from Gale Databases: Dictionary of Literary Biography
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Lorenzo Thomas August 31, 1944-
Ethnicity: African American Birth Date: August 31, 1944 Genre(s): POETRY Table of Contents: Biographical and Critical Essay WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
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The life and literary interests of Lorenzo Thomas span vast distances, ranging from Central America to New York City to the American Southwest, underscoring his stature as one of the most broadly based and multifaceted writers of African descent in America today. Thomas's most extensive work has been in poetry, though his few critical essays are remarkable for their vision and comprehension. His poetry is noteworthy for its extraordinary, imaginative depiction of popular American culture and for his unique intermixture of apparently unrelated frames of reference. Born in the Republic of Panama on 31 August 1944, Lorenzo Thomas came to the United States in 1948 when his parents immigrated to New York. His mother, Luzmilda Gilling Thomas, born in 1914 in Costa Rica to Jamaican parents, has been a community organizer and has been active in local New York politics. Thomas's father, Herbert Hamilton Thomas, was born in St. Vincent, West Indies, in 1906. The son of a stonemason, he was educated to be a pharmacist, worked as a chemist in the oilfields of Venezuela, Aruba, and Curacao, emigrated to Panama, and then to the United States, where he was chief dietary purchasing agent for St. Luke's Hospital in New York City until his retirement. Thomas's brother Cecilio (Cess) is a commercial artist and book designer who frequently illustrates the poet's work Thomas was raised as part of a closely knit family in the Bronx and Queens. Having spoken Spanish as a child, Thomas refers to his childhood interest in reading and writing English as an attempt to master his new language, and thus, to make himself more acceptable to his schoolmates. This attempt, in turn, led to his early interest in creative writing. His strivings for literacy were abetted, he has said, by "the whole business of being Black and from a home full of race conscious people, and the idea that if you are Black you had to be more qualified than necessary." While still a teenager attending Queens College, Lorenzo Thomas sought out and became a member of the influential Umbra workshop, which was meeting on the Lower East Side of New York from 1962 to 1964. In intense, highly charged weekly group sessions, he was exposed to the beginning work of young black writers like Ishmael Reed, Calvin Hernton, Joe Johnson, David Henderson (himself only nineteen years old), Askia Muhammad Touré (then Rolland Snellings), Tom Dent, Lloyd Addison, James Thompson, Oliver Pitcher, Norman Pritchard, Art Berger (not black, but nevertheless a faithful member), Steve Cannon, Brenda Walcott, and Lennox Raphael, among others. All of these writers were struggling to find their artistic voices; in 1962 only one or two had published. By 1982, the combined artistic output of the Umbra workshop writers comprised some forty published volumes of prose and poetry. Lorenzo Thomas's earliest literary influences, as with other Umbra writers, were shaped by all the salient social and artistic forces of the 1960s: the civil rights movement and the concomitant drive toward black pride and consciousness, the emergence of Africa as a world force, and a new, positive cultural identification with their African heritage by many members from the African diaspora. The multi-ethnic matrix of New York itself was also influential, especially the atmosphere of the Lower East Side, with its strong European, Caribbean, and Chinese communities. The Lower East Side was also then the newly found domicile of avant-garde, beat, antiestablishment artists--an avant-garde set amidst a nineteenth-century cultural milieu: poetry readings in new coffee houses adjacent to bodegas, open food and clothing markets, and Eastern European saloons. The Lower East Side was not only the crucible for much of the antiestablishment art emerging during that time, it was the first setting for what soon came to be known as the black arts movement--Umbra, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and his movements, and the Negro Ensemble Company all developed out of that section of New York. Lorenzo Thomas, looking back on those years in his 1978 Callaloo essay. "The Shadow World: New York's Umbra Workshop and Origins of the Black Arts Movement," observes that this avantgarde 1960s movement had strong historical roots in the black community: "cultural black nationalism of our moment did not spring forth from inspiration of the New York Times or the Late News; it is the result of a continuing tradition transmitted as naturally as possible under the circumstance of a specially malicious and aggressive white American culture which expediently implemented its hostility with the integrations ideologies of the NAACP and the Urban League." He asserts that in the black folk tradition, griots of the Harlem