About Thylias Moss Essay Research Paper Thylias

About Thylias Moss Essay, Research Paper

Thylias Moss: A Poet of Many Voices and A Spellbinding

Delivery

by Eve Silberman

Her hands clasped, her head lowered, Thylias Moss

sits in a chair in a small room at Ann Arbor’s Concordia College and waits for what

she calls her "poetry experience" (she dislikes the term "poetry

reading") to begin. The 4’10" associate professor of English at Michigan

looks timid and schoolgirlish in her high-buttoned blouse, short skirt, tights tucked into

rolled-up socks, and high-laced shoes.

But once introduced, she springs to her feet as though just wound up.

Thanking the audience for coming, she playfully reminds them, "We poets don’t

have the benefits of rock stars," whose audiences, she notes, are familiar with their

work. "We are always flattered when someone in the audience yells, ‘Please

read!’"

Although no one shouts, "Please read," the attendees soon look

absorbed—and occasionally dazed—as Moss zings from poem to poem and persona to

persona. She sounds like a squeaky-voiced little girl when she delivers "When I was

’Bout Ten We Didn’t Play Baseball." She assumes a weary-voiced Black

dialect ("Let me clear up a nagging misunderstanding:/ This is the way to make

the white woman’s bed") when she reads "The Linoleum Rhumba," a

poem inspired by her mother, who has worked most of her life as a maid. And her voice

becomes powerful and sermonizing when she delivers "There Will B Animals!"

a poem alternatively playful and despairing as it suggests that the true beasts are those

with two legs: "The lion lying with the lamb, the grandmother/and Little Red

Riding Hood/walking out of a wolf named Dachau."

At times she coaxes the audience into participating, challenging them, in

one instance, to tell her what line upset her mother in the poem "She’s Florida

Missouri but She Was Born in Valhermosa and Lives in Ohio" (Florida Missouri Brasier

is her mother’s name).

"‘Those feet wide like yams’" someone calls

out.

Moss laughs and agrees. "Oh, that troubled her! And she made me look

at her feet: ‘Do they look like yams.’ Well, I have already written this; what

am I supposed to say." The audience eats up the merry dialogue.

After the reading, a woman who says she teaches at Concordia College

declares she’s never heard any poet read so well. "I like all her voices!"

she exclaims.

"I am an exceedingly shy person," Thylias Moss says in her

office the day after the reading. But offering up her poetry to audiences transforms her.

"I’m a performer. If I have to go out and be myself, that would not work."

Reciting her poetry, however, gives her "a sense of completion" because she can

expose her listeners to "all the rhythms and cadences of the language" that they

can’t get through reading. It is an "exhilarating experience" not only for

her but, she hopes, for her audience, too.

And apparently it is. Moss won the annual $10,000 Dewar’s Profiles

Performance Artist Award in poetry in 1991. She has four collections in print, including

her most recent, Small Congregations, New and Selected Poems, published by Ecco

Press this year. She also received the Witter Bynner Prize awarded annually by the

American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters to a "distinguished younger

poet."

Although serious poetry reaches a very small number of readers, poetry

readings—whether on campuses or at bookstores—are enjoying a resurgence of

popularity. Moss’s emphasis on the oral artistry of poetry means she’s in the

right place at the right time. "I don’t know many poets who have better eyes and

better ears," the poet Charles Simic, her former teacher in graduate school at the

University of New Hampshire, has said of Moss. "She knows that language is both the

individual and the community."

Moss has branched out, publishing a children’s picture book, I

Want to Be (Dial Books for Young Readers, 1995), with a second children’s book, Someone

Else Right Now, scheduled for publication soon. Keenly interested in children’s

literature, she is teaching a seminar for first-year students this fall, "The

Literature of Invented Realities," which will focus on the escapist element in that

genre. She also recently finished her autobiography, encouraged by the interest a short

sketch of her life last year in the Wall Street Journal generated in several publishers.

On hold is a draft of a novel. Secretive about its plot, she says only that it is not

based on her life. She adds, however, that she will not be "another Black woman

providing a first book commiserating a kind of desolation of spirit. That seems to be so

common for African American writers. Mine is different. It is rather abo

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