Overview

This book of photos, poems, and essays chronicles like never before the inner world of GoGo, Washington D.C.'s official music. Thomas Sayers Ellis masterfully captures the rhythms, beats, and souls of a culture which is ever expanding beyond the beltway of our nation's capital. Crank Shaped Notes is a must-have volume.

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9781734641660

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"""Thomas Sayers Ellis's photography is not only a document of the leading figures of the GoGo poetic and musical world, but the author seems to make of them not mere portraits but 'real' presences with the strength of direct testimony, together with his narrative-poetic writing made not only of allusive and evocative references, but also full of tension and energy in the sound of words, in the rhythm of their connections, with the development of a flow that (in apparent fragmentation) makes us grasp an original and almost physical wholeness in the assumption of a world whose echo of complexity is perceived. His writing reflects the movement, the incisive and repeated gestures of the bodies and their rituality. The result is an intersection, a thickening in the poetic language of words."" Manuela Zanelli ""Washington, D.C. on one level, dominant signifier of planetary consciousness by projected weaponry, and on another a hobbled precarious enclave with its aforesaid weaponry compromised, shadowed (if you will) by its malevolent apartheid. Thomas Sayers Ellis' Crank Shaped Notes crystallizes this premonition rotating (as they do) as a simultaneous poltergeist that evinces an indigenous ethos simultaneous as otherness with its concussive power that shapes an alternative grammar as it issues waves of imagery and feeling."" Will Alexander"

Author Information

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.

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