by Sam Moore

I

We’re holding hands at Golden Gate Park. Their jacket is thicker than mine, and they’re wearing my gloves; a Californian through and through, this clear, brisk day at the dawn of winter is too cold for them. I feel them squeezing my hand, lightly tugging me a step or so back, before I turn around and see the AIDS Memorial Grove. There’s an inscription, a quote from Bill Clinton: We must continue to work together as a nation to further our progress against this deadly epidemic. And while we do so we must remember that every person who is living with HIV or AIDS is someone’s son or daughter, brother or sister, parent or grandparent. They deserve our respect, and they need our love. 

We’re spending the weekend in San Francisco before I fly through the night back to London. Our to-do list grows more expansive as we get closer to the drive that takes us to the outskirts of the city; to the cheapest hotel we could find, and a five-ten minute walk to a train station that will take us into the city itself. We’ve only got a full 24 hours in San Francisco. There are plans for museums, galleries, bookstores, restaurants. We stumble on the memorial accidentally. It feels like serendipity. I want to reach out and touch it, leaving my own fingerprints on this piece of history, but I stop, hold myself back. I imagine that touching it would imprint me, my presence, my history, within this lineage. If this is enough of a lineage; what we’re able to do with only the fragments we have left, and these towering, immovable monuments to what we’ve lost.  

Aaron Shurin’s Unbound: A Book of AIDS is an exploration of this tension—the push and pull that exists between lineage and loss. Even the title captures this precarious feeling; the idea of a book—this book—coming undone, even as the reader holds it. A literary legacy is the one that people think of the most—the one that I keep returning to—something that’s bound. Permanent but precarious, in something as light, delicate, fragile, as paper. 

Shurin evokes his friends, reading these drops on paper, and I wonder if they’re drops of ink or drops of blood. When I wrote All my teachers died of AIDS, a personal, cultural, half-remembered meditation on living a generation after the AIDS crisis, I described the virus, its impact, and the inaction surrounding it, as seeping into the bloodstream of history. Ink and blood have been bound together in my head ever since. Potent drops that seep through so much more than pages. Shurin describes a gland on a friend’s neck bursting open, hemorrhaging, becoming the mouth of hell. This dying friend asks their lover to be taken outside, so he could bleed into the earth. Shurin calls this communion. It makes me think of the Memorial Grove at Golden Gate Park; the blood at the roots of a monument like that, in the soil, the depths of it. 

The Memorial Grove looks impeccable. I have a picture of it on my phone; blurry and imperfect because the phone case is too big for the phone itself, and cuts off the top corner of the image. There’s an irony to how pristine it looks, for the history that it speaks for. I remember decades ago, in history classes, we were shown ways that we could make things look old, like artifacts for a project. The example was always a map. We were told to use cold, damp teabags to weather the paper, to age it. There was this idea that for something to look like a genuine historical artifact, it needed to look old; the antithesis of how I understand this history now: something that never got to grow old.

Unbound has an interesting relationship to this history. This latest edition, published by Nightboat Books, features a new introduction, with the older ones now forming an epilogue. This change, to what comes pre- and post- in Unbound, creates a complicated relationship with history. As if Unbound is talking to itself, because there’s nobody else there to talk to. In the new preface, Shurin describes Unbound as a book that’s been revived. This act of revival is another way in which Unbound makes contact with the shadow of death. And in many ways, this shadow, the death that defined so much of the AIDS crisis, is the only history that we have left. 