street, "bedraggled saints from southern communities ... somehow (by a process still incompletely documented) managed to transmit to the young writers of the 1960s an entirely alternative approach to doing art that has made contemporary black literature of the United States one of the most vibrant and beautiful human flowerings on the planet." A sense of new black consciousness and activism, along with a national mood of artistic change, experimentation, and social relevancy made strong impact upon the budding literary ideas of Lorenzo Thomas by the time he was twenty years old. Despite influences, however, the task of discovering an individual voice is one each writer has to struggle alone with in order to emerge as a distinct literary presence. Lorenzo Thomas's poetry and prose matured in the 1970s and 1980s after his initial Umbra period Leaving New York for the first time in 1968, Thomas joined the United States Navy in which he served as Petty Officer 2nd Class (Radioman). In 1971 he served as a military advisor in Vietnam. He returned to the States in 1972, worked as a librarian at Pace College in New York, and in 1973 was invited to serve as writer in residence at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas, a section of the United States he had never before visited. At Texas Southern, Thomas helped edit the literary journal Roots. After completing his year there he decided to remain in Houston where he conducted writing workshops at the newly formed community Black Arts Center from 1974 to 1976. Sinking roots and deciding to remain in Texas, Thomas cemented ties with other black writers in the South, published his poems widely in national journals, gave regular readings of his work, and became active with the Texas Commission of Arts and Humanities. He was among the first black writers to work in artists-in-the-schools programs in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Thomas also served during the mid-1970s as a member of the board of directors of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. Recently, Lorenzo Thomas has given expression to his broad interests in black and American indigenous musics through his work as an organizer of the successful Juneteenth Blues Festivals in Houston and other Texas cities. By 1983 he had published a number of broadsides and pamphlet poems as well as three volumes of poetry: Jambalaya (1974, an anthology of Thomas's works and the poetry of Cyn Zarco, Thulani Davis, and Ibn Mukhtarr Mustapha), Chances are Few (1979), and The Bathers (1981). His poems and other writings have been anthologized in New Black Voices, Nimrod (New Black Writing: Africa, West Indies, the Americas),Another World, the Poetry of Black America, and Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. He is a winner of two Poets Foundation awards and the Lucille Medwick Prize. In 1983 he was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and in 1984 he received the Houston Festival Foundation Arts Award. The poetic style of Lorenzo Thomas gives the reader the feel of a camera gliding through a maze of sensual impressions and memories. It is primarily a cultural world he contracts out of. Though Thomas employs grammatical devices designed to evoke "black English," his approach is not similar to the familiar styles developed in the 1920s and 1930s by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, or in the 1960s by Sonia Sanchez or Haki R. Madhubuti. Lorenzo Thomas has said that one of his earlier influences was the great Martinican poet, Aimé Césaire, the first Afro-Caribbean surrealist and one of the leading proponents of the francophone Negritude movement, with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas. It is said that Césaire adopted his surrealist style under the influence of French poet André Breton as a way of discovering more imaginative devices to portray the complex realities of the Caribbean than was possible through the limited forms of folk verse. There is no question that Thomas's style reflects many of the elements contained in the work of Césaire: surrealism, or magic realism, strong identification with Africa and the African past as a symbol of home and ancestry, strong identification with the conditions and struggles of the masses against the oppression of their rulers, identification with a folk culture, particularly black culture, not officially recognized by European cultural czars, and extreme skepticism toward the technological, scientific/rational overemphasis of contemporary Western society. This technological bias is counterposed against African and Afro-American spirituality, exemplified in its most assertive form for Thomas through the genius of black music. Like Césaire's work, Thomas's poems are composed of disparate and widely varied elements: song, criticism, erudite allusions, sharp description, memory--all flow along rather evenly in his versification. And like Césaire, the quest for identity is a major theme, though Thomas has experienced increasing assurance and rootedness in his identification as a black American. Finally, Lorenzo Thomas