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Olio
"Jess's work displays a deep sense of cool black consciousness, especially in regard to musicality. He works with an expressive tradition that blends sensibilities of field holler, spiritual encodings, gospel moan and groan, work song cadence, blue notes, and jook joint jazz."—Howard Ramsby II, Sou'wester
Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.
So, while I lead this choir, I still find that
I'm being led…I'm a missionary
mending my faith in the midst of this flock…
I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see
these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God
speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;
they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.
Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.
So, while I lead this choir, I still find that
I'm being led…I'm a missionary
mending my faith in the midst of this flock…
I toil in their fields of praise. When folks see
these freedmen stand and sing, they hear their God
speak in tongues. These nine dark mouths sing shelter;
they echo a hymn's haven from slavery's weather.
Detroit native Tyehimba Jess' first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
235 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 2016
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About the author
Tyehimba Jess
21 books78 followersTyehimba Jess is the author of leadbelly and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Olio. leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2005." Jess's second book, Olio, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2017 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the 2017 Book Award for Poetry from the Society of Midland Authors. It was also a finalist for the 2016 National Books Critics Circle Award, 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Library Journal called it a "daring collection, which blends forthright, musically acute language with portraiture" and Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it "Encyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant" and selected it as one of the five best poetry books of 2016.
Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is the Poetry and Fiction Editor of the African American Review and is Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in anthologies such as 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, Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry. His poetry has appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Brilliant Corners, Ploughshares, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Mosaic, American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Nashville Review and 580 Split.
Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Jess is the Poetry and Fiction Editor of the African American Review and is Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in anthologies such as 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, Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry. His poetry has appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Brilliant Corners, Ploughshares, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Mosaic, American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Nashville Review and 580 Split.
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July 12, 2017
Olio can signify a mishmash of elements or variety of musical performance acts. In the case of Tyehimba Jess' ambitious volume of poetry which has won him the 2017 Pulitzer, Olio is miscellaneous recollections, which Jess has pieced together to give a voice to the early African American performers of Tin Pan Alley who had to take a back seat to their white counterparts. In a collection that is indeed a hodge podge of interviews, poems, minstrel songs, letters, and brief essays, Jess has brought the performers of Tin Pan Alley to life.
As the volume opens, pianist Julius Trotter is writing to W.E.B. DuBois, imploring him to publish Scott Joplin's life story in his Crisis magazine. The king of African American jazz and ragtime, even Joplin was not immune to having his voice taken away by more privileged whites. Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band had been allegedly taken from Joplin's opus opera Treemonisha which is an homage to his deceased wife and daughter. As both a World War I veteran who first hand experienced discrimination and an accomplished pianist in his own right, Trotter set off to find those who knew Joplin and piece together his life story. Through the interviews in these pages, including the poignant one with Joplin's wife Lottie, Jess gives both Trotter and Joplin their due.
In between the interviews are poems, essays, minstrels, and church choir songs, which pay homage to a generation of African American performers who would have otherwise been lost to Jim Crow. We meet colorful characters such as John "Blind" Boone, Sissieretta Jones known as The Black Patti, and conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy who were treated as spectacles at traveling shows. This group of performers were not taken seriously as this was the era of Jim Crow and slavery still existed in all but the name. Whatever wages African Americans earned through their varieties of performances had to be turned over to the white owners of the troupes. In the course of his interviews, Trotter discovers not only Joplin's life but those of these other gifted performers as well.
A few artists depicted in these pages did escape Jim Crow but at a cost to themselves. Henry "Box" Brown escaped the south by smuggling himself out inside a wooden box. Arriving in Philadelphia twenty hours later, Brown had won his freedom; however, he lived as a wanted man for the rest of his life. Likewise, Edmonia Lewis, who was half African American and half Ojibwe, gained notoriety as an artist in Greece, which she most likely would not have done had she remained in Ohio. Likewise, Trotter was forced to flee from his Cairo, Illinois home where he saw his cousin hung by a lynch mob, and gained employment working on Pullman railcars. After escaping the near south, Trotter had no desire to return there.
Jess' poetry flows like the jazz and music he depicted on his pages. At many points in the volume, it was hard to tell which words were Jess' original prose and which could be attributed to the artists depicted in these pages. This project required much research into the lives of African American Tin Pan Alley performers and is truly a labor of love worthy of the Pulitzer. Tyehimba Jess is truly as gifted of a poet as the artists he writes about in his award winning work. His first volume of poetry leadbelly also garnered awards, and Jess has become a leading African American poet of this current generation. Olio deserves the accolades it has received; it is a work of art and merits 5 stars.
