In Memoriam: Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005)

A great poet's death always comes prematurely, but the suddenness of Lorenzo Thomas's passing seems especially cruel, because his indispensable work was not nearly finished. Despite his valiant struggle with illness in recent years, he had just begun to reach a broader readership, mainly due to the recent publication of several significant books: first, his major critical work, Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry which Kathryne V. Lindberg has called "an extraordinarily erudite addition to the ongoing global–local, nationalist–diasporic conversation among black poets and their readers, a remarkably scrappy and self-critical floating seminar" (24), and "a revelation of the depth and duration of African American literary theory and practice" (31); second, the revised and expanded version of his 1979 collection, Chances Are Few poems that Gwendolyn Brooks praised for their "wit, technical skill, [and] steady energy" (Thomas, Chances cover), and which had earlier launched Thomas's international reputation as a poet of sharp humor, edgy sophistication, pure candor, and syncopated music; and most recently, his new book of poems, Dancing on Main Street, a collection that displays not only the breadth and depth of Thomas's subject matter, but the sheer inventiveness and urbanity of his style—in my view the best book of poetry published in the United States in 2004. Together with the plethora of provocative essays, commentaries, poems, and interviews recently appearing in journals throughout the country, these works express the soul of Thomas's original thinking about life, literature, society, and art, thinking that is starting to shape twenty-first-century American culture at large.

Sadly, however, at the time of his death, not only was Thomas working on another groundbreaking critical study, this one of the African-American writers of the nineteenth century who had anticipated the modernist writers he discusses in Extraordinary Measures, but he had reached the height of his power as a poet. His death has stolen from us a literary voice no one else has, since no other living poet I know has the same searing intellect, the same steady compassion, the same fount of historical knowledge, the same unyielding grip on the illogic of much of American culture, the same abiding wit, and the same musical soul that Lorenzo Thomas had. His death leaves an unbridgeable abyss between us and the understanding we need to cope with the contemporary American ethos.

Born in Panama to Caribbean parents—his father was a native of Saint Vincent, his mother a Jamaican born in Costa Rica—Thomas immigrated with his family to New York in 1948 and grew up in the Bronx and Queens. Spanish was his first language, but when he was five the other kids in his neighborhood beat him up because he "talked funny." He explained that this drove him to become "extra-fluent"in English (Nielsen 146), an effort that led him to become an avaricious reader. He started to write and publish poems in high school, and in the early 1960s, while still a student at Queens College, Thomas sought out and became (undoubtedly) the youngest member of the progressive, experimental Umbra writers' workshop in Manhattan. His involvement with the Umbra writers, and through them with the Black Arts Movement and other radical groups on the Lower East Side that were actively engaged in social protest and avant-garde art, brought Thomas into close contact with a host of young black writers, most of whom have since developed significant careers themselves, including Ishmael Reed, Tom Dent, Calvin Hernton, Joe Johnson, David Henderson, Amiri Baraka, and Lloyd Addison, among many others (Dent 318). From this early experience Thomas absorbed several important lessons that would guide his writing: Not only did he participate in the new black revolutionary social consciousness of the period but he gained a keen sense of the cultural and artistic diversity of those with whom he was working. Furthermore, he became acutely aware of how much music (especially jazz and the blues) and other arts intermingle...