The dark room collective and post-soul poetics

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by Brian Reed

Generation next does not labor under the burden of being brand new or even Brand Nubian. ... [T]hey know how to bring the pain and the profanity but also the prophecy, the redemption, and the light. They bear witness to what Amiri Baraka once identified as the Changing Same of the African continuum. (Tate 630)

In November 1986 the aspiring poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange met in the Harvard University Film Archive. A few months later, a 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 a meeting place for a diverse cast of young black artists and intellectuals. James Baldwin's funeral in December 1987 galvanized this group and gave it a sense of common cause. ("Baldwin died / and we became a church," as Ellis puts it ["T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M." 11.68-69]). Its members rechristened themselves the Dark Room Collective--"so-named for a small, dimly lit room in the house that once held a photographic enlarger but gradually began to accumulate books" (Valentine 59)--and remade themselves as something of a "pre or PMFA":

   [W]e'd read one book, then trade and share different books. We
   didn't always read them in the order they were written, but would
   place them in order and talk about why one book was written after
   another; we looked for the things that held books together, argued
   with decisions authors made and made critical judgments, all the
   time developing our own tastes and literary vocabularies. Lonely
   fun done together. And when you're doing something like that around
   people 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 the weak link in the chain! It was like joining a big band or something and cutting your chops that way, before you became a soloist or had your own gig" (Young, Interview 50). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the 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 a time when European Americans still dominated most positions of authority in the US poetry establishment (Strange 296).

In 1989 the collective inaugurated its now-famous Dark Room Reading Series. Initially, the readings took place in the living room at 31 Inman, and publicity for the 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 a relocation first to the Institute of Contemporary Art and then to the Boston Playwrights' Theatre. These new venues brought wider exposure. "White Cambridge" and "Harvard Square" took notice, and the Dark Room quickly found itself behaving less like an improvised gathering of like-minded friends and more like an official entity with a "business side" (Ellis, "Loud" 39).

During its five year run, the series succeeded in bringing to town some of the 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 the transformative experience of "watching people like Michael S. Harper and Thylias Moss give these amazing readings and share the stage with people who were just a 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 the collective. "[W]e appeared in Emerge, the Boston Globe, the New Yorker, on NPR, and in numerous newsletters and anthologies" (Ellis, "Notes"). In summer 1993, the journal Callaloo kicked off a special section devoted to the Dark Room with the kind of rhetoric usually reserved for chart-topping rappers and Hollywood celebrities: "they've all sounded their first note: it cut through time to legend. And it's only just beginning" (Melnyczuk 514). (2)

From 1994 onwards, fellowships, degree programs, paid jobs, and other career opportunities conspired to disperse the Dark Room Collective geographically. Although many of its members have kept in touch and continue to feel a sense of common endeavor, this third phase has nonetheless been distinguished primarily by individual achievements. Carl Phillips and Kevin Young are the premier examples. (3) Besides winning Guggenheims and assorted other honors, both have been finalists for the National Book Award, Young for Jelly Roll (2003) and Phillips for both From the Devotions (1998) and The Rest of Love (2004). Additionally, Ellis, Smith, Strange, Major Jackson, and Natasha Trethewey have all published well-received books with respected presses, and many other Dark Room alumni, including Tisa Bryant, Nahassaiu deGannes, and Janice Lowe, have successfully established themselves as up-and-coming names. (4)