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An Interview with Thomas Sayers Ellis

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.1998.0045

1080-6512

Charles H Rowell, Thomas Sayers Ellis,

Gothic Literature and Media Analysis

An Interview With Thomas Sayers Ellis Charles H. Rowell This interview was conducted by telephone between Charlottesville, Virginia, and Cleveland, Ohio, on February 3, 1997. ROWELL When I first met you, you were not only writing poetry; you were also a cultural worker, organizing and developing what was then called the Dark Room Reading Series, and planning and coordinating its cultural activities. How important was the Dark Room Collective to you, individually, as a writer? What is the Collective? What does it do? Will you talk about its importance in relation to your generation of writers? You’ve had the advantage of witnessing the doings of four generations of writers: not only your own, but those represented, chronologically, by Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and Rita Dove. Will you talk about how you see the Collective and, in general, your generation of writers in relation to those earlier three living generations? I am aware that I have actually asked several questions here. [Laughter.] ELLIS It’s an interesting question, and I think that the answer is going to be linked to the answer to your first question—having got part of my education, my literary education, being a member of the Dark Room Collective and one of the coordinators of the Dark Room Reading Series that gave me the advantage of coming in contact with many of the writers you just named and if anything, when you’re speaking about literature and the Dark Room Collective’s relationship to African-American literature, you’re speaking about a specific and quick historical moment. And I don’t think that what we did is so different from what some of the other writers you named had to do in order to be heard. Of course History has afforded us the advantage of coming in contact with those writers, and that in itself creates both community and courage. We have the advantage of nothing but being now, the advantage of gazing back at those other writers’ careers and works from the present. And certain lessons have been taught and learned and others haven’t. And you learn not to tiptoe. You learn to be courageous. And there’s no time to waste or to be anybody other than yourself, because once you choose literature, to quote Hayden, you’re already “an alien among aliens” and a minority of black people calling themselves writers (in America) is a UFO to some and a mothership to others. So it is a certain kind of elbow room that is happening or that pops up in the aesthetic that says this is who I am. You know somebody, I think Greg Tate, called it a post-civil rights liberation aesthetic. We’ve had the Black Arts Movement, we’ve had the Harlem Renaissance, we’ve had that [End Page 88] Third Plane of artists who were sort of ignored but very important. And I think those people were . . . we could name some of them, people who were sort of too formalistic and too “artsy-fartsy” or touchy-feeley for the 1960s, really courageous people like Robert Hayden, Toni Morrison, Sterling Brown, and Clarence Major, people who went their own routes. I think that’s the answer. ROWELL Did the work of any of the older writers help or direct you in the very beginning of your writing career? I suddenly think of Robert Hayden, whom you mentioned in your poem “View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.” I also think about the importance of artifice or the architectonics of poetry in the poems of Robert Hayden. In other words, craft was very important to Hayden as a poet. ELLIS Sure, artifice is important, but I think today’s argument is about whether or not artifice is the most important aspect of the poem. I think that what we learned from people like Hayden who took pains to make artifice out of truth is that artifice born out of truth is a very different thing from straight up faking the funk, and I think courage like Hayden’s and Sterling Brown’s is very rare and important. If you’re studying writing in the...