When Thomas Sayers Ellis was growing up in the District, he wanted to be president because he thought it would allow him to share his opinions and ideas with a wide audience. After some analysis of the highest office in the land, however, he decided against it. "It seemed very limiting to be president, because the president didn't really talk to people," he said. "It seemed the best way to be heard was to be a writer."
That's what he became. Ellis studied poetry under Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, ultimately receiving a master of fine arts in the subject from Brown University. Since then, his work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and anthologies. His first collection of poetry, "The Maverick Room," was published by Graywolf Press this month.
Thomas Sayers Ellis will read from his first collection of poems, "The Maverick Room," on Saturday in Hyattsville.
(Courtesy Of Graywolf Press)
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Ellis will read from the collection Saturday at Karibu Books in Hyattsville. The appearance is a homecoming for the 40-year-old poet. Ellis now lives in Cleveland, where he is an English professor at Case Western Reserve University. Although he left Washington after graduating from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Northwest, Ellis said he has not strayed far.
"I have stayed connected to the music, the people, the folk of D.C. My movements have been for universities -- these things that one feels are a job. My roots always are and still are in D.C.," he said.
Those roots are prominent in "The Maverick Room," which is named for one of the now-defunct go-go clubs that Ellis frequented as a teenager. The book is divided into four sections, each named after a quadrant of the city he loves.
In the Maverick Room, where Ellis first heard go-go music, he realized that "the love of language, the love of imagery, the love of noise were all one. . . . The tight progression and flow of go-go let me know the kinship in what I was hearing, in what I thought and wrote, had to be poetry," he said.
Ellis said that "funk meets formalism" in his work, which combines literary devices and creative riffing. In "All Their Stanzas Look Alike," he writes of his struggle not to become a poet who follows convention.
His poems cover a wide range of subjects, including his writing life, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the percussive sound of go-go.
In "A Baptist Beat," he writes:
"A mixed congregation: sinners, worshipers,/Hustlers, survivors. All that terrible energy,/Locked in, trying to blend. Such a gathering/Of tribes has little, if any, use for a silk-robed choir./Members bring their own noise, own souls./Any Avenue Crew will tell you: nothing comes closer/to salvation than this . . . /Being called home, arms raised to testify, waving/From side to side, fists flying like bullets, bullets/Like fists. Above the snare: two sticks make the sign/Of the cross then break -- a divorced crucifix./The tambourine shakes like a collection plate./This pastor wants to know who's in the house,/Where we're from, are we tired yet, ready to quit?/We run down front, scream & shout, "Hell no,/We ain't ready to go! . . . "
Ellis said his poetry is an attempt to establish connections between genres, people and places.
"I want to make things whole again," he said. "I want the poem to be cinematic, like music, like reading, to challenge all those false barriers between genres. I don't want you to have a poem experience that's just poem. I don't want an experience that falls down flat as a whole or one that isn't meal-like, that's just vegetables or just meat.
"I want these things to live in the widest, most possible sense," he said, "even when they exist in a tight focus."
Thomas Sayers Ellis will read from "The Maverick Room" at 2 p.m. on Saturday at Karibu Books, the Mall at Prince George's, 3500 East West Hwy., Hyattsville. Admission is free. 301-559-1140.
