Author2Author: Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon & Thomas Sayers Ellis, pt. 4

Yesterday, Thomas persuaded Lyrae to share some of her work in progress.

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon: Now, I have to ask for the same: lines/stanzas from what you're working on now, a new map you've made for us to traverse and explore.

Thomas Sayers Ellis: This air, the contemporary one, seems to be filled with so many things that it's hard to keep up with ones' self, with ones' own breathing, especially with ones' own thinking and feeling about breathing; and isn't this the first duty of a line poetry? However, in most cases, only sighs or glimpses are catchable, how awful, and still I am full of work and load. Reading, then, and living, has loaded me, again. Confession: I was once a drum and now I feel a gun, a proud one, full of the different levels of blackness--how many, I don't know, but certainly more than I've ever felt before. I absorb this from everyone and I feel it all over, the way one feels his or her own private briar patch.

In my work this means that my channels, my frequencies, those used to load and unload nuances of Coloredness, Negroness, Blackness, and then some, are all simultaneously living and alive, a mixed congregation, all bothering and worrying me with non-traditional ways around and of replacing the usual poetic devices. See "Marcus Garvey Vitamins" for "psyche", the supreme trick-move, and for why I, sometimes, think subject-verb disagreement is legit. I feel this swelling in our everything, them changing same-old-same-olds, the real reasons why Blackness ain't one thing and why we (Black folks) don't all get along (in art or life) in February or April.

Call it a Supafly2k triple crossroads but whatever it is I am feeling very "Return to..." and very full of us. I even made the Celie-Color-Purple-Fingers (between poems) at an audience the other day. All in all, I'm repairing something. I must be...the I in we, perhaps. Here's an excerpt/offering from "The Return of COLORED ONLY"--

Naturally, this will scare
the civil rights out of some
and, for a mad-moment, empower
a great many wrong-cultured others.

To this "The Return…"
will either code switch or hood ornament,
drama-drumming both--a cult-nats matrimony
of the vernacular re-mix: ain't studin' you,
nommo no more nommo,
stop studin' us.