The Dark Room Collective and Post-Soul Poetics

Abstract

Generation next does not labor under burden of being brand new or even Brand Nubian. ... [T]hey know how to bring pain and profanity but also prophecy, redemption, and light. They bear witness to what Amiri Baraka once identified as Changing Same of African continuum. (Tate 630) In November 1986 aspiring poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange met in University Film Archive. A few months later, housemate of Strange's moved out, and Ellis replaced her (Ellis, Interview 90). Their three-story Victorian in Cambridge's Central Square--31 Inman Street--soon became meeting place for diverse cast of young black artists and intellectuals. James Baldwin's funeral in December 1987 galvanized this group and gave it sense of common cause. (Baldwin died / and we became church, as Ellis puts it [T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. 11.68-69]). Its members rechristened themselves Dark Room Collective--so-named for small, dimly lit room in house that once held photographic enlarger but gradually began to accumulate (Valentine 59)--and remade themselves as something of pre or PMFA: [W]e'd read one book, then trade and different books. We didn't always read them in order they were written, but would place them in order and talk about why one book was written after another; we looked for things that held books together, argued with decisions authors made and made critical judgments, all time developing our own tastes and literary vocabularies. Lonely fun done together. And when you're doing something like that around who are taking it very seriously, it gives you support and strength. (Ellis, Interview 91) The collective also provided an object lesson in the necessity of ... working hard, to come up with something new--no one wanted to be weak link in chain! It was like joining big band or something and cutting your chops that way, before you became soloist or had your own gig (Young, Interview 50). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Dark Room provided young African American writers a way of overcoming isolation, an opportunity to share similar struggles with writing with other Black people at time when European Americans still dominated most positions of authority in US poetry establishment (Strange 296). In 1989 collective inaugurated its now-famous Dark Room Reading Series. Initially, readings took place in living room at 31 Inman, and publicity for events was both informal and local. Little typed messages began appearing on bulletin boards around Cambridge, Askold Melnyczuk recalls (513). Landlord problems, however, soon forced relocation first to Institute of Contemporary Art and then to Boston Playwrights' Theatre. These new venues brought wider exposure. White Cambridge and Harvard Square took notice, and Dark Room quickly found itself behaving less like an improvised gathering of like-minded friends and more like an official entity with business side (Ellis, Loud 39). During its five year run, series succeeded in bringing to town some of biggest names in contemporary African American literature, among them Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, Essex Hemphill, bell hooks, Randall Kenan, Terry McMillan, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Walter Moseley. (1) Tracy K. Smith recalls transformative experience of watching like Michael S. Harper and Thylias Moss give these amazing readings and stage with who were just little older than myself, and who were taking their art very seriously. And I realized that I wanted to be doing that, too (Something 868). The Dark Room Reading Series also brought national attention to collective. [W]e appeared in Emerge, Boston Globe, New Yorker, on NPR, and in numerous newsletters and anthologies (Ellis, Notes). …