MARQUETTE — To a filled room, Northern Michigan University professor Mathew Frank announced the final guest in NMU’s Visiting Writers Series for the 2023 academic year.

“Tonight we have Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tyehimba Jess,” he said to a crowd of applause on Feb. 29.

Performing a reading of various poems and answering a litany of questions, Jess provided university professors, area residents and students with an opportunity to learn from his style. These featured poems were from Jess’ published books “Olio,” the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and “Leadbelly,” which won various awards as well.

“On each page of both ‘Olio’ and ‘Leadbelly’ are poems that sing through history, that reach from the Civil War through Reconstruction and World War I and bring to the present in their punctilious palm the voices of Black performers like members of the all-Black a cappella choir the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Black indigenous sculpter ‘Wildfire’ Edmonia Lewis, and of course blues guitarist singer and multi-instrumentalist Leadbelly,” explained essayist, poet and NMU graduate assistant Andrew Walker.

Jess explained the significance of the title of his book “Olio,” and how it applied to the poetry inside. Olio has different meanings: a melange of ingredients that come together to put a meal together, in the literary sense an olio is a book with multiple forms and formats within, and in the theatrical sense the olio is the middle part of the mistral show where many other acts appear. These come together as the poems inside the book relate to Black history, has different voices and uses a style that encourages multiple readings.

Jess explained the style as, “Contrapuntal poems, contrapuntal meaning counterpointed, point counterpoint. There is a dialectic happening between the various voices featured in contrapuntal poems, there are plenty of contrapuntal poems in the book. It is kind of a theme of the book.”

Using this style allows a dialogue between historical figures, to allow one voice to converse with the other, said Jess.

Jess also said he used this style to create dimensionality, so the reader could go around and around as this contrapuntal dialogue kept going and became akin to a riddle. As opposed to the standard poem as Jess said “which were subjected to a kind of flatness, a two-dimensional plane.”

The contrapuntal poems Jess read from “Olio” were a series of poems about Millie and Christine McCoy, born in 1850 as conjoined slaves. They spent time in a traveling circus before being kidnapped to England, before returning, then buying the plantation they were raised on.

“They bought the land, they held onto that land, I just visited with a friend of mine down there a couple years ago,” said Jess. “There are still descendants of the McCoy family living on that land today in North Carolina.”

Jess then read a few of the poems he wrote for the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who he called “the first Black supergroup.” Their struggles and tour in Germany and their eventual performance to the German Prince and Princess.

Jess ended on two recently composed poems on issues in the modern age. The last one he read was a poem whose first listeners where those who attended this event, as it was the poem’s debut. Utilizing jazz harmonica Jess performed a poem about Aaron Bushnell, and compared his death to that of the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc; and how both self-immolated in protest of a war ongoing in their respective times.

When asked if that last poem would be published in an upcoming collection, Jess replied, “We’ll see, that last one isn’t really finished yet. You know what, I did not realize was that there was somebody in Atlanta that also self-immolated. It was in December and I cannot even find their name, their name has not even been released,” he said. “I guess what I am saying is that there are more verses to that song to come, hopefully. Then hopefully I won’t have to sing that song or read that poem with the same sense of urgency I am reading it now.”

Next fall, NMU’s Visiting Writers Series will host Melissa Febos, author of “Girlhood,” a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and in the winter, Hanif Abdurraqib author of the “A Little Devil in America,” which won the 2022 Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction.

Antonio Anderson can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 550. His email address is aanderson@miningjournal.net.