Amidst the formal transformations of Unbound is the transcription of a performance piece: Turn Around: a solo dance with voice. Shurin dedicates this performance to John B. Davis. Davis was born in 1964, and died of AIDS in 1992. As I write this, I am 28-years-old, the same age that Davis was when he passed away. Turn Around was first performed by Ney Fonesca in 1992. The transcription features an OFF-STAGE VOICE, and a dancer. Here, the dancer’s lines are attributed to NEY. The voice that pushes forward the story—the memory—of Turn Around is telling John’s story. Ney protests that the voice only ever tells them the same story, a story where John looked down at himself lying there. It offers to tell him a different story. A variation on a theme, with the opening line: Ney Fonesca looked down at himself lying there. Ney protests this is unfair, rages against it. Only to be told that this is a story about becoming a story. It has to be told. It has to be put into the past. But I don’t think that Unbound is about taking these stories and putting them into the past. Instead, through these constant reissues, reiterations, returns, Unbound is about bringing the past into the present; making it impossible to ignore, and giving people the space to reckon with a legacy of loss, and why sometimes, there’s no need for anything new to come and fill up that space. 

II

One of the most challenging—emotionally and intellectually—parts of Unbound comes from Shurin trying not just to create space for this loss, but to imagine himself within it, as if this is the one place where he might be able to feel kinship with the friends that have been lost. My Memorial was written in 1994, the year that, according to a timeline of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States, AIDS became the leading cause of death for all Americans aged 25 to 44. It’s no wonder that My Memorial is exactly that, and that Shurin tries to lay it out with something approaching grandeur, or a gesture towards peace at what might feel inevitable. Shurin describes an elaborate stone chamber, the setting of a “fatal stone,” and a series of voices performing O Terra adio, a mournful piece from Aida, which translates to O Earth, farewell. What sounds at first like the description of a performance of Aida itself is quickly undone by Shurin, who instead confronts you directly with the idea of his loss, and the cause of it: I have died of AIDS, and this is my memorial. He describes the voices of the singers who will intone this aria—Aprile Millo and Placido Domingo—at his memorial as unbounding, which is to say, limitless. In a way, Shurin himself becomes limitless here, able to at once witness and enact his own memorial. My Memorial is thus pulled in two directions. As much as Shurin lingers on death—something as simple as a parenthetical (yet) in reference to dying cuts deep—it is the loss of others that moves him, and what this means for how he himself wants to be remembered. A self-professed opera queen, drama queen, he takes us through a series of records, operas, arias, a way of trying to keep his memory alive, flickering, even as that brief candle threatens to go out. He calls it the power of art to encode affection itself. I’ve often thought of art—both what was made, and what never had the chance to come to light—as being the legacy of the AIDS crisis, the ways in which we try to make sense of it. The ways in which we fail to. Shurin ends his hypothetical memorial with the words listen: remember me, and I wonder if that’s all we can do. 

III

Whenever I write books, I put a lot of weight on the titles, epigraphs, chapters, and sections. They’re my first way into it, a kind of north star that I’m able to keep returning to, to see if I’m on the same path that I was at the beginning, and what it might mean if I’ve deviated. Right now, I’m trying to write a novel, and one of the first things I tried to do was find an epigraph, an anchor. I settled on a line from Rachel Cusk’s Transit, the second book in her Outline trilogy: “Maybe it’s only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root.” For all of the formal codes I’m trying to crack, and structural decisions I need to make, I keep returning to this one sentence: this idea that the book is about healing. 

It was easier to find the epigraph for my first book: I told myself that I was going to write about rage today, but instead, I’m writing about elegy Can one write both with rage and elegy? (Kate Zambreno). I’ve been thinking about it, and about the book, in my time with Unbound. I’ve found myself gravitating towards Shurin’s anger, to the voice that rages against unfairness in Turn Around, the desire to bleed into the earth. The latter reminds me of the ending of  Buddies, the 1985 film by Arthur Bressan Jr, and the first to tackle the AIDS crisis. In the film’s final moments, David, a “buddy”—someone who volunteers to spend time in the hospital with a man dying of AIDS, giving them companionship at the end—is shown as the lone protestor on the lawn of the White House lawn, with the strings of the New York Salon Quintet aching in the background. This in itself reminds me of another moment; of The Jacket, worn by David Wojnarowicz. Made of denim, with a pink triangle on the back, it’s emblazoned with a furious declaration: IF I DIE OF AIDS – FORGET BURIAL – JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A. 