As the volume opens, pianist Julius Trotter is writing to W.E.B. DuBois, imploring him to publish Scott Joplin's life story in his Crisis magazine. The king of African American jazz and ragtime, even Joplin was not immune to having his voice taken away by more privileged whites. Irving Berlin's Alexander's Ragtime Band had been allegedly taken from Joplin's opus opera Treemonisha which is an homage to his deceased wife and daughter. As both a World War I veteran who first hand experienced discrimination and an accomplished pianist in his own right, Trotter set off to find those who knew Joplin and piece together his life story. Through the interviews in these pages, including the poignant one with Joplin's wife Lottie, Jess gives both Trotter and Joplin their due.
In between the interviews are poems, essays, minstrels, and church choir songs, which pay homage to a generation of African American performers who would have otherwise been lost to Jim Crow. We meet colorful characters such as John "Blind" Boone, Sissieretta Jones known as The Black Patti, and conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy who were treated as spectacles at traveling shows. This group of performers were not taken seriously as this was the era of Jim Crow and slavery still existed in all but the name. Whatever wages African Americans earned through their varieties of performances had to be turned over to the white owners of the troupes. In the course of his interviews, Trotter discovers not only Joplin's life but those of these other gifted performers as well.
A few artists depicted in these pages did escape Jim Crow but at a cost to themselves. Henry "Box" Brown escaped the south by smuggling himself out inside a wooden box. Arriving in Philadelphia twenty hours later, Brown had won his freedom; however, he lived as a wanted man for the rest of his life. Likewise, Edmonia Lewis, who was half African American and half Ojibwe, gained notoriety as an artist in Greece, which she most likely would not have done had she remained in Ohio. Likewise, Trotter was forced to flee from his Cairo, Illinois home where he saw his cousin hung by a lynch mob, and gained employment working on Pullman railcars. After escaping the near south, Trotter had no desire to return there.
Jess' poetry flows like the jazz and music he depicted on his pages. At many points in the volume, it was hard to tell which words were Jess' original prose and which could be attributed to the artists depicted in these pages. This project required much research into the lives of African American Tin Pan Alley performers and is truly a labor of love worthy of the Pulitzer. Tyehimba Jess is truly as gifted of a poet as the artists he writes about in his award winning work. His first volume of poetry leadbelly also garnered awards, and Jess has become a leading African American poet of this current generation. Olio deserves the accolades it has received; it is a work of art and merits 5 stars.
August 19, 2016
History is important, but it takes poetry to bring the facts to life, especially when there are few details and no recordings. How do you revive the musical birth of a nation when even wax cylinders weren’t wasted in preserving the songs of the black musicians? All we have are ministerial shows and Irving Berlin, who was accused of stealing “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” from the King of Ragtime himself, Scott Joplin.
Joplin appears in the ambitions second collection of poetry by Tyehimba Jess, whose first book was about Leadbelly, but only in hearsay. A veteran of WWI, now working shoveling coal for the railroad, with a mask hiding terrible facial wounds from the war, pieces together Joplin’s life through interviews with friends and relations. Other characters get to speak for themselves, including conjoined twins and a man who escaped slavery by mailing himself north in a box.
They’re all entertainers of a sort, hiding behind their own masks, which allows them to speak of things they would otherwise be unable to safely articulate. The double is repeatedly used throughout Jess’ mix of fact and fiction, sometimes competing voices in the same poem wrestling for their story to win as history.
The production of the book is also unique, with perforated folded pages that can be removed. There is an appendix in the back that illustrates how to fold them into all manner of shapes, but I thought they were meant to be plastered over the walls of every city in America, like posters reminding us a show is coming back to town, and this time we must not forget.
Joplin appears in the ambitions second collection of poetry by Tyehimba Jess, whose first book was about Leadbelly, but only in hearsay. A veteran of WWI, now working shoveling coal for the railroad, with a mask hiding terrible facial wounds from the war, pieces together Joplin’s life through interviews with friends and relations. Other characters get to speak for themselves, including conjoined twins and a man who escaped slavery by mailing himself north in a box.
They’re all entertainers of a sort, hiding behind their own masks, which allows them to speak of things they would otherwise be unable to safely articulate. The double is repeatedly used throughout Jess’ mix of fact and fiction, sometimes competing voices in the same poem wrestling for their story to win as history.
