March 20, 2010
Thomas Sayers Ellis
continued
The Maverick Room, dazzles with its dance-beat-quick wordplay, its refusal to follow form, and the risks it takes for the love of sound. Like many other first collections, The Maverick Room (released last month by Graywolf Press) covers several years of the writer's career: youthful breakthroughs, early experiments, the emergence of a signature voice. So sprinkled among Ellis's exciting, newer pieces are quiet narrative poems: slow, autobiographical, polite, academic. They aren't bad — he's learning what he can from convention, making some nice moves within the confines — but they remind me why I got bored with a lot of poetry. Ellis got bored too. He writes in the book's climactic poem:
| All their literary journals All their car commercials All their bribe-spiked blurbs All their stanzas look alike |
He's matured by playing more games. Watch how fast his double meanings move, how quickly they weave reality with music and myth. "A Pack of Cigarettes" is a poem about Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton's early street-corner singing group, who find their "Airplay limited / to the whole notes / of smoke. . . . / All three lungs negro / as vinyl," who have "nowhere to run, / after graduation, / except / the needle-patrolled, / bald highways / between / pretty silky black / songs."
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