Poet, essayist, and editor, Thomas Sayers Ellis is a literary threat. Harvard educated and a Brown University graduated, noted writer Elizabeth Alexander described him as, “one of our geniuses.” Despite accolades and three published poetry collections—The Good Junk (Graywolf Press, 1996), The Genuine Negro Hero (Kent State Press, 2001), and The Maverick Room (Graywolf Press, 2005)—Ellis lacks any pretense Ivy League environments may grant one.

Head to toe he’s pure soul, emoting his own brand of individuality—silver loop nose ring often accompanies his retro attire. True to community, Ellis is a cultural icon in his own right. A co-founder of the now defunct Dark Room Collective, he followed its departure with the birth of Quotes Community: Notes For Black Poets, an anthology of comments on craft and race between emerging and established black poets from all over the world.

The writing community welcomed the release of The Maverick Room, your first major publication since the year 2001. Where have your literary priorities been during the interim?

I don’t have any literary priorities. My literary priority is life, is living, without which there wouldn’t be any poems––but I know what you mean. I’ve been doing what writers do: teaching (a lot), reading, writing, giving readings, re-writing, re-reading, re-giving readings, paying the bills, falling in love, falling out of love.

Your poetic passions are, “…the trick move, the okey-doke, and the trope-a-dope.” Is The Maverick Room your “passion project,” a compilation of favorite poems that include plenty of back-peddling?

Well it was my passion project but now it’s just a book. The height of such passion only exists for me while I am making the poem, and yes, sometimes it takes a trick-move or two to get the muse to see it my way. I don’t have any favorites. My favorite poems are the ones I’m working on right now and they are “Dear Don Cornelius,” “The Last Time I Saw Soul Sister #1” and “Statue of Sterling Brown”. Some of the poems in The Maverick Room are more event-like than others but not one of them is my favorite. I think a poem should be an event. Favorites don’t let you walk away from them, their loves, the way they look and the way they sound…To re-answer your first question, I guess you could say I’ve been wrestling myself away from those events, those I’s.

I read Michael Eric Dyson’s blurb for your book jacket. He refers to the book as, “Ellis’ sonic opus of a site-specific artistry that reminds us of Ralph Ellison’s sampling of his namesake Emerson’s observation that “geography is fate.” Do you believe this book is destiny manifest in your writing career, a literary birth that has been incubating since your Washington, D.C. childhood?

I definitely believe this book belongs to me and that we’ve been waiting for each other. I saw this book years ago, all of the D.C. stuff, from day-one, but I had no idea about the literary journey and how those things would take root aesthetically––and to answer your first question again, that, too, is what I was waiting for, especially in this age of series writing and book length series and poems. I discovered I wanted something looser, something a little more maverick. Destiny manifest, maybe––birth and rebirth…I am not always thinking book—no way—sometimes I am thinking against book, against magazines, against permanence. Why must everything become either fixed or finished? It’s a lie, especially for utterance.

At the end of The Genuine Negro Hero you state, “I’ve always had a burning desire to be percussive, to create the kind of composition that resembles a literary, mini-March on Washington. Have you reached a full “percussive-crescendo” in the poems that comprise The Maverick Room?

I’ll never know and I do think the idea of crescendo is overrated–– I like the climb, the groove, the getting there, the bobbing and weaving. I think that what I have tried to do in The Maverick Room is to fill “the pocket” so to speak. (See www.thedcpocket.com). I’ve simply tried to fill in the spaces between the chaos and the order that I experienced and imagined while growing up in Washington, D.C., the city and the district of language. In the book I do “bang, bang” and “wham, flam” and “Up, up, up up, down, down.”

What artistic and/or political factors came into play when you selected poems for this collection?

The book is divided into four sections, each named after one of the four quadrants of Washington, D.C. with the title poem sitting in the middle of the book, hill-like, like the Capitol Building. The ordering does not attempt to match subject to geography but does attempt to re-map Washington as a source of tension between local and federal noise and culture. In the book I hide the federal noise the same way the local noise gets hidden in real life; thus, the cover photograph. At the same time, because Black D.C. is a very funky town, built on sweat and swamps, I’ve infused the book with the rooted and uprooted outrageousness of Parliament/Funkadelic and the cosmology of its many metaphors and slanguage.

The poems that start and conclude The Maverick Room, “Marcus Garvey Vitamins” and “The Dollar Signs of Autumn” can both be considered controversial. I say this because you’ve disclosed that literary journals refused to print “Autumn,” until its recent solicitation by Eliot Katz for Longshot’s “Beat Bush” issue. Do these two poems set the tone for what is nestled neat between Maverick’s pages?