The production of the book is also unique, with perforated folded pages that can be removed. There is an appendix in the back that illustrates how to fold them into all manner of shapes, but I thought they were meant to be plastered over the walls of every city in America, like posters reminding us a show is coming back to town, and this time we must not forget.
January 29, 2018
This is an overwhelming book. Blind Boone & Edmonia Lewis are two of the most powerful figures in narrative prose or poetry of the last hundred years.
Boone's inability to play Joplin's final outpouring note for note is a gut-wrenching conceit for the inability to fully empathize with another's personal anguish and seems to imply the sin of Slavery (Jim Crow, lynchings, burning churches, et al.) will not and cannot ever be atoned (note for note).
Absolutely blown away by this work. It ranks among my favorite Modern Poetry Epics (Paterson, The Cantos, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Four Quartets, The Dream Songs--which Jess references/ deconstructs), but while the above all feel like self-indulgent guilty pleasures, Olio is an edifying, must read masterpiece for anyone interested in the history of humanity. The music of the work alone is worthwhile.
Boone's inability to play Joplin's final outpouring note for note is a gut-wrenching conceit for the inability to fully empathize with another's personal anguish and seems to imply the sin of Slavery (Jim Crow, lynchings, burning churches, et al.) will not and cannot ever be atoned (note for note).
Absolutely blown away by this work. It ranks among my favorite Modern Poetry Epics (Paterson, The Cantos, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Four Quartets, The Dream Songs--which Jess references/ deconstructs), but while the above all feel like self-indulgent guilty pleasures, Olio is an edifying, must read masterpiece for anyone interested in the history of humanity. The music of the work alone is worthwhile.
January 19, 2018
10 Stars!
This book was overwhelmingly brilliant! It is poetry, performance, history, prose, art, witness, confession...I could go on... The sheer amount of care that went into the creation of this beautiful book is evident...it is impeccably researched and rendered; Jess has excavated the unsung black heroes from the period just after emancipation, giving them ownership of their legacies, all told in intoxicating, dazzling, dizzying language. I've never read anything like this in my life and I truly don't think I will again!
This book was overwhelmingly brilliant! It is poetry, performance, history, prose, art, witness, confession...I could go on... The sheer amount of care that went into the creation of this beautiful book is evident...it is impeccably researched and rendered; Jess has excavated the unsung black heroes from the period just after emancipation, giving them ownership of their legacies, all told in intoxicating, dazzling, dizzying language. I've never read anything like this in my life and I truly don't think I will again!
December 23, 2017
This is an amazing work. I had to try twice before I was able to enter into it. A compendium of sonnets and lyrical prose, a history of slavery and oppression and race relations (or the cruelty that blacks have suffered but whose spirit was not broken), a series of interviews about Scott Joplin, and much about art, especially music, its role in the black culture.
I feel physically full from this work, unable to completely digest it. I've been listening to Jess' recordings of sections of the poem and it is a help to hear him. I can hardly write a review. I am overwhelmed. And so glad I kept trying: Jess' mastery of language and rhythm as well as the massive scope of this work is breathtaking.
I feel physically full from this work, unable to completely digest it. I've been listening to Jess' recordings of sections of the poem and it is a help to hear him. I can hardly write a review. I am overwhelmed. And so glad I kept trying: Jess' mastery of language and rhythm as well as the massive scope of this work is breathtaking.
February 5, 2018
Hhhhhhhhholy crap, this is an ambitious and complex book. Couple things - I recommend reading Olio in as few sittings as possible, for maximum immersion in the history, characters, story. I also highly recommend listening to Tyehimba Jess's appearance on the Commonplace podcast (https://www.commonpodcast.com/home/20...) in close proximity to your reading of the book - it helps you take a deeper look at the construction of the book and format of the writing, if you're into that kind of thing.
Olio is an epic collection of writing - poems, interviews, lists, drawings, and photos - about minstrelsy and African American performers' roles in and against it and Scott Joplin and pre-recording industry musicality andandand a lot of other things. Jess's writing makes these figures larger than life. The contrapuntal pieces are my favorite, and that's not a form I typically love in poetry. The book itself is a work of art, larger than a standard paperback, employing a variety of typefaces, pullout pieces that work as Mobius strips....serious props to Jess for creating this beautiful monster, and also props to Wave Books for taking on a big poetry project and going all out in turning it into a physical object. The result is a collection that's overwhelming in the best way.
