What We’re Reading: Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems

Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems by Thomas Sayers Ellis (Graywolf Press; 2010)

I’ve been reading and re-reading the poems in Thomas Sayers Ellis’s second collection of poems (freshly out in paperback) for the last several weeks, but it wasn’t until a week ago when Amiri Baraka passed away that Ellis’s work took on a new dimension for me. In many ways, Ellis is a spiritual descendent of Baraka. Indeed, Baraka said of Ellis’ first book, The Maverick Room, that “Ellis’s work is always fascinating. [… He is] not backed against the wall of any absolute, including himself.” Ellis’s poems are wild and filled with rage, yet leveed with hope and humor. Skin, Inc. is a nuanced, fascinating book that takes on race, language, and pop culture in an attempt to update the conversation surrounding race, language, and pop culture.

Ellis gets down to business quickly opening the book with “As Segregation, As Us.” “Shut up about Sameness,” he writes. “Shut up about Difference.”

I don’t allude like you. I don’t call me anything.

 

These genres these borders these false distinctions

are where we stay at

in freedom’s way.

These poems take language and writing as their subject, especially the language we use when we talk about race, when we talk about writing, and when we talk about where language and race overlap. In the fifth and final section of the sequence “First Grade, All Over Again,” Ellis writes, “Out of vernacular-respect / Black men often refer / to the women they love as ‘Mama.’” In “Race Change Operation” he says

My English, by fault of gaze (theirs), will upgrade.

I will call my Mama, Mother and my Bruh, Brother

and, as cultural-life-insurance, the gatekeepers will

amputate my verbal nouns and double-descriptives

Elsewhere in the book Ellis levels his ire at editorial rejection of certain subjects in poetry magazines. In “The Judges of Craft,” Ellis quotes what we assume are actual rejections his work has received, engages these rejections in conversation, and ultimately rejects them. “We’re actually very interested in poems that address issues of race and racism and wish we could run more of them,” reads one such rejection. It continues, “Most of what we get in that regard is mere subject matter; that is, there’s not enough craft to carry the content.” Ellis responds:

A B C

 

The act of breathing is the first craft,

the carrier from which

all content pours.

Later in the poem he writes, “Writing is not king. / Speak.”

Despite the rage these poems contain, there is an unmistakable optimism in Skin, Inc. Indeed, it’s right there in the subtitle: Identity Repair Poems. In a Publishers Weekly interview Ellis says, “an identity repair poem is one that acknowledges that many of the tools in the ‘taught toolbox’ need cultural improving.” Ellis has to believe that identity can be repaired in order to continue forward, and to continue forward, means to reconcile the body-as-flesh with the body-as-idea, as in “The New Perform-A-Form,” the first of two manifestos in “Two Manifestos:” “A perform-a-form occurs when the idea body and the performance body […] seek to crossroads with one another.” He goes on:

Perform-a-formists seek a path around both Academic and Slam Poetry, to eliminate the misconceptions between them, and to balance the professional opportunities (in publishing and employment) opened to each. The utterance, paged or memorized, is only a schema in need of diverse modes of representation.

Ellis demands that we read his work in new ways, neither strictly slam poetry nor strictly academic poetry.

One of the rejection letters Ellis quotes in “The Judges of Craft” says that the magazine tries “to shy away from poems explicitly about the subject of writing—much less the politics of the writing scene,” which is a real shame because the poems in Skin, Inc. tackle the subject and politics of writing in complex and energetic ways. There’s rage, but a certain amount of swagger; there are big ideas, but, as Amiri Baraka said, Ellis doesn’t hold with absolutes. Ellis has engaged readers—and, I hope, writers—in a conversation about the value of certain words, ideas, and voices, and in doing so, set himself up to be one of the important writers of our time.

What other writers use rage to open up conversations about sensitive subjects?