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 July 17, the New York Times reported. He was 61.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., Ellis "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," the Times noted. He played drums in a few bands before starting his own, and named his first book of poetry The Maverick Room (2005), for a local go-go club.
Ellis's high school nickname was Sticks, which referred to his drumming skills as well as his slender frame. The Times highlighted one of his poems with that title, in which "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 speech
With 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 drum
Resisting the clockwise twisting
Of a handheld chrome key
Poet and composer Janice Lowe, another Dark Room founder, said 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... 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."
In 1986, while living in Cambridge, Mass., Ellis and poet Sharan Strange began putting together a library of works by Black authors of the diaspora. They created it in a former darkroom in their house and called the collection, "The Dark Room."
When James Baldwin died the following year, Ellis, Strange, and their housemates "made a pilgrimage to his funeral in New York City," the Times wrote. "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."
"In a city where everybody acts like they've read everything, he actually had," said author and Arrowsmith Press publisher Askold Melnyczuk, who was an early booster, including Ellis's work in Take Three: Agni New Poets Series (1996), which he edited, and later publishing The Corny Toys (2018). Ellis's other books include Crank Shaped Notes (2021), Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems (2010), and The Genuine Negro Hero (2001).
Ellis taught at Case Western Reserve University and Sarah Lawrence College, among other institutions. The Times noted that in 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."
The Dark Room Collective grew to include, among many others, Kevin Young, Tracy K. Smith, and Natasha Trethewey. 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.
"You need other people who think like you, maybe, who read like you, maybe, who walk and breathe like you, maybe," Ellis told an audience in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2013 during one of the Dark Room Collective's reunion tours. "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."