One thing leads to the other, like a feedback loop; a book becoming (un)bound. My association is one that I’ve made with ghosts, in the hope that they might see, hear, read, a fragment of what’s come after them. Shurin writes about these ghosts, what he calls AIDS apparitions. I’m grateful that Unbound is more than an apparition; that it exists, corporeal, for me to hold in my hand. For me to thumb through while I write this essay. 

Aaron Shurin is 75 years old, and an emeritus professor at the University of San Francisco. I wonder how many times he’s walked past the AIDS Memorial at Golden Gate Park, and if he’s ever laid his hand upon the stone, reaching out to those AIDS apparitions. I wonder if he was there, that cold day in November when I went the length and breadth of the city, fitting as many things as possible into a long day that I wished could have stretched on beyond how we think of time. I like to think that he was.

Sam Moore is a writer and editor. They are the author of All my teachers died of AIDS (Pilot Press), Long live the new flesh (Polari Press), and the forthcoming Search History (Queer Street Press). They are one of the cocurators of TISSUE, a trans reading series based in London.

by Omar Pimienta

Every nation hates its children. 

this is a requirement of statehood. 

—Solmaz Sharif 

Reading open pit was a complex process for me. Before reading it, I had approached the orality of the text through various public readings of the manuscript, and these had triggered in me the need to understand how Villarán was going to resolve conceptually and formally, in a book, all those threads that emerged from the same theme: approaching extractivism in Peru from a distance and the vicissitudes of living as a graduate student in California. I have waited for the book for just under a decade, I have seen the manuscript grow, expand, contract, and now that I have it in my hands as a concrete, finished, published object, I must write a review. As you will understand, this review is not intended to be objective and much less academic. Jose Antonio Villarán has been my colleague during graduate school in San Diego and teammate at the soccer field in Tijuana, a poetic accomplice, but above all he has been a friend, and it is perhaps for this reason that I thought I understood where Villarán writes from and for whom open pit is written for. At first, I thought my reading of the book and this review could be more useful for readers if I visualized myself as an “insider,” but nothing could be further from the truth. When I closed the book, the opposite occurred; I had as many or more questions than when I opened it and I understood that Villarán had achieved something important: infecting me with his uncertainties: “I feel more knowledgeable on the subject / and at the same time / more confused and discouraged.” I can’t even say that I feel more knowledgeable about the subject, just confused and discouraged, with many questions. Villarán does not give you answers — he does not have them — but he invites you to question everything, and it is in this exercise where poetry is the best tool, answers do not matter as much as making the reader formulate their own questions, the labor of uncertainty as means to build yourself a reality.

The first question triggered by my reading was the following: in these increasingly globalized times, and beyond what’s inscribed into our genetic code, what is the most powerful concept that defines us as writers? Villarán’s open pit offers the following clue: class. Yet little by little, as I moved through its pages, I understood that nationality can have as much or more relevance. It seems that we can recognize more and more clearly the concepts that make us vulnerable; race, gender, class, sexual orientation and nationality, the latter being the most difficult to recognize because it is difficult to clearly recognize the fiction of “national being-ness” until you see it from afar. open pit made me think about how to write poetry from “a national being” when three nationalities are inherited within that being, three possible passports. What happens when you have divided your life into two countries that you can call homeland. Not only that, what happens when one of these passports symbolizes an economic system responsible for the exploitation of the other, when one of your countries could be the poster child for the global south and the other for the global north. How do you write poetry from two languages ​​about those two nations when both are part of your subjectivity, and at the same time so diametrically opposed? How do you write while always being “the other,” regardless of how you are perceived? As the white academic at 4,540 meters above sea level in Morococha or as the Latinx poet in the hallways of a University of California? Jose Antonio Villarán does not offer you any answers, but from his pages he does what all poetry should do: he digs.