shares with Aimé Césaire a belief in the powers of imagination and spirituality to overcome the more tangible problems of powerlessness, along with a belief in poetry as a protector of truth that cannot be bought, sold, or tailored by commerce. It is almost as if he accepts as credo Césaire's assertion: "In this climate of flame and fury that is the climate of poetry money has no currency, courts pass no judgements, judges do not convict, juries do not acquit." The Bathers, an ironically titled collection of poems published in 1981, contains a fine chronological presentation of the poet's work--ranging from his earliest poems in New York, his poems about and around his Vietnam experience to a very representative collection of his best work emanating from Houston and the Southwest. Sections of The Bathers were originally published as broadsides or pamphlet poems. The cover for the book is an imitation drawing of European Rubens-like paintings of lazing bathers at the seashore. The book's inside cover is a collage of black demonstrators being attacked with high pressure water hoses, as in Birmingham during civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s. The collage is by Cecilio Thomas, the poet's brother. Among his early New York works, "The Unnatural Life" is a characteristically surreal portrait of the New York scene. There is, however, a personal, almost private voice in this rather abstract love poem, possibly an allusion to what might have been love devoid of conclusion or consummation. Here we see early evidence of Thomas's powers of sharp observation and his gnawing discomfort with cosmetic or domestic tranquility, a recurring theme in his later work, first projected as a theme in itself in "Domestic Horror." Thomas has the gift of spotting inner turmoil hiding behind the seemingly mundane--an inner turmoil born of tragedy, passion, memory: who is this dread child, bounding through our home devouring the furniture? The theme of hidden or masked malaise is given heavy treatment in "Dracula," written in 1966, published separately in 1973, and collected in The Bathers. A lengthy, philosophical poem, "Dracula" in substance and style anticipates Thomas's finest and most fully realized work. Difficult as it is to summarize "Dracula" in rational, linear, narrative terms, it may be said that Thomas juxtaposes the popularity of the Dracula films,which he believes is firmly rooted in American boredom, with the insatiable Western appetite for conquest without coming to terms with consequences, which include the spiritual and moral impact of conquest on the conquerors. Like Dracula, the appetite for conquest is an appetite for blood, a desire to destroy life by always going for the jugular vein of the victim. No matter how much bloodsucking has occurred in American history, there is always the suppressed, but irresistible appetite for more and more. Possibly, Thomas suggests, a failure to face historical truth lies at the heart of so much of the irrational, unexplained violence and horror that have always been so deeply embedded just below the plastic surface of American culture--thus, the American subconscious attraction to the Dracula myth and films: "only such emotion could complete us/When we are tired of our thoughtful survival and/Cry to be married to a cringing darkness and capture/It in our souls." All of Thomas's poems reflect an extraordinary sensitivity to contemporary American culture, particularly the suggestive and image-laden world of cinema. He uses cinematic imagery in an effort to come to terms with the African heritage, an identity framed first by his West Indian upbringing, and by his experiences as a black youth in New York. One of Thomas's earliest poetic references to black identity is contained in his Umbra II poem "South St. Blues." Here Thomas presents his vague black persona as possibly frighteningly limited and depressing but undeniably real. However, in the full-length 1970 poem "The Bathers," the title poem of his 1981 collection, Thomas addresses the Southern civil rights struggle and racial reality in his own, very personal terms. "The Bathers" is a series of refractions off the indelible photographic image of black demonstrators being attacked with police fire hoses during the Birmingham demonstrations of April 1963. Thomas employs several images to depict the conversion of black people via this brutalization, which he views as a magically transforming ritual: when hosed, the demonstrators "Turn to fire," becoming akin to a "sun" people, newly endowed with the age-old strength of ancient Egypt, through the poet's evocation of the regenerative legend of Horus. There is also the image of baptism:
Here, for the first time in Thomas's published work, he deals directly with the struggle for civil rights and black equality so much in the news and consciousness of black America in the 1960s. Thomas weaves an identification with ancient African culture into the contemporary American struggle. He views the ritualistic freeing, wrought by the Southern struggle, as a spiritual descendent of the mythical emergence of ancient Egyptian, national consciousness wrought by the imaginative reconstitution of Horus's body. Thomas is suggesting that for the Afro-American emergence into national consequence to be most meaningful, there must be a sense of return to ancestral and mythical "home," even if the sense of home, or fatherland, lies buried deep in layers of subconscious, and even if there is little evidence of such memory in the day-to-day rhetoric of the civil rights struggle. This black American regeneration is also symbolized, as was common with several black poets of the period, by the metaphor of Afro-Americans emerging spiritually into a "new land," that is, a new, more positive concept of self as a people distinct from territorial identity as Americans, thus helping to shed the psychological shackles of slavery. Nineteen seventy to 1976 was an extremely creative period for Thomas; it was a time when his powers of imagination and observation were at their height. It was during this period that he was adjusting to moves from Vietnam to New York, and then to the Southwest. "Envoy," for instance, is a fine short poem, humorous and introspective; the poet returning to America from duty in Vietnam notes the landmarks of the San Francisco Bay Area while descending in an airplane:
In "Wonders" the persona is stuck in the delta swamps of Vietnam He discovers he longs for New York and the pleasurable times in the city he had known as home. In a gush of nostalgia, he says, "I feel so simple to be thinking of Harlem/New York the apple/Where we had our own Adam/And damn near all/The wonders of the world." But it was in the post-Vietnam period that Lorenzo Thomas achieved a new synthesis of experience and belief. Never losing his sharp sense of irony or his feel for the absurd, the poet became more at ease with elements of black culture and history, particularly black music. His succinct portrayals of the Southwestern terrain add a new dimension to his poetry, contrasting, or rather, adding to his heretofore almost exclusively New York frame of reference. The creative genius of black music becomes a frequent theme, as in his 1972 piece for Charlie Parker, "Historiography": The phoniness of society also becomes a recurring theme as in "Fly Society," which comments on the language of a woman friend who, in conversation, "mentions nineteen high priced islands." The complex, but smoothly flowing "While Madness Reigns" tackles the theme of the present nature of nature in America, where: Echoing the theme of "Dracula," Thomas sees us "Destroying life to make a living ....": the Western compulsion to destroy raging out of control. "Work Song," written in 1972, makes strong social and economic comment on the state of the poor and oppressed in America, reflecting on Victor Hugo's nineteenth-century Les Miserables. Of all Thomas's poems, this is the most in keeping with the traditions of social realism in style and militancy, as he depicts the fate of twentieth-century masses, whom he views as guileless, voiceless, and endlessly victimized by their rulers. Nothing much has changed since Hugo's time to better conditions for the poor. A hundred years of technological advances have hardly advanced the quality of our lives. The poem ends with a declaration of the necessity for revolution, for the "masters" of the world have failed the people of the world:
"Framing the Sunrise," dated 1975, is representative of Thomas's most accomplished and imaginative work. The poem literally springs forth from the American family television set and offers several fascinating comments on the influence of television in blurring images of reality. The poem presents a parade of television images/icons from our recent national past: Ike (Dwight D. Eisenhower), FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt), supermarkets, Eddie Fisher, the Selma (Alabama) Bridge, the Kent State killings, and especially Vietnam, that peculiarly American war, the war within the American soul experienced by the American populace through the television evening news, the unpleasant, dirty war seeping into safe American living rooms like a putrid gas Thomas focuses on the distortion inherent in commercial television, in the way events are programmed in America--the incapacity of our new electronic media to capture the full impact of reality--especially war, evil, and tragedy. Throughout the poem, images of events and faces flow from the omnipresent screen, filtered through the poet's memory as they have penetrated the living rooms of our collective consciousness, at the same time deadening our consciousness and our capacity to feel. Thomas repeats the phrase "the state of the art has improved," meaning technological advances, an advance paradoxically concomitant with our diffusion of the impact of reality, a theme Thomas developed earlier in "Work Song." Harry Truman on his morning constitutional, White Sands test planes, the late night movies, "each became monsters/lazy unfeeling/brutally corrupted by our senses." Lorenzo Thomas's sense of irony, absurdity, and his social awareness are very much a part of the shared