For in 1968, during the Vietnam War, like other black poets such as Yusef Komunyakaa, Thomas entered the military, serving four years of Navy duty that included education in the Vietnamese language. That was the same year Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka edited and published the influential Black Fire, key anthology of the Black Arts Movement, which included Thomas’s work. Thomas’s exposure to other languages and his military experience resonate throughout his mature verse. Unlike Baraka, Thomas was discharged honorably in 1972; he moved the next year to Houston, where he would make his home intermittently for the rest of his life.
This dislocation might seem an odd move at the height of the Black Arts Movement, which critics tend to view as centered in urban hubs on either coast. But highlighting Thomas’s story furthers recent efforts to illuminate the geographical diversity and divergences of the movement’s practitioners beyond those obvious poles, as he articulated in the 1981 interview with Rowell: “[t]he Black Arts Movement of the Sixties was never very far from the South.” Mullen has called Thomas “one of the messengers who brought the Black Arts movement below the Mason Dixon Line” (see the essay “All Silence Says Music Will Follow: Listening to Lorenzo Thomas,” in her book The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be). We might even view him as having been ahead of his time, for the move was precipitated by accepting a position as writer-in-residence at Texas Southern University; among the first black writers to work in public schools in this capacity, he then filled the same role at Florida A&M University and for the states of Arkansas and Oklahoma. While black writers inhabiting such positions has since become common, this trend was just beginning in the early 1970s, when Black Studies programs and departments were first being established.
Like better-known Black Arts Movement practitioners, Thomas remained devoted to working in his community alongside these university spaces. He helped to edit the arts journal Roots out of the Black Arts Center in Houston, where he also taught writing workshops, another demonstration of his role in cementing the cultural centrality of black artists and writing a history in progress. He became active with the Texas Commission of Arts and Humanities and served on the board of directors of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. Further, he organized the Juneteenth Blues Festival in Houston and other cities, directed the Cultural Enrichment Center at the University of Houston–Downtown, and reviewed books for the Houston Chronicle for many years. He won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1983 and the Houston Festival Foundation Award in 1984. On a panel for a 2002 American Studies Association conference, Maria Damon argues that in Thomas’s work
Afrocentric poetry is historiography, and Afrocentric literary historiography is a form of social witnessing…. to write the extraordinary linear measures of poetry is to link one’s own survival to that of one’s community. To write history through poetry and a poetic historiography is to knit oneself even more closely to community. Healing the split between history and poetry, literary history, itself a poetics, can be a way of situating poetic practice in a social context—one’s own. By looking at Lorenzo Thomas’s literary historiography, we get a sense of how a poet’s rendition of history foregrounds the poetics of community formation and historical transformation.
The history surveyed in Thomas’s work ranges from ancient Egypt and Afrocentric cosmological mythologies to contemporary American incursions into Vietnam, extending the legacies of Ishmael Reed’s early poetry—which similarly integrated ancient myth and twentieth-century political critique—through the changing contexts of the Civil Rights movement, subsequent neoconservative retrenchments, and twenty-first-century iterations of racial terror.
Thomas’s continuing in-between aesthetic positionality—by which his work fit either into no aesthetic school or many, depending on whom you query—resulted in such seeming anomalies as his name being proposed as the sole potential black contributor to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine in early discussions among Ron Silliman and the editors. Like Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry (1960) and later Erica Hunt in Silliman’s anthology In the American Tree (1986), Thomas ultimately became the only black writer to appear in that publication. At the same time, he was publishing poetry and criticism widely in such venues as African American Review, Ploughshares, and the African American Encyclopedia, focusing on black literature and music with a critical astuteness that culminated in a posthumous collection of essays, Don’t Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition. Such rigorous boundary-crossing in terms of publication venues and connections to other writers seems especially unusual when one considers Thomas’s indebtedness to an aesthetic of Afro-surrealism, frequently inspired by Cesaire and in tune with black musical innovation in all genres, including (as Mullen has written) “jazz, blues, R&B, rock, reggae, calypso, zydeco, disco, country western, western classical music, and even muzak.” But understanding this defiance of boundaries in (literary and musical) aesthetics and in publication is essential to reading Thomas’s work, as my co-editor’s Introduction details: his artistic statements (several of which are included at the end of this collection) decimate categories. As he articulated in a 2001 interview in The New Journal, his poems
are influenced as much by Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery as by Amiri Baraka and Calvin Hernton…. what I learned from Ashbery reinforced what I learned from Wallace Stevens and both Ashbery and Baraka reinforced what I found interesting about the colloquial language that I found in Langston Hughes and Carl Sandburg. And, of course, it is a fact that Hughes learned something from Sandburg, too. I guess that is how poetic influence connects you to a tradition. But in this sense I am not suggesting that tradition is a readymade thing.
Indeed, Thomas was always engaged as much in making traditions as he was in suggesting their preexistence, though—as with his critical assertions—those intersecting influences in his work have often been ignored. The resulting neglect of the range of poetic texts Thomas produced, even including a 1997 bilingual German edition of his poems, began to be rectified near the end of his life. His final collection of poetry, Dancing on Main Street (2004), featured on its cover praise from Ashbery: “Lorenzo Thomas’s poems have a graceful New York School nonchalance that can swiftly become a hard and cutting edge when he writes of the African American experience, especially in his adopted home of Texas. ‘This useless clairvoyance / is embarrassing,’ he confides. Yet Thomas’s brand of clairvoyance is not only useful, but beautiful.” That implied divide between “New York School nonchalance” and the “African American experience” rarely plays out in the poetry, which interweaves so many supposedly disparate locations and experiences. Like Mullen, Thomas cleverly “puts the wit back into witness” (as Maria Damon said, quoted by Kalamu ya Salaam), satirically critiquing in often amusing verses Western imperialism, reliance on technology, and understandings of science as irreconcilable with spirituality.
Indeed, Thomas’s clairvoyant ability to foresee our moment of black poetics breaking down the boundaries that have attempted to delimit its subjects and forms should render him of special interest to anyone entranced by the recent flourishing of black poets’ work. He asserted in the 2001 New Journal interview that “a great deal of poetry” seems “to resemble the mental work that occupies us when we are in a condition somewhere between sleep and waking. It has a quality of almost obsessive attention to detail.” This evocation of a state halfway between sleeping and waking brings to mind both the surrealist and ancient forms of imagery of which Thomas was fond—and the ghastly realism with which he concisely, comically rips away the veil on American war crimes and the modes of thinking that prop up its methods of domination. In this, his work resembles Reed’s and Baraka’s. But in other ineffable ways, Thomas’s poetry resembles no one else’s work at all, the contributions of a singular voice whose unification of seemingly distinct interests helps us to rethink what we believe we know of American poetry and African American literature.
INTRODUCTION