The Royal Spanish Academy and the Cambridge dictionary have similar meanings for the verb to dig: “Scratch or repeatedly remove the surface of the earth, delving something into it.” open pit is a poetry book that works like a shovel. Villarán scratches, loosens, and rakes, trying to remove layers of earth, a key word to understand the nation, because without land there is no nation, and without people there is no town. In Spanish, unlike English, pueblo means territory as well as people; the town of Morococha is removed, dug up, raked. In Spanish it is understood that it is the people, in English, not necessarily. This is another question triggered by the book: is this linguistic divergence, this difference between Spanish and English, the reason or the outcome of practices of settler colonialism?

Villarán writes:

there’s a town on the mountain 

a bull with no horns 

in order to reach the deposits 

the people must go 

as must the mountain

My translation: 

hay un pueblo en las montañas 

un toro mocho 

para llegar a los depósitos 

tiene que desaparecer

asimismo la montaña. 

My translation does not have the word people because it would sound redundant in Spanish. It is often said el pueblo peruano, or el pueblo mexicano, and we all understand it is the people and not the towns that we are referring to. It is an insignificant difference, perhaps, but I would like to know if when someone reads in English that in order to obtain capital a town has to disappear, is it as shocking as when someone reads in Spanish that in order to obtain capital the people have to disappear? This type of inquiry, this work of digging into language can only be achieved from a space of linguistic privilege such as that of Villarán, a privilege given to him thanks to his dual citizenship and educational obstinacy, a privilege that in return marginalizes him as a poet who will never belong to a national poetics.

Since when, how, and why is a book like open pit written? Villarán starts writing from the moment he is trying to understand the forces that create his subjectivity as heir to multiple realities, that of being a Peruvian-American writer with a Mexican mother who becomes a father during this writing process and tries to navigate an academia that is increasingly becoming the very model of the system it pretends to criticize. How to write this book was the key that confused me the most and at the same time opened more poetic veins in my brain. With a schizophrenic poetic practice, in which he pretends to be the writer-parent, the people, capital, the extra-human and the government. Why write a book like open pit? Because it is necessary to understand your heritage; American poetics / Latin American poetics; the atavisms and freedoms that both languages give you; the sociopolitical baggage and colonial traditions implicit in your passports. But above all to try to understand all that Villarán is leaving behind: well-articulated questions to Miqel, to other writers, to the students of the future, clues for how to understand ourselves in an increasingly interconnected and sick world.

Omar Pimienta is a writer/artist/scholar who lives and works across the Californias. His artistic practice examines questions of identity, transnationality, emergency poetics, sociopolitical landscape and memory.  He is an Assistant Professor of Border and Migration Studies in the Americas at UC Santa Barbara. He has published four books of poetry in U.S, México and Spain. He has won the Emilio Prado 10th International Publication prize from the Centro Cultural Generación del 27 Malaga Spain. In 2017-18 he was awarded an Art Matters Grant. From 2019-22 he was a Member of the Mexican Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte in the area of Poetry.

by David Grundy

Ably edited by scholars Aldon Nielsen—Thomas’ friend and literary executor—and Laura Vrana, The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas is a much-needed volume. It collects all of Thomas’ in- and out-of-print collections—Chances are Few (1979), The Bathers (1981), Sound Science (1978), and Dancing on Main Street (2004)—along with his contribution to the anthology Jambalaya (1975), and a substantial section of previously uncollected work originally published in little magazines ranging from El Corno Emplumado to Umbra, Liberator to C: A Journal of Poetry, Callaloo to Zzzzz¹. The book takes its place in a mini publishing boom of work by poets of the African-American innovative tradition hitherto trailblazed in Nielsen’s own scholarly and editing work. Recent examples include new editions of the work of Russell Atkins (Cleveland) and Bob Kaufman (San Francisco), as well as in recent and forthcoming critical work by Lauri Scheyer (Ramey), James Smethurst, Jean-Philippe Marcoux and Harmony Holiday. As these editions and this criticism reveal, such poetry forms a major part of American—and world—poetry that has too often gone ignored by an establishment that remains fundamentally governed by the linked principles of aesthetic conservatism and white supremacy. Thomas, the consummate poet-scholar, was himself a pioneer in redressing such omissions. As a critic, he wrote beautifully about others’ work, and he might well have been the writer best posed to explicate his own history, correcting misconceptions and lazy critical generalisations with a sharp and witty eye for telling detail. In the following, I’ll nonetheless try to catch some sense of Thomas’ life and work in the hopes that it will illuminate a reading of these Collected Poems.

