Thomas Sayers Ellis, Poet of ‘Percussive Prosody,' Dies at 61

New York Times

3 days ago

Thomas Sayers Ellis, a poet, photographer and bandleader who explored race, music, politics, academia and family in dazzling, erudite and often funkified verse — 'percussive prosody,' he once called it — and who was a founder of the Dark Room Collective, a noted community of Black poets, died on July 17 at his home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 61.
His son, Finn Andrews, said that the cause was unknown, but that Mr. Ellis had been suffering from respiratory issues.
Mr. Ellis grew up in Washington, and he was captivated by its hometown sound, go-go music — a funky, jazzy, wildly percussive form that sprung up there at the turn of the 1970s. He played drums in a few bands before starting his own, and he named his first book of poetry 'The Maverick Room' (2005), for a beloved local go-go club. In that book, he paid homage to the music and how it marked him.
Mr. Ellis's high school nickname was Sticks, not just because he deployed them on the drums but also because he was skinny. In a poem with that title, he used the language of percussion to connect the violence he saw in his father, whose strength he revered as a child, with his own development as a writer:
I discovered writing,How words are parts of speechWith beats and breaths of their own.Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam!
He went on:
My first attempts were filled with noise,Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows.The page tightened like a drumResisting the clockwise twistingOf a handheld chrome key
The poet and composer Janice Lowe, another Dark Room founder, said in an interview that Mr. Ellis's work was 'very much rooted in musicality, in all kinds of Black musical and linguistic traditions and in the way people play with language.' She added, 'It can fly you into the surreal, into jazz or film, or root you in something familial — whatever he was dialoguing with — but it never rests, never stays in the familiar. It always travels and transforms and transgresses.'
Mr. Ellis was prone to linguistic pyrotechnics, both on and off the page. He was an omnivorous reader of the literary canon and an avid book collector, particularly of those writers not yet in the canon, notably people of color. He was also a film, poetry and music buff whose interests ranged from Gertrude Stein and French New Wave films to Bootsy Collins and George Clinton.
In 1986, he was living in a Victorian house in Cambridge, Mass., with the poet Sharan Strange and others when he and Ms. Strange began putting together a library of works by Black authors of the diaspora. They housed it in a former darkroom on the third floor, and they called the collection 'The Dark Room,' a name they liked as a pun for a room full of 'Black books,' as Ms. Strange wrote in an essay for the literary magazine Mosaic in 2006.
When James Baldwin died the next year, Mr. Ellis, Ms. Strange and their housemates made a pilgrimage to his funeral in New York City. It was a heady literary event — Toni Morrison, William Styron, Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka all delivered eulogies — and it galvanized them to create a collective that would honor and support writers of color. They already had a name, the Dark Room, and, with Ms. Lowe, they began to host readings in their living room.
They were electric events, with music and art installations, and everyone wanted in. Alice Walker called and asked to read. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born Nobel Prize winner, read, and so did Michael S. Harper, the poet laureate of Rhode Island.
The collective grew to include, among many others, Kevin Young, now the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and the Pulitzer Prize winners Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey, the country's poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. Jeff Gordinier, writing in The New York Times in 2014, called the Dark Room 'a flash of literary lightning' akin to the Beat poets and the Black Arts Movement. The collective lasted, in various forms, until 1998, and the members held reunions in subsequent years.
'You need other people who think like you, maybe, who read like you, maybe, who walk and breathe like you, maybe,' Mr. Ellis told an audience in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2013 during one reunion tour. 'You think you're adding something that's needed, that you don't see. There's something about that, that never ends, no matter who you are and where you are.'
In a poem that Mr. Ellis titled 'T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully-Operational Memory),' he wrote:
Memory, Walcott says, moves backwards.If this is true, your memory is a mothershipminus the disco-sadistic silverall stars need to shine. Tell the world.A positive nuisance. Da bomb.
When that poem was included in 'The Best American Poetry 2001,' he had this to say about it, in an author's note:
'In the poem, I am working on my own brand of literary activism, which I call Genuine Negro Heroism. Genuine Negro Heroism (GNH) is the opposite of HNIC (Head Negro In Charge), and incorporates pee-pure modes of black freak, black folk, and black soul behavior.'
Thomas Sayers Ellis was born on Oct. 5, 1963, in Washington. His mother, Jeannette (Forbes) Ellis, managed a restaurant; his father, Thomas Ellis, was a pipe mechanic.
Thomas attended Dunbar High School but spent much of his time at the city's block parties and go-go clubs. His girlfriend at the time, Sandra Andrews, gave birth to his son, Finn, when he was 17 and she was 19. Mr. Ellis attended Alabama State University on a scholarship and then moved to Cambridge, where he took classes at Harvard with the poet Seamus Heaney.
'In a city where everybody acts like they've read everything,' the poet and publisher Askold Melnyczuk said of Cambridge, 'he actually had.'
Mr. Melnyczuk was an early booster of Mr. Ellis's; he included his work in 'Take Three: Agni New Poets Series' (1996), which he edited. In addition to 'The Maverick Room,' Mr. Ellis was the author of the chapbook 'The Genuine Negro Hero' (2001), 'Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems' (2010) and 'Crank Shaped Notes' (2021), a collection of poems, essays and photos about the go-go music he loved. Mr. Ellis, who had taken photos since his go-go days, was a sharp street and portrait photographer.
Mr. Ellis earned an M.F.A. from Brown University in 1995. He taught at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., among other institutions, and earned numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim.
In 2014, he and the jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis formed a band they called Heroes Are Gang Leaders, after a chapter in Amiri Baraka's 1967 collection of short fiction, 'Tales.' An enticing mash-up of poetry, jazz, funk and more, the group swelled to 12 members and performed with guests like Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, the singer and poet Lydia Lunch and the jazz bassist William Parker.
Mr. Ellis and Mr. Lewis often squabbled during rehearsals. Mr. Ellis had a habit of recording jam sessions and then memorizing the music, and he was annoyed when they weren't later reproduced, down to the note. 'His memory was phenomenal, and he'd get so irritated,' Mr. Lewis said in an interview. 'I'd say: 'Thomas, we're improvising. We're not supposed to be memorizing.''
In addition to his son, Mr. Andrews, Mr. Ellis is survived by a brother, James; four grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.
In early 2016, a year before the #MeToo movement took off, Mr. Ellis was a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when a women's literary group known as Vida published, online, a collection of anonymous accounts of what it said was sexual misconduct by Mr. Ellis. His classes were canceled, and Jia Tolentino, writing in Jezebel, reported on the Vida post and its ethics in an article headlined 'Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?' The New Republic picked up the story, as fodder for a piece about the workshop's reputation for the bad behavior of its male professors.
For his part, Mr. Ellis made no public comment about the incident. Soon after, he moved to St. Petersburg, and he was named the city's first photo laureate in 2023.
'Language is always changing,' Mr. Ellis told The Missoula Independent, a weekly independent newspaper in Montana, in 2009. 'Language is not finished. Language is the thing that if you stay connected to it like I do, eat it enough, carry it with you enough, it will rejuvenate you.
'I don't mean 'save you' in a religious sense, but it will save you from a certain kind of dogma or mundane, boring existence.'