Leadbelly's Blues

If you’d like to give some contemporary poetry a try, look no further than Tyehimba Jess, a nationally acclaimed poet who is currently on the faculty of the UI Creative Writing Department. There’s nothing obscure or pretentious about Jess’ poetry – he’s a great storyteller, and he picked a great subject for his latest book, leadbelly: the life of Huddie Ledbetter, the hard-living Blues guitarist.

The poems in leadbelly include actual excerpts of news articles, letters, interviews, and songs from Leadbelly’s time. There’s a rawness and intensity to his story – stripped down poverty, murder, prison, and shocking racism. The enormously talented and charismatic Leadbelly could not and would not be controlled. Here’s a line from a poem early in the book that foreshadows all that is to come, a poem written in the voice of Leadbelly’s mother:

when the black boy climbs out of my womb:
how to peel dynamite from his bones?
how to strip tornado’s hum from his ears?
how to weed graveyard from the garden of his tongue?

As Toi Derricotte says in a quote on the book’s cover, “Changing history into poetry takes mysterious skill.” Tyehimba Jess certainly has it.