A teacher of poetry, a student of poetry, an activist, a listener. These are some of the images that come to mind when considering Tyehimba Jess. For a man who could otherwise live as free a life as he pleases, he is intensely invested in the welfare of children. His career as a teacher takes him to many schools throughout Chicago over the course of a week. His modest car is a live-in office. He spends hours each day simply shuttling from one classroom to the next. Snack food. Coffee. A change of clothes, some books and folders. The sound of tires, the occasional sigh of exasperation from bad cross-town traffic. Settle in a class. Workshop with the kids. Then off to the next school.

When he arrives in a school, he is in direct contact with children. Young children. Sometimes teens. They speak about their lives. As a newcomer to their homerooms, he often hears them confide their lives in ways their everyday teachers don't hear. These may be stories spoken to the everyday teachers, but simply overlooked, rehearsed and kneaded into background noise by adult minds coping with managing 20 to 40 children at a time. But Jess is a listener, and the children teach.

Tyehimba Jess is invested in his family as they are invested in him. His father was part an American migration which drew many blacks northward to find opportunities otherwise not available in to them in the South. His father earned his bachelors at Xavier in Louisiana, and then took his Ph.D. in Detroit. He was a professional, and so he provided for his family better than the assembly line life with which many other Detroiters stuggled.

There is a strong sense of parental/paternal connection for Jess with the city of Detroit. With a role model in his father he's also had an example of academic achievement. In turn, Jess would leave Detroit for the University of Chicago for his own studies. Intellectuals. Radicals. Exposure to new politics that Detroit didn't necessarily cultivate.

The sea change that Chicago's slam and performance brought to poetry caught Jess's imagination, and by the early 1990s he was making a name for himself as a performance poet. He is one of only a handful of poets ever named as a cultural ambassador from Chicago

motivations: Tyehimba Jess is very precise about distinguishing between performance poetry and slam poetry. This is an idea he shares directly and critically with Quraysh Ali Lansana, who is a peer and collaborator of Jess'. While Jess acknowledges he is a performance poet, he did not consider himself a slam poet until 1999 when he began participating in slams in a regular basis. It was important for Jess to establish himself first as a performance poet in general terms, and then more specifically as a slam poet later. You can read further to see some of his general motivations in a literary way.

through the Sister Cities program. He captured the ambassador's title in a slam that sent him to Accra, Ghana. He has continued to be a steady presence in Chicago's slam poetry, earning a space on the 2000 Green Mill slam team. He has also been a Writer's Voice writer in residence, sponsored by Chicago's Duncan YMCA; ; is published in BLU Magazine, and Soul Fires: Black Men on Love and Violence; and is a 2000 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship winner.

The focus in this suite is upon the father relationship -- father and son, teacher and student -- and it emerged in an almost subconscious way. This is a sign that Jess is working on new writing at a basic level. His first self-published chap book when niggas love the Revolution like they love the bulls earned this praise from Sterling Plumpp: "Thematically and linguistically, Jess' poetry addresses his community politically and artistically. He possesses an educated ear that fuses various cultural sounds into powerful tapestry on the page."

While the success of the chapbook has sustained him, Jess feels that he's due to make a more subtle turn in his writing. But given the strength and variegation in his voice, one could just as easily say that the energy has simply found a different thematic outlet. Given the social condition of the present-day black family -- very often deprived of a father and the social continuity he begets -- the suite is both an open critique and a wake-up call in the most basic terms.

America lingers someplace near justice and responsibility, but outside both, where the black man should be as much at home with his family as would a man of any other color. The fact is, he is not. The restoration of the African family in America is a difficult mission. But with the guidance of poetry such as Jess's, we know that it can be done, as we know the rewards of the family's completion will nurture us all.

- Kurt Heintz, e-poets network

To audition the audio poetry in this feature of the Book of Voices, you should have the current Real Player plug-in for your web browser.