Thomas Sayers Ellis, “Audience”

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Imagine a door, a door
with a sign on it, a sign that excludes you.
Not a symbol of you,
but the real birth you: erased, gone.

Through the door,
something you think you want,
something you were told was in books,
a false wholeness: Europe.

And if you are lucky… a seat on one
of its not so murderous seas,
surrounded by listeners
who are “kind of” open.

So you go, alone in the mind, often,
despite the sign on the door
and the signs inside,
and you never come back.

You are rewarded for this, in public,
and accepted onto
their realm of podiums.
Disliked, by a few, too.

Skin, Inc. is the long-awaited second collection from Thomas Sayers Ellis. He describes it as “identity repair poems,” elaborating for Publishers Weekly: “The ‘publishable’ American poem seems to have skipped over a certain amount of honesty, boldness, and activism in the name of ‘craft.’ An identity repair poem is one that acknowledges that many of the tools in the ‘taught toolbox’ need cultural improving… If there’s an ideal reader, I guess it would be someone—black, yellow, white or red—interested in literary time travel, so that we don’t end up here again in a place where there hasn’t been an Asian or Latino or Native American poet laureate.”

Skin, Inc. also includes “Race Change Operation” (from the Split This Rock blog). And, in 2005, I hosted Ellis in conversation with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, during which he showed us an excerpt of the poem “The Return of Colored Only.”

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29 September 2010 | poetry |

Major Jackson, “Roof of the World”

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I live on the roof of the world among the aerial
simulacra of Things, among the faded: old tennis shoes,
vanished baseballs, heartbreak gritted with dirt. My mind
flickers like lightning in a cloud. I’m networked
beholding electric wires and church spires.
I lean forward and peer at the suffering below—
Sartre said: man is condemned to be free.
I believe in the dead who claim to believe in me—
says, too, the missing and forgotten. Day darkens
on. I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you, now.

The poems in Holding Company, the third collection from Major Jackson, share the formal bond of a ten-line structure—because, he told Identity Theory, “I wanted to teach myself how to create an exalted utterance in a poem, how to create something that was emotionally heartrending, that did not need a lot of scaffolding. I wanted to go in a new direction and allow that compression to sing the poem’s themes louder, sing emotive declarations by shrinking it further.” Sometimes there are other interesting connections between the poems; the last line of “Roof of the World,” for example, will turn up again in “Forecast” (from Poetry Out Loud), and another line from that poem finds its way into “White Power.”

Other poems in Holding Company include “Here the Sea,” “At the Club,” and “Maithuna” (all from Salt Magazine) and three other poems that inspired short animated films: “Leave It All Up to Me,” “Zucchini,” and “Migration.”

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27 September 2010 | poetry |

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