Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (review)

In Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems, his new and impressive volume of poetry, Thomas Sayers Ellis is funny because he is dead serious. Though he is often deliciously irreverent about academia, the literary establishment and certain strange pieties of race politics, Sayers Ellis takes quite seriously his mandate to himself to imagine how identity—poetic, racial, communal, national—can be repaired. Indeed, this mandate is the great strength of the book even as it produces some of its foibles, quirks which usually entail Sayers Ellis to rein in his seriously funny imagination in the face of the very constraints against which he is pushing. Of course, he is too wise and too self-conscious a poet not to notice most of these moments of compromise, so they usually afford him opportunities for his most intriguing and powerful formal innovations, his most incisive political insights and his most satisfyingly ironic humor. Moreover, Sayers Ellis knows and channels black traditions from James Brown to Langston Hughes, from the dozens to the sermonic, and from vernacular oral performance to the most literate of African American wordplay with a richness, fullness and accuracy that are not matched by anyone this side of Toni Morrison. Thus, the volume shows off the rose of our culture and politics and its thorns, the known pathways of blackness and the liberating newness. To read this book is to feel the imaginative salve of one’s heritage offered with fierce love by a poet who knows his tools, who is nobody’s fool, and who is at his most eloquent when he claims the difficult freedom of his own creativity.

What distinguishes Skin Inc. as a book to read and to remember, then, is Sayers Ellis’s explicit refusal to write what anyone expects. Though he rarely uses the words like “freedom,” Sayers Ellis will brook no limitation to his imagination and creative practice, including some of the tried and true models of black poetic form and statement. While he mines the blues tradition, practices something resembling jazz poetry improvisation, and embraces hip hop, he invents far more forms than he borrows. For example, Sayers Ellis uses four-line stanzas that evoke blues forms only to revise them, or to shift to longer stanzas in the same poem, hinting that the blues form cannot and does not say it all. In “The New Perform-a-Poem,” he ironically writes blocks of prose for his manifesto on performance poetry, knowing criticism of spoken word often declares that it is either too simplistically poetic or too much like prose. And in “Mr. Dynamite Splits,” his elegy for James Brown, Sayers Ellis juxtaposes his own photographs with poetic texts and sometimes cryptic prose footnotes which give instructions on how to read and even perform the poem—even though the poem may seem straightforward—just to make sure that we don’t fall into complacency. There is folk wisdom remixed (“A single profile of personas / like a caesura / in buttermilk”); fabulous wordplay straight from the streets (“This the same me I was before / skin’s melanin whip, / / coloring color the color / I want to color color, not the color / color colors me.”); and moving meditations on the originality of James Brown’s artistry, on the significance of Barack Obama’s presidency and on how a racist history continues to write us. His poems tell stories by resisting narrative and validate individual personhood by resisting the lyric voice. Some of them use Standard English syntax, but many do not, instead juxtaposing phrases that insinuate or, at times, even defy traditional narrative or linear logic. As part of his fix, then, Sayers Ellis comes at you from so many different directions, with so many modes of poetic structure, so many complicated personae and so many subtle allusions to the tradition that you cannot get a hold of him. This multiplicity is central to the beautifully repairing freedom of the tradition that is at the heart of this volume.

Indeed, this multifaceted, serious playfulness is in itself one of...