Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Khalil Murrell, Program Associate, Poetry

Poetry may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear “Music History,” unless you’ve been reading Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, or leadbelly by Tyehimba Jess. Through poems in the voice of Leadbelly and characters in his life (listen to freedom and see martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935) and through letters, quotes, dialogue, song lyrics, and prose pieces (see harris county chain gang and home again), Jess brings the fascinating life of American folk and blues musician, Huddie William Ledbetter (Leadbelly),  into verse. Perhaps for him, history is not only a matter of fact, but one of perspective and imagination.

When asked in an interview what drew him to the “King of the 12-String Guitar,” Jess said the history was fascinating: “[Leadbelly’s] personal themes matched certain major themes in African American history: his relationship to The Prison Industrial Complex, The Great Migration, anthropology… The fact that he was grounded in myth, and on the edges of American folklore was also appealing to me.”

But these somewhat academic interests do not say enough about Tyehimba Jess. A two-time member of the Green Mill Slam teams in Chicago, the hometown of slam poetry, he attributes much of his performance and writing techniques to what he learned from slam poets, like Patricia Smith. An avid fan of blues, the Detroit native’s performance style has also been greatly influenced by blues and jazz. (see Jess read below). Still, he acknowledges The Last Poets, Black Arts Movement poets, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and later on Cornelius Eady and Yusef Komunyakaa as literary influences.

Hearing Jess’ most recent work on Thomas “Blind Tom” Wiggins, an autistic savant and musical prodigy on piano, suggests his interest in the intersection between (musical) history and poetry show no signs of wavering. A Cave Canem fellow, Tyehimba Jess earned degrees from the University of Chicago and NYU, and is also the author of African American Pride: Celebrating Our Achievements, Contributions, and Enduring Legacy (non-fiction). He currently teaches at CUNY College of Staten Island. To hear more poems and an interview, visit Fishouse.

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Martin Farawell, Program Director, Poetry

Patricia Smith’s reading of her poem “34” reminds us that poetry comes out of an oral tradition that predates written language by tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.

We know the epics and sacred texts that built the foundation for all the literature that has followed were originally composed on the tongue. They were passed on, generation by generation, through the oral tradition.

It has been argued that the truest histories have been written by our poets, who capture the human costs of those momentous events that the official histories tend to abstract and glorify.

The Iliad chronicles one of the great disasters of its age: a war that raged for a decade and ended in the destruction of a once beautiful and flourishing city. In the centuries since, poets have striven to understand the catastrophes of their own times.

This is never more so than in those cases when vast human suffering seems the inexplicable result of our own folly. For Homer, it was the fall of Troy; for Patricia Smith, it is the fall of New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina.

In Blood Dazzler, her book-length sequence of poems from which “34” is taken, Smith assumes the personae of countless participants in and victims of the disaster. We would like to make sense out of such an event, but we also know its survivors can never fully explain why it happened. To hear Smith read one of these poems is to enter into their unending dilemma. In writing and reading these poems, Smith pulls us directly into her struggle to understand.

A biography of Patricia Smith can be found in the 2008 Festival Poet Pages.

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