Famous (sort of) Friend (sort of)

See here.

SO someone I know has achieved a higher level of social recognition! My once-professor Thomas Sayers Ellis has won an award for his recent book of poetry, The Maverick Room. I gather that this award is pretty prestigious, if by no other indication than the winners receive $40,000.

If his previous work hadn't, I guess this award officially makes him a Big Deal in a wider public sphere. He wasn't exactly low profile before; he's well known for co-founding a group called the Dark Room Collective to support African-American poets. The funny thing is, I can't really imagine how he would respond to fame (such as it is). He's got a website with press photos and such, but it doesn't quite seem to fit. Let me try to explain, he's not a man you can put your finger on. Even in class, when one would expect him to be at his most conservative and accessible, he always kind of slipped in 30 seconds late, sifted through the class' brains for two and a half hours, then flickered out. That is not to say he was a bad teacher. I took his "Intro to Poetry" class, which was a first step into the world of reading and writing (and occasionally performing) poetry. I decided to take the class based on a recommendation from a friend and a curiosity in real poetry. After meeting Ellis, I decided that even if he was a total space cadet, the class would be worth it just to spend some time interacting with such an unfamiliar and unusual person. In his class things were out of order, bizarrely challenging, at times unsettling, and most certainly different every day. But as I watched the semester and the students unfold I realized that he had as much skill at teaching as he did at his art, he simply approached the job like poetry instead of an essay. His non-linear style suited a poetry class readily. He was the reason the word "eclectic" exists. You have to realize how hard this is to explain out of context, but for example: he could be talking and say "You could write a poem about anything, X, Y or Z" Simple, right? But X, Y and Z would be unbelievably cool ideas for poems, totally disparate from each other, and nothing any of us would have thought of in a year. Every class was like dipping your cup in the River Ellis, where you never know what you're going to get from the thick stream of ideas that was always running through his head. At the end of class he would duck out, and we would all laugh at the weird things he said, but we'd all know that we had really been a part of something. He didn't just lecture at you, he brought you along for the ride. He'd push each person for as far as he or she could hold on, and sometimes a bit farther. Sometimes his eyes would skip around the room like he was watching something we couldn't see. Sometimes you'd catch his eye, and he'd pull something out of you and set it on your desk, and you'd spend the rest of class trying to figure it out. That was the best part, when he would lean on someone just a little harder than they wanted him too (we all got this at some point) but then the next week that person's poem would be so much better than even they expected. His challenge wasn't "turn in a paper at the end of the semester," his challenge was "KEEP UP."

So that's Thomas Sayers Ellis' class in 500 words. Of all the personalities I've come across, he's on the short list of people I'd like to be more in the public eye. And now that he's one step farther along I can't help wonder, what does a guy like that do with a spare $40 large?