Born in Panama, Thomas moved to New York at the age of five where he to learn English from scratch, and a sense of both productive hybridity and double displacement haunts this work. ‘Black’ but not ‘African American’, as Tyrone Williams has noted, Thomas combined an exile’s sense of trauma with a diasporic, internationalist potentiality². Thomas was extremely precocious, editing a magazine called Lost World at the age of just seventeen and reading voraciously. At a workshop held by Belgian-Jewish trade unionist and poet Henri Percikow, mainly attended by garment workers, Thomas met another young poet, David Henderson: they both would soon become central members of the Umbra Poets’ Workshop which emerged on New York’s Lower East Side in 1962. Umbra emerged from a confluence of internationalist activism and experimental writing practice. The Umbra poets wrote in a huge variety of styles and registers, providing a receptive environment for Thomas’ own complex voicings, which avoided the pitfalls of dialect stereotypes, ‘protest poetry’, or ornate, Eurocentric imitation. Outside of the nurturing milieu of the workshop, Thomas, like many other Umbra writers, had to struggle with the misinterpellations invariable placed on writers of colour by white critical gatekeepers, who equated nuanced exploration of politics with ‘anger’.³ Irony is key to this early work: neither the irony of despair, of giving up on struggle, nor the knowing irony that serves as decoy for the politics of hatred, but a mode of critical distance that works alongside solidarity, insurgency and the joy of creation. The poems tend toward a wickedly complex syntax, spanning the limits of sentence grammar, as telling line-breaks and enjambments, emphasized by Thomas’ characteristic use of capitalisation at the start of every line, disrupt and extends ostensible sense to telling effect. ‘The Black Canaries Weep Over Gomorrha’—probably Thomas’ very first published poem, from his own Lost World journal—provides one of the most visually striking instances of such work. 

[…] strange spaces

b

r

e

a

k

s

our

lips

& split

my w o r d s

(437-8)

Umbra had dissolved by the mid-1960s, but Thomas continued to be involved in New York’s thriving artistic scene, publishing a scarce journal with Ron Padgett, and participating in the birth of the Black Arts Movement. In 1967, he graduated from Queens College and studied for an M.L.S. at the Pratt Institute, publishing his first pamphlet, A Visible Island, with Adlib Press. The following year, he was drafted and, having considered fleeing to Canada, ultimately served in Vietnam. Thomas keenly felt his status as first-generation immigrant and decided to join the navy in the ultimately vain hope of staying out of combat. For a time, he was unable to write, but gradually, he found a way to process the Vietnam experience in his work: most notably, in Fit Music: California Songs, written in 1970, and a section of his second collection The Bathers entitled ‘Slum Days After the War’. Thomas’ Vietnam and post-Vietnam poems are as crucial as the much more famous depictions of the conflict in the work of white poets like Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov and Allen Ginsberg. Unlike them, Thomas actually served in the conflict, a contradiction he renders with keen intensity and with his characteristic irony, likening returning to America as returning to “de Plantation” and asking himself “How did you like being the envoy of a monstrous epic / Or saga of Western corruption” (71). 