Olio is an epic collection of writing - poems, interviews, lists, drawings, and photos - about minstrelsy and African American performers' roles in and against it and Scott Joplin and pre-recording industry musicality andandand a lot of other things. Jess's writing makes these figures larger than life. The contrapuntal pieces are my favorite, and that's not a form I typically love in poetry. The book itself is a work of art, larger than a standard paperback, employing a variety of typefaces, pullout pieces that work as Mobius strips....serious props to Jess for creating this beautiful monster, and also props to Wave Books for taking on a big poetry project and going all out in turning it into a physical object. The result is a collection that's overwhelming in the best way.
March 21, 2017
Most of the poems, when experienced individually, aren't anything remarkable; however, the project as a whole is impressive and certainly unique, combing removable foldouts, poems that can be read in several different ways, all sorts of visual poetry, some wonderful drawings and pictures, and faux interviews that are probably my favorite sections. While I honestly think some of the poem-based sections could've been better served by being less simple in their language and straightforward in their message, I understand why Jess wrote them this way and I do think this collection is better viewed as a whole for that reason; he's essentially made the literary equivalent of a concept album that is better listened to as a whole, from front-to-back, then a few songs at a time. In other words, some sections are underwhelming while others are fantastic. I'd recommend this book simply for its ambition and overall structure.
May 16, 2021
I sat on the porch and read for hours. What especially stood out to me was not the famous syncopated sonnets, but the prose portions that blended into poetry, the back and forth.
June 13, 2021
Visually, literarily, and spatially stunning. Such a beautiful celebration of Black art and joy alongside the horrific history of oppression and exploitation of Black Americans at the hands of White Americans.
May 3, 2017
"What part of me is mine that was
not mined from the mind of poets,
artists rewriting the past blow
by blow till it's pulverized past
the barely recognizable?
I was born when I was written,
then hammered out of a mountain."
This is one of the best books I have ever read. Apart from being one of the most ambitious volumes of poetry probably ever, it is also consistently surprising—and never becomes less so over the course of its hefty 230 oversized pages. Jess's project here is a big one: how have narratives of Black artists been erased throughout American history, and what does it mean to imagine them back into existence?
But Jess doesn't stop by writing conventional poems about these subjects, with each new cycle about each member of the "cast" outlined in the volume's introduction taking on, to a degree, new formal challenges: prose poetry, interpolation of later texts (most notably John Berryman's The Dream Songs , and the ridiculously ambitious "syncopated poems" that really belie description. These are poems that can be read forwards, backwards, diagonally, etc. They really need to be seen to be believed. I didn't even realize just how extensively they could be creatively read until I reached the appendix, wherein Jess demonstrates the poems versatility—among other surprises that I'll leave for other readers to discover.
There's also a gripping series of sonnets narrated by members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, each of which is bracketed by the names of Black churches targeted in hate crimes—burning, bombings, and other acts of violence—beginning with the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, burnt down in 1822... and ending with that same church, where nine black churchgoers were killed during a prayer group meeting in 2015. Bracketing the collection in this way, Jess draws a direct line of persecution from the era of slavery to the present day, implicitly reminding us that the very issues his cast of characters face, i.e., overt violence and erasure, not to mention the stifling and diminishing of Black voices, are things that never went away, but were rather transmuted into different forms. It's brilliant.
This is now a book I will get to live with for the rest of my life, in all the pain and joy it captures. It's a book that shattered and remade my concept of what literature can do, maybe not unlike another of my favorite volumes of poetry (coincidentally also by an NYU alum), Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems . Truly astonishing work.
not mined from the mind of poets,
artists rewriting the past blow
by blow till it's pulverized past
the barely recognizable?
I was born when I was written,
then hammered out of a mountain."
This is one of the best books I have ever read. Apart from being one of the most ambitious volumes of poetry probably ever, it is also consistently surprising—and never becomes less so over the course of its hefty 230 oversized pages. Jess's project here is a big one: how have narratives of Black artists been erased throughout American history, and what does it mean to imagine them back into existence?
But Jess doesn't stop by writing conventional poems about these subjects, with each new cycle about each member of the "cast" outlined in the volume's introduction taking on, to a degree, new formal challenges: prose poetry, interpolation of later texts (most notably John Berryman's The Dream Songs , and the ridiculously ambitious "syncopated poems" that really belie description. These are poems that can be read forwards, backwards, diagonally, etc. They really need to be seen to be believed. I didn't even realize just how extensively they could be creatively read until I reached the appendix, wherein Jess demonstrates the poems versatility—among other surprises that I'll leave for other readers to discover.
