amina Baraka, and me
• January 25: The poetics and politics of protest signs
• January 24: A short checklist of African American poets on artworks & artists
• January 19: The shifting places of (black student) audiences for poetry
• January 17: A visual recap of blog entries on Tyehimba Jess's Olio
• January 17: The shifting places of jazz poetry
• January 14: Memorable black poetry collection: Arnold Adoff's I Am the Darker Brother
• January 12: Locating Patricia Smith in histories of contemporary poetry
• January 6: Recognizing the political struggles behind black poets as award winners and finalists
• January 3: From Jack Johnson to the Stars: Charting Adrian Matejka's next moves
• January 1: Blogging about Poetry in December 2016

More Lasting Impacts of Black Poetry After the Black Arts Movement

By Deborah M. Mix 

I was thrilled when I learned I’d been accepted to the NEH Seminar on Black Poetry After Black Arts, and even more thrilled to discover I’d be learning from and alongside scholars and poets like Evie Shockley, Howard Rambsy II, Tyehimba Jess, Harryette Mullen, and Kevin Quashie in the summer of 2015. The conversations we shared were galvanizing for my pedagogy and scholarship. Kevin Quashie suggested I read Bettina Judd’s patient., and I have since written and published an article on Bettina Judd’s patient. in Revising the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era. 

Tyehimba Jess’s thrilling reading led me to teach his 2016 collection, Olio, in my classes at Ball State University. Evie Shockley’s brilliant close reading strategies have shaped the ways I help my students engage with a variety of contemporary poems. Howard Rambsy’s interest in persona poems led me to think about that complex and innovative field. Harryette Mullen showed me new ways to think about poetic genealogies and about what makes a "nature poem."

None of these experiences would’ve been possible without the tireless work of Maryemma Graham and the rest of her University of Kansas community with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, who created such a rich and welcoming space for poetics and scholars from all over the country to read and talk and learn together.

Related: 

• Black Poetry After the Black Arts Movement: Reflections

The year in African American poetry, 2016

Over the past year, I documented news items and publications concerning African American poetry. Here's a partial list of developments that I noted.

Select volumes of poetry published in 2016:

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib's The Crown Ain't Worth Much
Joshua Bennett's The Sobbing School
Tara Betts's Break the Habit
Rita Dove's Collected Poems: 1974–2004
francine j. harris's Play Dead
Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria
Hoke Glover's Inheritance
Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons
Tyehimba Jess's Olio
Allison Joseph's Mercurial, Mortal Rewards, Multitudes, Double Identity, The Purpose of Hands
Donika Kelly's Bestiary
Jamaal May's The Big Book of Exit Strategies
Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal
Clint Smith's Counting Descent
Phillip B. Williams's Thief in the Interior
Kevin Young's Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995-2015

Select collections in 2016:

Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky edited by Tony Medina
Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (2016) edited by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr. 

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• February: Yolanda Wisher named Philadelphia Poet Laureate.

• March: Ross Gay wins Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

• March: Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015) wins the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry.

• March: Safiya Sinclair and LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs win Whiting Awards.

• April: Jericho Brown and Ed Roberson win Guggenheim Fellowships in poetry.

• April: Will Alexander wins the Jackson Poetry Prize.

• April: Sonia Sanchez is recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award.

• May: Ed Roberson awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

• May: Elizabeth Alexander elected to Pulitzer Prize Board.

• May: Claudia Rankine named the Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.

• August: Kevin Young named as new director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

• September: Angel Nafis and Alison C. Rollins win Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

• November: Tyehimba Jess awarded a Lannan Foundation Literary Award.

• December: Joshua Bennett, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Danez Smith, and Patricia Smith win NEA Fellowships.


Related
• A visual recap of poetry blog entries in 2016
• The year in African American poetry, 2015
• The year in African American poetry, 2014
• The year in African American poetry, 2013
• The year in African American poetry, 2012
• The year in African American poetry, 2011

A visual recap of poetry blog entries in 2016

Another enjoyable year of blogging about poetry. Here's a recap of a few of the more than 90 blog entries on verse that I published over the last 12 months.

