{"id":827,"date":"2010-09-29T00:01:19","date_gmt":"2010-09-29T04:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/09\/29\/thomas-sayers-ellis-audience\/"},"modified":"2010-09-26T19:54:39","modified_gmt":"2010-09-26T23:54:39","slug":"thomas-sayers-ellis-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2010\/09\/29\/thomas-sayers-ellis-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Sayers Ellis, “Audience”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"thomas-sayers-ellis.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\n

Imagine a door, a door
\nwith a sign on it, a sign that excludes you.
\nNot a symbol of you,
\nbut the real birth you: erased, gone.<\/p>\n

Through the door,
\nsomething you think you want,
\nsomething you were told was in books,
\na false wholeness: Europe.<\/p>\n

And if you are lucky… a seat on one
\nof its not so murderous seas,
\nsurrounded by listeners
\nwho are “kind of” open.<\/p>\n

So you go, alone in the mind, often,
\ndespite the sign on the door
\nand the signs inside,
\nand you never come back.<\/p>\n

You are rewarded for this, in public,
\nand accepted onto
\ntheir realm of podiums.
\nDisliked, by a few, too.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Skin, Inc.<\/i><\/a> is the long-awaited second collection from Thomas Sayers Ellis<\/a>. He describes it as “identity repair poems,” elaborating for Publishers Weekly<\/i><\/a>: “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\u00e2\u20ac\u201dblack, yellow, white or red\u00e2\u20ac\u201dinterested 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.”<\/p>\n

Skin, Inc.<\/i> also includes “Race Change Operation<\/a>” (from the Split This Rock<\/i> blog). And, in 2005, I hosted Ellis in conversation with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon<\/a>, during which he showed us an excerpt of the poem “The Return of Colored Only.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}