There's also a gripping series of sonnets narrated by members of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, each of which is bracketed by the names of Black churches targeted in hate crimes—burning, bombings, and other acts of violence—beginning with the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, burnt down in 1822... and ending with that same church, where nine black churchgoers were killed during a prayer group meeting in 2015. Bracketing the collection in this way, Jess draws a direct line of persecution from the era of slavery to the present day, implicitly reminding us that the very issues his cast of characters face, i.e., overt violence and erasure, not to mention the stifling and diminishing of Black voices, are things that never went away, but were rather transmuted into different forms. It's brilliant.
This is now a book I will get to live with for the rest of my life, in all the pain and joy it captures. It's a book that shattered and remade my concept of what literature can do, maybe not unlike another of my favorite volumes of poetry (coincidentally also by an NYU alum), Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems . Truly astonishing work.
May 23, 2017
This is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. It is almost historical fiction. It is almost an epic of a people. It is a collection of stylistic performances broad in range and consistent in execution. If it suffers from anything, I think putting the historical material at the end hurts it, as there is something wondrous about taking these historical figures and their almost legendary labors and making a music of them. A music about music in many cases. You have a literal phantom of an opera pursued by a figurative phantom of an opera, a masked man haunted by what almost was, unable to let go of a past forgotten by his contemporaries. Magic & myth & history & an accounting overdue. Again and again I was struck by the fact that these legends were real. That these dramatic scenes were not invented. Blind pianists, the Greek tragedy of Scott Joplin, conjoined twins, a magician who mailed himself out of slavery, a sculptress driven from her country but who hears the songs of her country inside the earth: all these mythic heroes interrupted by Jubilee songs from a chorus of burnt-down churches.
There is a section that decrypts John Berryman's Dreamsongs in a brilliant way that brings their stories back to the waking world. It is a great work of classicism transposed to America, modernist in its forms & facades, overdue for footnoting, deserving wider audiences. The whole thing has layers of clever that you would not see if you did not chase them, or read the explanatory material at the end. This is artful as all hell, but it is also a remarkable piece of scholarship about minstrelsy, blackface, the subjugation of a people.
Without a whiff of hyperbole I nominate it for poetry of the century. I feel like this must be what it felt like to read The Waste Land in 1922, a fledgling century with its masterwork already behind it.
There is a section that decrypts John Berryman's Dreamsongs in a brilliant way that brings their stories back to the waking world. It is a great work of classicism transposed to America, modernist in its forms & facades, overdue for footnoting, deserving wider audiences. The whole thing has layers of clever that you would not see if you did not chase them, or read the explanatory material at the end. This is artful as all hell, but it is also a remarkable piece of scholarship about minstrelsy, blackface, the subjugation of a people.
Without a whiff of hyperbole I nominate it for poetry of the century. I feel like this must be what it felt like to read The Waste Land in 1922, a fledgling century with its masterwork already behind it.
January 11, 2020
Olio is a unique mixture of history, fiction, poetry and data visualization and was written by Tyehimba Jess. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2017.
This polyphonic work loosely follows a dozen post civil war era African American entertainers and artists almost lost to history. The great composer Scott Joplin figures prominently in several of the stories. We forget that he died a pauper.
5 stars. An impressive work and labor of love by Jess - to revive these minor historical characters from the masses of forgotten figures.
This polyphonic work loosely follows a dozen post civil war era African American entertainers and artists almost lost to history. The great composer Scott Joplin figures prominently in several of the stories. We forget that he died a pauper.
5 stars. An impressive work and labor of love by Jess - to revive these minor historical characters from the masses of forgotten figures.
July 29, 2020
A work of genius and dedication
January 28, 2018
When I finally got around to reading this one, I was surprised to find that none of my friends have read it nor have any of them shelved it.
Jess was the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this collection of poems and I can totally understand the accolades. This is an amazing, mind-blowing piece of art. I mean I just can't say enough about what a master of words Jess is ... seriously.
The book focuses on the lives of various artists, writers, entertainers from the Antebellum South and beyond. Jess has chosen to play with form and uses something called syncopated sonnets to illustrate the narrative amongst his characters.
He also utilizes actual text pulled from interviews and songs from the time period. This makes what he does with the form even more amazing because he is forced to put words already on the page into his narrative.
There are some pages that are perforated and after reading the entire book, you can find pages in the back that show you how to fold and manipulate these pages to make the words create even more art.
Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
Jess was the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for this collection of poems and I can totally understand the accolades. This is an amazing, mind-blowing piece of art. I mean I just can't say enough about what a master of words Jess is ... seriously.
The book focuses on the lives of various artists, writers, entertainers from the Antebellum South and beyond. Jess has chosen to play with form and uses something called syncopated sonnets to illustrate the narrative amongst his characters.
He also utilizes actual text pulled from interviews and songs from the time period. This makes what he does with the form even more amazing because he is forced to put words already on the page into his narrative.
There are some pages that are perforated and after reading the entire book, you can find pages in the back that show you how to fold and manipulate these pages to make the words create even more art.
Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
September 28, 2021
Meticulously crafted and dense. The components – interviews of Scott Joplin's friends and family from the perspective of a railroad worker and war veteran collecting his stories; documentation, news, artifacts, and stories of first generation freed slaves and performers, told in formal verse; a long list of burned churches – are interwoven throughout, a layering of history that took the wind out of me at times, the stitching more intricate the closer I looked.
April 25, 2018
I must confess that I was slow to understand and appreciate the structure of this book—I was confused by the juxtaposition of interviews, biographical poetry, haiku, artwork, letters, directions for paper-folding, the imagined testimony of sculpture. However, once I “got it”, I was in awe of this literary resurrection of forgotten history. It is a necessary book, long overdue, that illuminates artistic contributions to Americana that were, at best, overlooked or, at worst, suppressed. Bravo to the Pulitzer for putting this book in the spotlight. On a darker note, I wonder how many of those who NEED to read it will actually do so.
September 2, 2017
I want to read this book again. I have nothing but good things to say about it. The creativity was so great. This book made me feel emotional. There was never a dull moment. I want to read this book again.
July 26, 2020
Not only does this collection confront our history (and present) in really important ways, but you can also read most of these poems at least three different ways. How does someone write like this? It’s wild. I’m very impressed.
August 29, 2021
Jess did an absolutely fantastic job of researching for this book. A combination of poetry and prose that traces the lives of forgotten influential African Americans for the several decades surrounding the Civil War. Highly recommend.
October 7, 2024
4.5✨
it’s something really special and important to mix archives and poetry. to interpret voices of the past who never got to speak up and/or be heard
it’s something really special and important to mix archives and poetry. to interpret voices of the past who never got to speak up and/or be heard
April 25, 2025
This was truly an experience. Amazing!
4.5 out of 5
4.5 out of 5
February 2, 2021
There we parts of this book I couldn't get into and others that i absolutely loved. Over all a very unique book that weaves the story of African/American musicians and entertainers using poems, interviews, songs and dialog to tell its tale.
April 21, 2025
this book? magnificent. my thesis? done!
May 16, 2017
I've never read or seen a poetry book like this. It uses the space on the page in unique ways, and many poems are like "two-for-ones." For instance, there are two columns/stanzas placed side by side, and you can choose to read one column top to bottom, then the other, or you can read all the way across. I believe my favorite of this type is "Duet: Blind Boone Meets Blind Tom, 1889," especially that last line ("This is how freedom feels--soaring through the stars in which I reel" OR "This is how freedom feels--like the face of dawn I've never seen--sunlight / soaring through the stars in which I reel")
The volume is so historically based, it reads like actual letters or writings of the early African American entertainers and artists Jess gives voice to. Listening to Joplin's tunes on YouTube while trying to reconcile Jess's lines to the music; looking at Lewis's sculptures then reading the poems about each piece--I'd call both the musical poems and the sculptural poems ekphrastic. My favorite piece is the imagining of the final letter Julius Monroe Trotter writes to his sister, and his letter to WEB DuBois. I was particularly drawn to the voice given to this character. I appreciate the research trips to the internet this book sent me on, learning about these figures, many of whom are likely unfamiliar (they were to me, and I've done some reading in my day), and whose stories are just devastating. American cruelty during slavery days knew no bounds, but the souls of these folks found a way to transcend--through music, theater, sculpture, language. However, the listing in the Fisk Jubilee Singers poems of the Black churches that have been terrorized, which dates from 1822 to 2015 (and the first and last entries are Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC), reminds readers that the horrors of being Black in America have not stopped.