Adrift in New York after the conflict, at a time when Black Arts and Black Power activists were getting some measure of employment – albeit often precarious – within the academy, Thomas moved South as writer-in-residence at Texas Southern University, Houston, in 1973. Taking up several similar positions in the intervening period, he was appointed to a teaching position at the University of Houston-Downtown in 1984, where he was Professor of English for over two decades. As a poet in residence at public schools, as well as community centres such as Houston’s Black Arts Centre, Thomas conceived of education as part of a broader cultural project, rather than a sequestering into elite institutions. Alongside his professorship, he also helped to organize the Juneteenth Blues Festival in Houston and to edit the magazine Roots, as well as acting as a regular book reviewer for the Houston Chronicle. And it was in Texas that Thomas’ career as a scholar began in earnest, in a series of essays published in the wave of new Black literary journals that emerged thanks to the gains of Black Arts activism such as Obsidian and Callaloo. As a critic, Thomas maintained the same wry, deft touch as his poems: often deceptively straightforward, he’d underscore a particular historical irony with a telling turn of phrase, or make the case for neglected poets with a passionate intensity that, one felt, could do justice to anyone.⁴ The objects of his attention were not always expected – perhaps my favourite of all his turns-of-phrase comes in an essay on Frank Stanford, whom he unforgettably describes as a “swamprat Rimbaud”.⁵ This range of reading also fed his poetry. In a statement for Michael Lally’s 1976 anthology None of the Above, reprinted as an appendix to the present volume, Thomas lists as influences the neglected Marxist theorist Christopher Caudwell, golden child of the Auden generation who was tragically killed whilst fighting in the Spanish Civil War; Hazrat Inyat Khan, founder of the international Sufi movement; Victorian Egyptologist Gerald Massey; and Vietnamese turn-of-the-century poet Tran Te Xuong (whose work Thomas translated). “I can understand it if you haven’t heard of some of these people”, Thomas concludes. “But you will”. (497) 

As the decade turned, Thomas’ relative career security enabled him to publish two full-length poetry books in quick succession. Chances are Few (1979) and The Bathers (1981), the latter published by his friend and Umbra colleague Ishmael Reed, collected work from both the 1960s and 1970s, and are dazzling examples of Thomas’ sheer range. In general, Chances are Few concentrates on poems which address the pleasures, pains and ironies of personal relationships (what one poem calls “personal anthropology”). ‘MMDCCXIII ½’, a sonnet which meditates on the legacies of “slumlord greed and desperate privacies” that haunt those arrangements we call ‘domestic’, is concision in itself: the volume also contains lengthy, brilliant meditations on race, music and cinema ‘Screen Test’, ‘Class Action’, ‘Big House Movies’ and ‘Hat Red’, along with translations or poems ‘after’ Leon Damas, Dukardo Hinestrosa, Ovidio Martins and Tran Te Xuong. The Bathers is oriented towards more explicitly ‘political work’, from the ‘Early Crimes’ previously published in Black Arts venues like Liberator and Black Fire to Fit Music, Dracula and the long title poem, a retrospective meditation on the 1963 Birmingham Civil Rights campaign which stands as one of his most important pieces. The book also collects Thomas’ 1975 chapbook Framing the Sunrise – a brilliant meditation on television, the “masked media” and the mendacity of American politics in the era of Attica and Vietnam – and poems on the murder or Pablo Neruda, the aforementioned section of post-Vietnam work, and a section which Thomas calls with characteristically deceptive simplicity ‘Euphemysticism’. 

