"A Mixed Congregation": An Interview with Thomas Sayers Ellis

Thomas Sayers Ellis. Photo by John "Skyline" Davidson, 2004.

This interview was conducted on June 2, 2004, by telephone between College Station, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio, where Thomas Sayers Ellis lives.

ROWELL: Tom, I have long had difficulty in my efforts to describe your poetry—its style, how you sound, how you form your language, the nature of your lyricism. You seem to take pleasure in the hard work of making poetry as play. I always thought that in technique, if not in voice, you deploy through sentences multiple cultural forms at once. Your synthesis of these forms is wonderful. I guess you can understand that I'm trying to tell you that you're unlike most contemporary poets I've read. Will you talk about what you're trying to do aesthetically with form and language in your poems?

ELLIS: It's actually hard for me to describe the totality of the many attempts in the work itself, but when I think about the work in terms of its DNA, its ways of being, it's hard not to discuss what a line is, and I remember learning in school the official definition of a line: a unit of sound and a unit of meaning. I was always struck by the idea of union in unit. Sharing, and how much a line can share, its completeness and incompleteness. I know that in a poem and in a line it's usually one category (a way of walking and breathing or another, never a mix), and I think that I had learned from reading poetry, from reading a lot of poetry, that I did not desire to continue to separate modes of behavior in the body of the poem and in the body of TSE. Ain't I a poem? [Laughter.] I am no longer satisfied with any kind of unit that moves in one direction. It seems to me that life and poems fill each other with unions of thinking, and unions of feeling, and unions sound, and unions of loss, and unions of all sorts of cultural characteristics that both the classroom/workshop and the officially accepted American English overlook, take for granted, and disrespect. I believe that W. H. Auden said one of the things a young poet needs to learn is to pun, and I think I took it upon (intended) myself to shake and bake and mix and remix pun, irony, and now radical black rule breaking—often trying successfully and unsuccessfully to merge every possibility of what it is possible to receive (and share) into one blood. Poem is skin, poetry is blood; the young must union all units. Imagine then, the signifying pun or the gossiping, ironic metaphor and the two-faced simile. That's the kind of line, kind of room my stanzas are struggling to hold and, at the same time, cannot hold. That's where much of the subject matter comes from—out of unionization, mini-marches, freedom walks, those kinds of breathing footprints, and that kind of "mad syncretism" is what wants to happen in the poem "Marcus Garvey Vitamins"?

ROWELL: You mentioned "Marcus Garvey Vitamins," the second poem in the opening section of The Maverick Room, your first collection. You actually divided the poem into sections bearing the letters a, b, c, and down to e—all vitamins. To help you remember, I want to read "Marcus Garvey Vitamins" for your comments:

A

All us we folk
person community first.
Invent truth,

B

no he didn't,
yes he did. Ain't English.
You lyin' to me.

C

Africa disagrees
with subject-verb agreement.
Aspect ratio,

D

widescreen whiteache.
Don't like it, don't Pulitzer me.
I stress less than landlessness.

E

I break beat, I rhetorical strategy,
I escape route.
I, I, I, psych.

As I read aloud and in silence, I hear you play with multiple references, with...