concerns of contemporary black literature, despite his surreal influences. He is not, however, a racial protest poet, but a critic of the Western world writing from the perspective of Afro-America, with inherited and acquired attitudes of an Afro-Caribbean. His sympathies are with "the people," the folk, the poor, the oppressed, of which people of African descent happen to be card-carrying members in the Western world. Lorenzo Thomas has said that his appreciation of folk culture was enhanced in the Southwest through his growing knowledge of Southern blues singers. He mentions as influences the legendary Robert Johnson, the late Lightnin' Hopkins, a native of Houston, Clifton Chenier, the western Louisiana Zydeco blues singer who sings in French and English, and the late Juke Boy Bonner, a poet-singer of the Houston streets, eulogized by Thomas in Callaloo, no. 7. Thomas's knowledge of music is extremely catholic; he seems to be on intimate terms with every form of American popular music. In terms of poetic concept, he has observed: "I write poems because I can't sing." We assume he means even though his poems are not written in song form, or that his language is not the language of the blues, the poet should play an artistic role akin to that of blues singers. The poet is like a blues singer with the same migratory tendencies, the same qualities of street prophet and historian, and the same fate of being held in low esteem by the ruling classes. Several of Thomas's short poems pull all of these ideas and concerns together. Especially noteworthy is "Suicide Administration," a political satire in the form of a letter from the inner depths of the Central Intelligence Agency to those it plans to destroy: "Hiccups," based on the famous Léon Damas poem, addresses the problem of Caribbean identity by referring to a "proper" European upbringing, mulattoness, religious orthodoxy, and so forth. However, "Collective Poems" is a kind of anthem for the communally-oriented black poet and his role of reclaiming his culture:
"Class Action" is a major effort in which Thomas assimilates his earliest, childhood, and youthful impressions, the black consciousness of the 1960s, and his new Southern experiences. Lengthy and difficult to summarize, it addresses racism in American culture as it is represented primarily in old Hollywood cinema and music, a process of examination from which Thomas extracts an unusually well-defined sense of personal values. As for blacks and the neglected masses he terms the "wallpaper" of American culture, those never depicted in the grand Hollywood film, those relegated to the balconies of the theaters of the silver screen, he sees them as a basic spiritual force that can counter the power and control of the ruling classes, the makers of the silver screen, the creators of official American art. There is and has been a deeper logic to the life of black people: The powerful, on the other hand, produce: "Self-serving histories of the self-serving"; they have used American cinema to project false histories. The power to do this has come from what Thomas calls "the force of circumstance": And the poet notes that the first speaking movie was "The Jazz Singer," a violation of black spirituality: Blacks can only counteract the forces of American circumstance by adhering to and believing in the wisdom of their own spirituality, which is fundamentally African: "Us," singularly and plurally, as blacks, as "wallpaper people," must speak out, for: The poem ends with a jest, a mild tone of self-deprecation which beautifully heightens his "we" concept:
"Class Action" is a profound and complex long poem, shifting in mood, allusion, suggestion, and meaning. Satire and irony are fundamental to Thomas's style; an oral reading of the poem brings that out. "Class Action" integrates Thomas's social and political concerns, folk values, and criticisms of the fairy-tale world of grand Hollywood cinema with his counterposition of the strength of black music, spirituality, and culture. Although "Class Action" does not really represent new elements in the poetry of Lorenzo Thomas, in no other poem are all his major themes so well blended and so brilliantly conveyed in metaphor and image. "Class Action," like "Framing the Sunrise" and "Dracula," deals with the projection of popular American film images and the unrelatedness of these images to the life of not only black Americans, but to most of the people in America. Underlying these poems is a call for a more meaningful truth, a more lasting and useful art. One can conclude, particularly
after his move southward, that Thomas believes Afro-Americans, guided
by the light of the star of African culture and life principles, have
the potential to lead the way in a freeing from the destructive, capitalistic,
money-obsessed American value system, and such an act of liberation must
be at its core cultural and spiritual. This is the pervasive logic behind
the fascinating and challenging poems and essays of Lorenzo Thomas. FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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