An Excerpt from “Crank Shaped Notes”
The Importance of Being Phat Bottom / Washington, D.C. / TSE / 2008
Crank Shaped Notes is Thomas Sayers Ellis’s mixed groove and mixed genre, love song to GoGo Music, the District of Columbia and Washington, D.C., the city of his birth. In his youth, Ellis played GoGo and has spent years documenting the history of GoGo in poetry, lectures and photography. A crank shaped note is an idea that has encountered crank, the social and historical gears and levers of GoGo, while churning in the pocket of its various wards, quadrants and neighborhoods, the percussive grammar and geography of GoGo. This approach results in utterances that have been vamped, structurally, and whose meanings have considered multiple philosophical possibilities to arrive at a new map of Washington within its homegrown music. Critical and Creative in scope, this book is also an uncovering of the layers of what it means to be a citizen of our Nation’s Capital and a native Washingtonian trapped between local and federal interests and tourism and invisibility. It contains notes, lyric prose, short poems, tributes and elegies for such members of the GoGo Community as Chuck Brown, Robert “Syke Dyke” Reed, Anthony “Little Benny” Harley, Ricky “Sugarfoot” Wellman, Reggie “Polo” Burwell, Valentino “Tino” Jackson, Maiesha “The First Lady of GoGo” Rashad, Ivan Goff, Quentin “Footz” Davidson, Willie Irving Gaston, Jr (aka “Heavy One”) and Rory “DC” Felton as well as others who have recently passed. At the crossroads of Roland Barthes, John Berger and Jean Toomer, Crank Shaped Notes is a book about language and loss as much as it is a book about music and government.
(Crank Shaped Notes will be available in May 2021 through Arrowsmith Press.)
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.