The volume is so historically based, it reads like actual letters or writings of the early African American entertainers and artists Jess gives voice to. Listening to Joplin's tunes on YouTube while trying to reconcile Jess's lines to the music; looking at Lewis's sculptures then reading the poems about each piece--I'd call both the musical poems and the sculptural poems ekphrastic. My favorite piece is the imagining of the final letter Julius Monroe Trotter writes to his sister, and his letter to WEB DuBois. I was particularly drawn to the voice given to this character. I appreciate the research trips to the internet this book sent me on, learning about these figures, many of whom are likely unfamiliar (they were to me, and I've done some reading in my day), and whose stories are just devastating. American cruelty during slavery days knew no bounds, but the souls of these folks found a way to transcend--through music, theater, sculpture, language. However, the listing in the Fisk Jubilee Singers poems of the Black churches that have been terrorized, which dates from 1822 to 2015 (and the first and last entries are Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC), reminds readers that the horrors of being Black in America have not stopped.
August 11, 2019
This is a book of sonnets, stories and other assorted narrative tools about how African American performers fought against economic oppression by whites after the Civil War. It’s an insightful, difficult read, especially for a Latin American who has a very weak (if any, except for understanding the logic of dominance and repression) relationship with the subject at hand.
It’s obviously worth your time, even if you’re distant, as it opens up a fascinating window into a key and cruel historical moment and situation. Doubly true if you’re at all curious about new (?) forms of creative expression, as well as about the origins of the greatest styles of music in the world: jazz, soul and the blues.
However, to the untrained eye, it becomes somewhat repetitive and it sometimes feel it overstays its welcome.
As an aside, Audible has an abridged live performance that clocks in under two hours. It also includes an interview with the author. Well worth it.
It’s obviously worth your time, even if you’re distant, as it opens up a fascinating window into a key and cruel historical moment and situation. Doubly true if you’re at all curious about new (?) forms of creative expression, as well as about the origins of the greatest styles of music in the world: jazz, soul and the blues.
However, to the untrained eye, it becomes somewhat repetitive and it sometimes feel it overstays its welcome.
As an aside, Audible has an abridged live performance that clocks in under two hours. It also includes an interview with the author. Well worth it.
June 20, 2018
things this book has:
- history lessons on ragtime
- interactive structural poetry
- lists that will make you cry
- a cast of characters
- some of the most incredible, beautiful words, telling stories about survival and the sly wit and tremendous bravery that survival required. words about thriving under impossible conditions.
it was all just really wonderful put together. each page was a surprise and a revelation and you should read it.
- history lessons on ragtime
- interactive structural poetry
- lists that will make you cry
- a cast of characters
- some of the most incredible, beautiful words, telling stories about survival and the sly wit and tremendous bravery that survival required. words about thriving under impossible conditions.
it was all just really wonderful put together. each page was a surprise and a revelation and you should read it.
November 8, 2021
I really love listening to Tyehimba Jess talk about Olio in podcasts (especially this one). He and the interviewers are always so smart and sophisticated and excited that it makes me want to love the collection, too. For me, though, this falls into the category of reads I WANT to like more than I actually do.
To be clear, it's brilliant. Maybe that's why it's so fun to listen to him talk about it. He does so much with form, and I can't even tell you how much I LEARNED. That was one of his intentions: to tell all of these unheard stories about Black American performers and their victorious and exuberant survivance. Henry Box Brown mailed himself to freedom in a box and then became a famous magician in England. Conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy made enough money that they bought the plantation they were born on. And of course, there's Scott Joplin.
The funny thing is that I know nothing about music, but I do happen to be married to a violinist who plays a ragtime show every year that includes pieces by Scott Joplin. (Including, this year, "Bethena!") But I didn't know this collection was about musicians and performers when I kept picking it up in bookstores. The book itself is gorgeous. It screams to be picked up, and I did -- in bookstore after bookstore until my husband finally just bought me a copy. But I didn't know what it was about, so while reading, I found myself googling people and places and terms. Seriously, you should see my annotations on pretty much every page. On "Sissieretta Jones" (one of my favorite poems), I have notes for "ad libitum," "presto," "Swanee," "legato," "coda," "tempo rubato," "tremolo," "staccato," "stretto," and, of course, "Sissieretta Jones." I LEARNED SO MANY THINGS.
Despite all the history and music lessons, though, the poems didn't hit me the way I hoped. Maybe I didn't read it right. I spent six weeks with Olio as my daily poetry, reading it bit by bit every day, and maybe this is the type of collection you have to immerse yourself in in a gulp or two. But I also think the poetry itself, while expertly structured, was limiting. Jess wrote in sonnets, many that were syncopated, meaning that they could be read one after the other or -- if you read straight across the page -- could be read intertwined or blended. There are some poems that could be read bottom to top or from one corner to another or -- if you rip our and fold the page a certain why -- in even more ways, the rhythm never breaking.