December 16: Kevin Young's Books: A Visual History

  November 7: Cindy Reed Reps East St. Louis

  October 19: Eugene B. Redmond visits the Redmond class

 September 23: Bro Yao in the mix 

Blogging about Poetry in August 2016

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• August 30: How do we get from Gwendolyn Brooks to Mahogany L. Browne?
• August 26: C. Liegh McInnis's books 
• August 26: The Inspiring Productivity of C. Liegh McInnis  
• August 22: An African American literature course: Recordings of black women reading poetry   
• August 12: Kevin Young as poet, editor, curator, and now Schomburg director 
• August 11: Meta DuEwa Jones and the mix of black poetry scholarly work 
• August 11: Meta DuEwa Jones & Evie Shockley as guides  
• August 10: Coverage of Tyehimba Jess's Olio 
• August 3: Three black poetry projects confront police brutality
• August 3: Blogging about poetry in July 2016 
• August 2: Photographs of Black Poets Matter: Victoria Smith and Of Poetry and Protest   
• August 1: Amiri Baraka's presence in Of Poetry and Protest
• August 1: Of Poetry and Protest and its aesthetic force

Reading the absence of references in Harmony Holiday's Hollywood Forever

By Laura Vrana

I was focused on researching the “notes” sections appended to recent black poetry collections when I paused to read Harmony Holiday’s latest Hollywood Forever, published by Fence Books in January. Her prior collections—Negro League Baseball (2011) and Go Find Your Father/A Famous Blues (2014)—had captured my (and others’) attention, extraordinary meditations on black music, historiography, and subjectivity in sinuous sentences that defy lyric interpretation. I had wondered before why Holiday is not more widely recognized. She adheres to some of the patterns that are generally enabling success for black poets: she has an M.F.A. from Columbia and is sometimes affiliated with academic institutions, and her first collection won Fence Books’s Motherwell Prize.

Hollywood Forever, though, defies virtually all common poetry interpretation methods. It makes those unassimilable elements that were present in her work yet more nascent—as in the inclusion with Negro League Baseball of a CD, or the websites that accompany her texts—explosively unavoidable. The work cannot be summarized, given its wide-ranging considerations of race, gender, celebrity, and appropriation that address Dr. King and Billie Holiday, Kanye and Beyonce. (This LARB review provides a pseudo-overview.) So I take as my angle of entry that which was preoccupying my mind upon first reading: the fact that this work, with its dizzying array of borrowed materials, contains no paratextual apparatus.

Sonnet Sequences and Contemporary African American Poetry

[An annotated version of this entry appears on Poetry Genius.]

Several prominent, award-winning African American poets have produced extended sonnet sequences over the course of the last several years. The sonnets cover a common topic and are often linked by interconnected lines combining to form what is known  as a crown of sonnets.
 
Sonnet sequences represent intricate series of poetic projects composed by poets, and those projects often demonstrate the abilities of writers to design elaborate networks of poems. Crowns of sonnets suggest that writing poetry is more than simply quick bursts of creativity. Instead, a series of interrelated, 14-line poems seem to be the result of planning and patience, extended study, and laborious attention to detail.             

The appearance of sonnet sequences reflects aspects of a larger shift in the publishing history of African American poetry. For decades, black poets gained attention for signature, often short poems such as "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, and "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes. Those poems circulated widely in part because anthologies were a primary means of circulating poems and assisting in making poets well known among diverse audiences. 
 
In recent decades, however, awards and contests in  literary culture became increasingly important. Thus, the visibility and worth of poets is often associated with the accolades assigned to award-winning volumes of poetry as opposed to individual poems. As extensive set pieces within volumes, sonnet sequences can showcase the literary and technical skills of poets and thus elevate the chances of their books receiving notice and winning awards. 

Of course, poets are not taking the time and energy to design sonnet sequences as attempts just to win awards. The design and composition of these highly structured series of interconnected poems present artistic challenges that poets might find fulfilling to pursue.

What follows are a list of volumes containing sonnet sequences.  

1997 - Marilyn Nelson's The Fields of Praise (a series of 7 sonnets, entitled "Thus Far by Faith")
2005 - Tyehimba Jess's leadbelly 
2005 - Marilyn Nelson's A Wreath for Emmett Till (a crown of 15 sonnets)
2006 - Vievee Francis's Blue-Tail Fly (a crown of 7 sonnets)
2007 - Natasha Trethewey's Native Guard (a crown of 10 sonnets) 
2007 - Elizabeth Alexander's & Marilyn Nelson's Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies & Little Misses of Color (sequence of 24 sonnets)
2010 - Allison Joseph's My Father's Kites (includes 34 sonnets)
2010- Tyehimba Jess's "Sonnet Crown for Blind Tom" (7 sonnets) 
2010 - John Murillo's Up Jump the Boogie (a crown of 7 sonnets) 
2011 - Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split: Poems (sequence of 19 sonnets)
2012 - Patricia Smith's Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (crown of 15 sonnets)
2013 - A. Van Jordan’s The Cineaste (a crown of 44 sonnets)
2014 - Marilyn Nelson's How I Discovered Poetry (50 sonnets)
2016 - Tyehimba Jess's Olio