During this time, to support himself, Jess worked as an intern at a bank, as a community organizer, and as substitute teacher in the public school system in Chicago.

[1] Around the same time, he began to take classes at nearby University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) with the poet and scholar Sterling D. Plumpp, who became a mentor, and he realized that his real passion was for poetry.

"[6] In his book he writes some poems in reference to Edmonia Lewis, John William Boone, Henry Box Brown, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Fisk Jubilee Singers, Ernest Hogan, Sissieretta Jones, Scott Joplin, Millie and Christine McKoy, Booker T. Washington, Blind Tom Wiggins, Bert Williams and George Walker.

In Tyehimba Jess's Olio, a new book length performance of poetry, song, collage and art object, musical knowledge is channeled back to its source—before the wax cylinders of antiquated recording technology, before Alan Lomax and W.C.

Jess's poetic concentration is so absolute, dithyrambic, multimodal, encyclopedic, that it defies categorization as much as the early music of gospel singers and jazz pioneers, blues artists and vaudeville performers he describes and celebrates.

The result is one of the most profound portraits I know of how artists have redefined their very being in the world[7]Jess, though an author who has a voice that cannot be mistaken, acts more as a gentle tour guide through a period of black artistry that is often represented differently than it is here[8]