Thomas’ pun suggests scepticism to the way that euphemism—the concealing of a blunt and unpleasant reality—is elevated to a kind of spiritual status. Top of the list of such ‘euphemystic’ double-speak lies the explaining away of persistent racism, if not as a necessary evil, then certainly an unavoidable one. Gradualism, apologias, the wilful turning of blind eyes: what are such refusals to face up to a difficult reality but mystical beliefs in an un-alterable reality? Given this, Thomas performs a swift and smart reversal, revealing the pseudo-rationalist ‘common sense’ of whiteness to be neither common nor sensical, and the derided, non-European mysticism of peoples of African descent to contain within it a good deal of common sense. Particularly in his poetry of the 1970s, Thomas operates under the influence of Sun Ra, whom he knew in the 1960s, as well as his own esoteric studies in the work of Gerald Massey and “the Egyptian syllabary”. Such work anticipates the rich esoteric tradition of poets such as Will Alexander, Nathaniel Mackey and Jay Wright. ‘Jubilee’ is a free translation of a hieroglyphic inscription, and in ‘The Bathers’, the “shameful English” in which “ancient words” are spoken is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of a hand-drawn set of hieroglyphs which lift above the fire-hoses, bombs and police dogs wielded by the racists of Birmingham, Alabama. Here, the hieroglyph seems to exist somewhere between sound and symbol, an image and aural force that provides the basis for calls ‘Sound Science’: a force-field, a presence that, for Thomas, also a quite material collective resource. In such work, the spiritual is a tool of both literal and metaphoric survival, inhering in Afro-Futuristic transmutations and transmission which resist the violent severing of ancestral links. 

In ‘Spirits You All’, a poem for saxophonist Charles Gayle, Thomas will memorably term this “Church if you feel it”. Experienced through music, in a fusion of free jazz and mambo rhythms, church here is a verb as much as a noun, a container for a felt collectivity and a felt history. And music—an inherently immaterial form, yet of great material import—is central to this aesthetic. Like many of his peers, Thomas was a keen attendee of New York’s jazz clubs, teeming as they were with an almost unimaginable profusion of invention and discovery. Thomas’ use of music goes beyond merely registering performer, ambiance or milieu, however: instead, music becomes a kind of cultural weapon, from the anti-colonial threat posed by Charles Mingus in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ to a Sonny Rollins like none you’ve heard before in ‘Modern Plumbing Illustrated’, in which Rollins appears to assault popular white evangelist Oral Roberts. Elsewhere, Thomas’ attuned ear goes all the way from ‘progressive reggae’ to R&B and country music, picking up the ditties on the radio station, from radio DJ Jocko to the Shirelles to the sentimental afternoons of Marlene Shaw (whose ‘Lazy Afternoon’ is shaded by the transformation on The World of Cecil Taylor), radio serving as both conduit for cosmic exploration (as per some of Jocko’s theatrics on the Rocket Ship Show) and a form of “wallpaper”, “composed by amateurs and marketed by pros” (282). Thomas is keenly conscious of the material circumstances bind and separate listeners and musicians alike. In ‘Historiography’, a poem written to be performed with a jazz combo, the speaker undercuts the tragic romanticism read into the life and death of Charlie Parker by insisting that, whatever cosmic hieroglyphs Parker’s music conjured, “Bird was a junkie” (88). Nonetheless, in Thomas’ understanding, art, particularly music, hold out a promise in the midst of death-dealing technocratic rationalism, commercial imperatives, exploitation and appropriation. As Thomas writes, this poetry is “an effort to welcome a better world. I see things & write them down & call it poetry, though they used to teach us this was ‘fantasy’. It’s not”. (496) Fantasy, the spiritual, the imagination—all those forces which white supremacy derides and delimits, often through racialised caricatures and affective stereotyping—are the weapons and anti-weapons that poetry has at its disposal, for “poetry is an instrument that we study in order to free the spirit”. 

