Tyehimba Jess’s 1992 poem “when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls” challenged Chicago fans to think about issues more substantive than their team’s NBA championships. If the promise of the poem’s title is fulfilled, he wrote, “We will know cia stats / fbi stats, / infant mortality stats, / police brutality stats, / and literacy training techniques like we know / paxson’s shoe size, / pippen’s rebounds, / grant’s salary, / and all the intimate details of michael’s last gambling spree.”
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He self-published a chapbook the following year, using “when niggas” as the title piece and giving away a third of the 700 copies. The chapbook, for which University of Illinois at Chicago professor Sterling Plumpp penned a blurb, boosted his reputation. Two years later the poem was included in the anthology Soul Fires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence, and circulated widely via E-mail.
Jess started writing poetry at 16 and won second prize for poetry at an NAACP academic competition two years later. After graduating from high school in 1984, he enrolled at the University of Chicago–partly because he had attended the same elementary and high schools as his brother and didn’t want to follow him to the University of Michigan. Jess started out as an English major but abandoned poetry for public policy after one of his papers earned only a C+ after two rewrites. “At this point, I can work with a white instructor about creative writing,” he says. “I was not at that point at that particular time.”
Jess, who will start an MFA program at New York University in the fall, says he now writes more nuanced poems. His work is “more concerned with the human struggle that we have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, like how we relate to our children, the question of whether or not we will have children, the romantic relationships we have as a people,” he says. “Those issues are just as important as the issues I brought up in ‘when niggas love Revolution like they love the bulls.’”
