Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005)
As I reread a few of Lorenzo Thomas's essays and poems, I
recall the first line of Allen
Ginsberg's "Howl" ---
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving
hysterical
naked…."
The single word in the beginning of Ginsberg's
semi-autobiographical, derivative tribute to Walt Whitman that captures
attention is "minds," although the current visibility of mental illness and homelessness in the USA
might derail that focus. Madness, which
isn't identical with insanity, and the companion images of hysteria and lack of
food and clothing invite aesthetic adventures which are tangential ( and
perhaps beside the point). Over the past
thirty years, criticism and theory have encouraged more concern with the material
body than with the abstract operations of the mind. Enthralled by such
emphasis, many a fine poet has plunged into innovation, outing, and shock-value.
The dullness of post-WWII America may have justified Ginsberg's wanting
to approach the surrealism of Bob Kaufman to protest how poetic expression was
imprisoned. The jury is still out on
that possibility. Reading Thomas against
the sweep and gestures of "Howl," I am intrigued that as one of the
best minds of my generation Thomas chose to dismiss the limits of protest and
to map new territories for African American creative work. Thomas invested heavily in language, history,
and the mind.
One small instance of Thomas's superior mind occurs in an
interview Charles Rowell conducted with him in 1978 ("Between the Comedy of Matters and the
Ritual Workings of Man" ). When
Rowell suggested that Thomas might "probably agree with W. H. Auden's
"In Memory of W. B. Yeats" --- that "poetry makes nothing happen,"
Thomas finessed the moment by saying that Auden's assertion was right, but that
Black poets are interested in Yeats as "a nationalist and an activist and
a mythologist as well." It was not
Yeats's making of poems and theater pieces that made anything happen, "but
their presence in people's consciousness is what made things happen. In a few simple words, Thomas accurately
contextualized and deconstructed a reprehensible stereotype by using plain
ancient Egyptian common sense rather than complex, deceptive European-derived
jargon. Whether they are experimental or
traditional, poets are not ethnic commodities in pre-future cargo ships. Thomas stood on the shoulders of Langston
Hughes. He understood clearly the aesthetic
kinship of poets and musicians and what ought to count as valid in matrices of
creative expression. There is lasting
relevance in the point Thomas made regarding what was problematic in the Black
Arts Movement and is still problematic
in the reception of American poetry: "The concept of the poem functioning
as a political entity ---as rhetoric that was to be acted upon --was and is a
mistaken notion. The poem creating
consciousness, which will then inspire people to act, is valid." I attribute Thomas's excellent insight to his
possessing a unique blending of African
Diaspora, Central American, and New York sensibilities.
Challenge my high regard for how Thomas mapped territory
by going to the sources, by reading his eloquent essays in Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century
American Poetry (2000) and Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition
(2008). Challenge your own literacy by reading his major collections of poetry
---The Bathers (1981), Chances
are Few (1979; and the expanded second edition, 2003), and Dancing on Main Street (2004). Try to avoid being complicit in allowing your mind to be
"destroyed by madness" in 2017.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. March
23, 2017