Thomas’ next, and final, full-length collection, Dancing on Main Street, had to wait until the new millennium to see publication. The book ranges from very early work to poems in his characteristic late style, in which a new simplicity of expression – which is, as ever, deceptively complex in its political thinking – evinces a vital compassion. In the extraordinary ‘Dirge for Amadou Diallo’, Diallo’s death as an undocumented migrant serves as the inverse of Thomas’ own life, which could be interpellated into the narrative of the ‘success story’. “It is hard to have your son die / In a distant land / And harder still / When we can’t understand” (407).  Thomas’ 9/11 poem ‘Ailerons and Elevators’, with which it originally appeared in the 2004 chapbook Time Step, sets Richard and Orville Wright’s famed flight alongside their classmate Paul Laurence Dunbar’s own ‘ascent’ as an elevator boy in downtown Dayton (“Their neighbours knew / That they’d go up high in this world”, Thomas drily remarks), the planes used to firebomb black residents of Tulsa in 1921 such as newspaper editor Andrew Smitherman, who organised African-American resistance against mob violence and was – with the perversity characteristic of white supremacy – blamed for inciting the massacre, and the ghost of the World Trade Centre attacks of the previous year. The political analyses in such poems are made with a sardonic yet compassionate quietness that sacrifices not one iota of justified anger. Though quiet, these poems are passionately oriented against injustice rather than lingering in pessimism, melancholy or despair. They insist on countering the “bread and circuses” of wars on terror, anti-Black violence, and the assault of consumer culture with a linguistic clarity that is a necessary and saving grace, refusing to let their readers forget the histories of injustice left out of the official record. This is, as one the section titles in Dancing on Main Street has it, “resistance as memory”. In ‘Airelons’, “From two backyards away / The Funkadelics and Jay-Z resist denial” (491). In a real sense, The Funkadelics and Jay-Z—and Thomas himself—provide sustenance, material for living. To resist denial, to condemn that which would deny resistance, to hear in several registers at once the affirmation of survival in the face of death.

The present volume ends with a tribute to the late, Houston-based artist John T. Biggers, whose work graces the cover. Typically modest in its ambition, ‘An Arc Still Opens’ turns a tribute to Biggers into a thesis on the origin and role of art.

The ancients said, 

Losing an elder 

Is to lose a library 

Then they invented Art

To stem such loss

(492)

In “world of entropy and haste”, a “vast depot”, to focus on the past is also to look towards the future.  History is lived and still living. Thomas’ poem reminds us of that, of time’s tricks and of poet’s orphic capacity to cast beyond the material constraints that cut us apart in the morass of global politics—that is, the basic facts of our daily, interconnected lives. If you care about poetry, you should read this book. 

But, as Thomas put it:

You don’t have to take my word 

For “it”

(290)

^{1 Thomas was a prolific little magazine contributor: since the book went to press, a selection of further poems have come to light, which might hopefully see the light of day in the not-too-distant future.
2 Tyrone Williams, ‘My Lorenzo Thomas: His Stand-Alone Blues’. Delivered as a paper at the African American Literature and Culture Society Symposium, St. Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri, October 25-27 2007.
3 A recently-digitised conversation between Thomas and Michael Silverton on WNYC is a case in point. The conversation can be heard at: https://www.wnyc.org/story/reel-11-lorenzo-thomas/. 
4 The fruits of these scholarly endeavours wouldn’t fully manifest themselves until the Millennium turned. Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2000) was the summation of Thomas’ critical work. An argument in part about canonicity, and the erasure of African-American poets from histories of American modernism in which they were central, Thomas’ range was broad – from the competition between William Stanley Brathwaite’s The Poetry Journal and Anthology of Magazine Verse and Harriet Monroe’s Poetry magazine, and the work of Chicago-based Fenton Johnson and of the great Margaret Walker, through to the Black Arts movement, in which Thomas’ personal experience of the era adds both depth and lightness to the stories he tells (the chapter on Baraka has a killer anecdote about visiting Baraka at the height of the Newark rebellion), ‘Louisiana voices’ such as Ahmos Zu-Bolton, and a concluding chapter on younger poets such as Harryette Mullen, whom Thomas mentored and who returned the favour with a pair of beautiful essays on his work. A book on Black music from blues to hip-hop, edited by Aldon Nielsen, appeared posthumously as Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition in 2008.
5  Lorenzo Thomas, ‘Finders, Losers: Frank Stanford’s Song of the South,’ Sun & Moon: A Journal of Literature and Art, no. 8 (Fall 1979): 8-23.}

David Grundy is a poet and scholar based in London. He is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Present Continuous (Pamenar Press, 2022), and co-editor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, 2023). He co-runs the small press Materials/Materialien.