An Interview with Lorenzo Thomas
- An Interview with Lorenzo Thomas
Lorenzo Thomas was born in Panama and raised in New York City. He attended Queens College of the City University of New York. Thomas is quoted in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry as saying, “I came to New York City speaking Spanish . . . got beat up on the way home from school because I ‘talked funny.’ Never forgot it. Went way way way away out of my way to become extra-fluent in English.”
Early in his career Thomas showed a penchant for maintaining personal, professional, artistic, and ideological ties with an interesting range of writers’ groups. For example, he was one of the contributors to Amiri Baraka’s seminal Black Arts anthology,Black Fire. However, early in his career he also affiliated with the “Tulsa group” of New York poets through Ron Padgett’s White Dove Review. He later associated with Ted Berrigan’s “C” Magazine on the Lower East Side.
Thomas counts among the eclectic influences on his poetry such artists as Aimé Césaire, Blues artists Robert Johnson and Lightning Hopkins, and the late Juke Boy Bonner (a Houston street singer and poet whom Thomas eulogized in Callaloo).
Thomas’s wit, his vision, is dry, ironic, seemingly unobtrusive until it sparks in telling lines throughout the poem. I’m thinking of such poems as “Hiccups,” “Instructions for your New Osiris,” “Fit Music.” In “Fit Music,” an exasperated speaker admonishes, “Live up to your clothes, / Sd K’ung Fu Tse // Despite what we learned / Of the sins of the suburbs / And the dreams of the harbor // Standing for their irrational anthems.”
Lorenzo Thomas is presently Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing. Having begun his career during the turbulent 1960s, Thomas continues to practice in the fields of poetry and criticism. His works have appeared in American journals such as African American Review and Ploughshares, and European journals, such as Blues Unlimited (England) and Subdream (Austria). He has contributed articles to the African American Encyclopedia, Oxford Companion to African American Literature, and American Literary Scholarship. His collections of poems include A Visible Island (1967), Fit Music: California Songs (1972), Chances are Few (1979) and The Bathers (1981). A new collection Es Gibt Zeugen (1997) has recently been published in Germany.
This interview took place at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 5, 1997. Indeed it was a reunion of sorts for Thomas, Pinson, and Kendra Hamilton, who have all lived and been active in the arts community of Houston, Texas.
How is the arts scene in Houston these days, given that you have been an integral part of it going all the way back to, say, when we met at the Orange Show?1 [End Page 287]
In any city that size, there’s a lot of different things happening in the arts on different levels. There’s an official, cultural level; there’re things that are advertised for tourists; there are things considered part of the established cultural elements in the community that are connected to schools, universities, that kind of thing; and there’s always a kind of ongoing artistic underground, whether it happens to be young people, or students or avant garde artists, so that’s always constantly changing in Houston. I’m sometimes more involved with it than at other times. Right now there are still a number of . . . writers and I guess some sections where you find it. Project Row Houses founded by Rich Lowe is one. And I guess Midtown, what used to be called Kuumba House [a theatrical space used for readings, visual arts exhibitions, and the like]. The Ensemble’s place is being entirely renovated, so for the past couple of years they have been floating to different houses—they were down on Main Street for a season, they’re in Midtown this season. The renovation was the result of a big capital plan and part of the [Cultural Arts Council of Houston’s] stabilization project. [This million-dollar renovation has since been completed.] The Ensemble is going on twenty years old . . .
Certainly...
