Thomas Sayers Ellis is an original; whether he's improvising spoken word at open mic or teaching, this associate professor of English at Case Western Reserve University is pushing his brand of creativity on his own terms. Thomas has authored several books, including his most recent The Maverick Room to be released by Graywolf Press in January 2005. He has a poem in the current issue of Tin House as well as other literary reviews, and he performs & signifies with Vince Robinson & The JazzPoets. He also co-founded the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for African-American writers in Cambridge, MA, and he's studied with Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. Currently Thomas is editing Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets. Check out this elusive poet and educator whose oxygenated language delivers its own verbal calisthenics.

When you boast to people outside Cleveland about Cleveland, what’s on your list?
The Reverend Albert Wagner and his Post Playa-Playa Salvation All Souls East Cleveland Basement Congregation of Visual Folklore
And Grandchildren Choir
Lancers & Gookies & Empress Taytou & Timbuktoo
Urban Dialect––minus the ads for cultural capitalism
Na’meen, rest in peace
James Baldwin’a Mama’s House, shhh,
Soul Vegetarian, rest in peace
Silver Beeeeeee & The Glenville Festival
Black Singles Network, Sankofa Fine Arts Plus & The Jazz Poets
Karen Job, rest in peace
The Statue of Russell Atkins at 112th & Superior
All those old world Hood Ornaments wrapped in Xmas lights, aluminum foil and mother wit who stopped pushing their grocery store carts and selling bootlegged flowers of evil just to direct black & white traffic for free when the power went out.

What’s your vision of how Cleveland should look and feel?
Cleveland is already a good church you can’t keep down. But certainly the pastors have dipped into the collection a little and this has hurt The Word aka sermon, especially at the level of faith. The believers don’t believe as much anymore––except in the case of their athletic miracle workers. Thus their support for LeBron & Wahoo. Alas, The Rockers weren’t male enough. A mixed congregation, the lumps in my gravy, trading gender & trading metaphors. That’s how Cleveland should look and feel.

What are your passions and how does it manifest itself in your life?
My passions are the trick move, the okey doke and the trope-a-dope. I bring noise into the world and some of it becomes words. I widescreen and I whiteache just like the blues which I speed up in order to get through each day. My life as it is being written is writing me. To run-on, to run-off, the way Black lines rap around, equator-like, then break––a pattern is passion. All living, to some degree, is against permanence

What has your best contribution to Cleveland is/has been?
I offer the Anonymous Poetic Self as Positive Nuisance.

Do you have favorite quotes or sayings you live by?
I don’t believe in living by quotes. At best they represent some well envisioned something for someone somewhere. Not me, not TSE. Whatever poem or line I am working on is what I am living by. I owe it that––to live by it, fully, to bleed if necessary. Well, that’s what I hope (with or without feathers) readers discover in my poetry––wings. How else to add anything to the sky?

Who’s on your list of most-admired & why?
I admire everyone but mostly I admire the invisible things beneath people, the them before them––their recipes of personal history if you will––despite HISTORY, which hasn’t been kind to everyone and which pops up in us all. I admire those people who don’t try to hide HISTORY. Did you hear Jackie Robinson’s widow the other day, damn, who knew she was even alive––where you been sister; I want one just like you––& all these years “Jackie O (Kennedy Onasis) this and Jackie O that” and she never said anything great about anything and there was a lot she could have said; and she’s considered cultured. Jackie’ Robinson’s wife dealt with History and Jackie O hid her children from it. Shit ain’t over.

What’s the best advice you’ve been offered?
“Stay Black”
––Buggin’ Out, Do The Right Thing

“The master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.” ––Audre Lorde

What was a significant failure in your life and what did you learn from it?
I am still grappling with turning that into metaphor, so that process won’t allow me to express it in prose, sorry. These things often reveal themselves in half-accidents and half-aims, so I am careful not to betray them too soon because then you end up with Premature modes of expression. Pre-me’s. And that’s the hardest thing to fight and that’s the thing I dislike in most local work. One can, however, practice doubt & failure––not to learn from them but to get at the almost right, the option of it, inside the wrong––but it takes courage, risks.

Where are you most likely to hang out in Cleveland?
I don’t hang out––I’m always in motion, constant motion. Nouns hang out; I’m more verb––not the usual kind––I’m a percussive verb. I act like I’m somewhere but I’m usually somewhere else––or already headed there…ahead of the present, real & imagined. I’m search engine awful this way. Most likely, though, it’s not office hours. I hate that morgue.

How do you think Cool Cleveland can continue being successful?
COLORED ONLY.

Can you extrapolate?
COLOR, any color improves everything. Isn't this true of art history--Impressionism to Van Gogh to Fauvism...Abstract Ex to Pop Art to Conceptualism to Post Black; it's only ever about COLOR, COLORING and COLORED, the materials not the theory, the feeling not the thinking, globs and brush strokes of us, struggling to get the light right, every mood and hue received and shared, along side improvisation. And that's how it feels to be COLORED me in Cleveland

Interview by Tisha Nemeth

Photo by Jia Micole Cunningham (:divend:)