Shakespeare would be so impressed, and I am, too. Olio is, as others have said, the first 4D collection of poetry. I just wish I liked it more.
To be clear, it's brilliant. Maybe that's why it's so fun to listen to him talk about it. He does so much with form, and I can't even tell you how much I LEARNED. That was one of his intentions: to tell all of these unheard stories about Black American performers and their victorious and exuberant survivance. Henry Box Brown mailed himself to freedom in a box and then became a famous magician in England. Conjoined twins Millie and Christine McKoy made enough money that they bought the plantation they were born on. And of course, there's Scott Joplin.
The funny thing is that I know nothing about music, but I do happen to be married to a violinist who plays a ragtime show every year that includes pieces by Scott Joplin. (Including, this year, "Bethena!") But I didn't know this collection was about musicians and performers when I kept picking it up in bookstores. The book itself is gorgeous. It screams to be picked up, and I did -- in bookstore after bookstore until my husband finally just bought me a copy. But I didn't know what it was about, so while reading, I found myself googling people and places and terms. Seriously, you should see my annotations on pretty much every page. On "Sissieretta Jones" (one of my favorite poems), I have notes for "ad libitum," "presto," "Swanee," "legato," "coda," "tempo rubato," "tremolo," "staccato," "stretto," and, of course, "Sissieretta Jones." I LEARNED SO MANY THINGS.
Despite all the history and music lessons, though, the poems didn't hit me the way I hoped. Maybe I didn't read it right. I spent six weeks with Olio as my daily poetry, reading it bit by bit every day, and maybe this is the type of collection you have to immerse yourself in in a gulp or two. But I also think the poetry itself, while expertly structured, was limiting. Jess wrote in sonnets, many that were syncopated, meaning that they could be read one after the other or -- if you read straight across the page -- could be read intertwined or blended. There are some poems that could be read bottom to top or from one corner to another or -- if you rip our and fold the page a certain why -- in even more ways, the rhythm never breaking.
Shakespeare would be so impressed, and I am, too. Olio is, as others have said, the first 4D collection of poetry. I just wish I liked it more.
October 29, 2020
How do we prove our souls to be wholly human
when the world don’t believe we have a soul?
How do we prove black souls holy and human
when the whole world swears we got no souls? (166)
Wow. Have you ever been personally devastated by a book while also realizing that everyone should read this ASAP? That's what happened to me while I read Olio. This is one of those books that I believe is deserved its Pulitzer. I should warn you that because of how it's structured, it's a little hard to get into. Don't let it discourage you and push through. Jess really takes his time to give voice to every single African-American artist he features, and while they did not leave behind any recordings (thanks racism & white supremacy! *flips them off*), their legacy still lives on thanks to Jess's careful and dedicated research. I am a history nerd and I love research and I CAN TELL how much this was a supreme labor of love and dedication. So yeah, read this.
September 12, 2025
all I can do is scream in awe of the genius of this man…I have so much respect for the undertaking of this completely singular, BLACK (!!!), musical, inventive and informative project. just wow. I learned about so many Black forgetten figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (my favorites were the mckoy twins and edmonia lewis) through his lyric and I’m soooo grateful. tyehimba jess is famous for creating the contrapuntal form and he shows how expansive and subjective and FREE it is in olio. it kind of allows the reader to “choose their own path” which I really appreciate. he does so much WORK behind the scenes so the reader can relax into the verse. anyways you should stop reading my review and just go pick up and read this book to have your mind nourished and blown and put back together again just to be placed inside your chest. i’m obsessed!
p.s. knowing that it took him 10 years to write this masterpiece is very comforting and inspiring
p.s. knowing that it took him 10 years to write this masterpiece is very comforting and inspiring
April 28, 2020
Tyehimba Jess's Olio is an incredibly layered and complicated work that is still, somehow, fairly approachable. Jess's ability to ground a lost history of African-American music through voices like Blind Boone & Edmonia Lewis gives Jess the space to explore a variety of forms both from poetry and music. So Tin Pan Alley comes to life through experimental poetry, interviews, sonnets, lyrics, and bits of music. Part history, part fiction, and all poetic and multigenre, it's a book that truly surprised and impressed me.
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