I don’t know, but I do think those poems are strong enough borders, boundaries, to contain all of what’s to come and that, in a way, is as tragic as the Dyson quote suggests: “geography is fate.” Is it? Maybe, but it is certainly containable and limiting, especially when book-ended by those two poems. In “Marcus Garvey Vitamins” I am considering the lie of English literacy, broken promises and cultural responses to both; and the different types of routes one can take toward truth, especially literary truth. Remember Quincy Troupe’s truth and Jayson Blair’s truth are only lies the moments the other actors are told to acknowledge them. In “The Dollar Signs of Autumn” it’s simple (but it’s still about truth): all things capitol eventually collapse because capitol is not natural. Nature muse behave like nature and that includes us and all of our inventions. Nature got us here and nature will take us away from here. Flags, borders, governments, policy, nothing can change that.

From Marcus Garvey Vitamins:

b
no he didn’t,
yes he did. Ain’t English,
you lyin’ to me.

c
Africa disagrees
With subject-verb agreement.
Aspect ratio,

d
widescreen whiteache
Don’t like it, don’t Pulitzer me
I stress less than landlessness.

Webster’s Unabridged defines a maverick as, “a lone dissenter, as an intellectual, an artist, or a politician, who takes an independent stand apart from his or her associates. Are you one, any, or all of these?

I am everyday people three times a week and I represent the anonymous poetic self as positive nuisance when I am not out getting ribs. Dissenter, intellectual, artist and, or politician, sounds like Aimé Cesaire––When would I find time to quote community.

Or to “…slice the watermelon into smiles.” ––Terrance Hayes

Or to sing The Pronoun-Vowel Reparation’s Song?

Let’s talk about risks in regard to writing. Your philosophy is that “all risks live between truth and trouble.” What, if any, artistic risk has caused you the most trouble?

Risks don’t cause trouble; they cause liberation and liberation is a troubling, rare thing, a new breed if you will. The truth is, for more cloudy reasons than I can conjure, already trouble’s first cousin and now it’s up to poems to invent new ones; truths, new cousins for trouble. That’s my job, to invent places for the troubled-truth to line and break. That’s what the best, not favorite, events in The Maverick Room do––I hope.

In your writing, you’ve traded “simile for signifying” saying it’s gotten so easy to simile. Do you consider using more simile, over less metaphor, the sign of an immature poet?

Naw, but I am ready to move beyond the limiting freedoms of diction…All poets are immature, all language is too, it’s always growing up. In my case, down, toward something elemental, basic, right before babble. The finished object is fooling us with its maturity, so it dies. We’re just babies, man.

You affirm, “Reading and writing ain’t enough!” What more do you suggest is required to make a poet?

Everything and nothing (despair) and feathers (hope) and food.

Students you mentor are offered an extensive and diverse reading list. Which contemporary works have had the most significant impact in developing your style?

All of them, I hope, and the “Book of Amnesia,” which creates courage. Memory can be a bad thing sometimes. Books, for writers, can be like push-ups, and we don’t need the mental weight of them all, but the body holds on––and that same body is a writer, or should be. The African body is, the didn’t-get-a-chance-to-go-to-school (non-academic) body, so they call it “performance” the moment the body gets involved.

I want my body involved, “into it into it and involved”.

The reading list is then a memory and an anti-memory exercise. Jump N Jacks. Bones. Books. Bones.

How many revisions, second glances, or second guesses do you allow yourself before a poem is deemed — finished?

That varies, but rarely are they born done––no way. I go the distance or they abandon me or I abandon them. They are never finished––we just break up for awhile then hook-up and check each other out later. Na’meen.

I believe in drafting till the lights come on, last call, work that sucka to death.

All that. Drafting is about making clay and seeding page.

Will your reading series for African Americans, “The Dark Room Collective,” ever experience a reprise?

Every time it tries to phoenix-up, I chop it down but I am getting tired of that; I predict that some young enterprising young writer who finds kinship in what we did will adopt it in the future but it won’t be me. There are a couple of silent reunions planned for the near future and, maybe, the anthology/reader Sharan Strange, Kevin Young and I almost did together will see the light of day, finally, too, but you didn’t hear that from me.

How would you complete the following statement? A poet has matured when…

A poet has matured when maturity is no longer the issue blocking the unrhymed path all corduroy sunsets fake, daily, midsummer, toward their deuce triple o zoo of zodiac vanishings and delicious clipadelic plantain butter showdowns.