December 2017 Meeting: Olio by Tyehimba Jess

December 7th's book club meeting stands out in my mind as the best one to date. It was the day Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tyehimba Jess pulled up with his wife, Kelly Marie Jess, and read from his poetry collection, Olio. I’ve always made it a point, when someone performs, to watch the audience react. The reaction, for me, is where the genius of a performance really lies. So when Tyehimba would do shit like point out that poem could be read from the top down, then the bottom up, I immediately scanned the faces of book club members because I knew the expression on their face would only say one thing: WHAT. THE. FUCK. On a deeper level, Tyehimba wrote those poems in three dimensionally because the black minstrel performers, he honored with these poems, were flattened in a such a way that their humanity was non-existent. In the minds of people who watched these minstrel performances, and believed what they saw, there wasn’t any difference between a black person’s being and performing. Olio shows how blurring that line is a subversive act. As anyone with real power knows, the best way to keep power is to never let it be known that you have it in the first place. This meeting was definitely the catalyst for my understanding that lesson. In short: it was lit!