July 4, 2005, 11:07PM
OBITUARY
Lorenzo Thomas, professor and poet
He was longtime Houston literary icon, social critic
By FRITZ LANHAM
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

Lorenzo Thomas, a much-respected fixture on Houston's literary scene and a poet who married bluesy lyricism with a social conscience, died Monday. He was 60.
Thomas died at the Texas Medical Center Hospice. Cause of death was emphysema, according to his companion, Karen Luik.
Thomas' poetry collections included Chances Are Few (1979, expanded second edition in 2003), The Bathers (1981) and most recently Dancing on Main Street (2004). About the last, the Chronicle wrote: "Taken together, the poems in this collection exhibit that equipoise that comes with age and experience. Sorrow and joy find their balance." Poetry, Thomas once wrote, "attempts to knock the mind out of the rut of commonplace thinking."
For more than two decades a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, Thomas also made important contributions to the study of African-American literature. In 2000, the University of Alabama Press published Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry, his overview of the work of James Fenton, Amiri Baraka and other important black writers. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for the year.
A longtime contributor to the Chronicle's book review pages, he was a generous and thoughtful critic.

He became 'extrafluent'
Thomas was born in Panama in 1944. Four years later the family immigrated to New York City, where Thomas grew up. Spanish was his first language, and he strove to master English to escape getting beaten up by other kids for "talking funny."

"Never forgot it," he once said. "Went way, way, way away out of my way to become extra fluent in English."
His study of English fed an early interest in creative writing. Further nurturing his literary ambitions was "the whole business of being black and from a home full of race-conscious people and the idea that if you are black you had to be more qualified than necessary," he said.
During his years at Queens College, Thomas joined the Umbra Workshop, a collective that met on the Lower East Side and served as a crucible for emerging black poets, among them Ishmael Reed, David Henderson and Calvin Hernton. The workshop was one of the currents that fed the Black Arts Movement of the '60s and '70s, the first major African-American artistic movement after the Harlem Renaissance.
Predictably, the civil rights struggle and the rise of cultural black nationalism had a big influence on Thomas and many of his generation.
"He is not, however, a racial protest poet but a critic of the Western world writing from the perspective of Afro-America, with inherited and acquired attitudes of an Afro-Caribbean," poet and playwright, Tom Dent wrote of Thomas.
"His sympathies are with 'the people,' the folk, the poor, the dispossessed, of which people of African descent happen to be card-carrying members in the Western world."

Served in Vietnam
After graduating from college Thomas joined the Navy, serving as a military adviser in Vietnam in 1971. In 1973 he moved to Houston as writer-in- residence at Texas Southern University. At TSU he helped edit the journal Roots. Later he conducted writing workshops at the newly formed Black Arts Center. He joined UH-Downtown in 1984.

References to American popular culture — music especially — abound in Thomas' work. He cited as influences such blues legends as Robert Johnson, Houston native Lightnin' Hopkins and the Houston poet-singer Juke Boy Bonner, whom Thomas eulogized in the journal Callaloo. Thomas helped organize Juneteenth Blues Festivals in Houston and other Texas cities.
"I write poems because I can't sing," he once said.
Charles Rowell, professor of English at Texas A&M University and editor of Callaloo, cited Thomas' role as a cultural critic as his most important achievement, in particular the essays on writers and musicians. Through writing workshops Thomas influenced young black writers not only in Houston but elsewhere. "His passing will be a major loss to African-American letters and to writing in Texas, period," Rowell said.

How to be a Texas poet
Harryette Mullen, a poet who got to know Thomas in the late 1970s when both worked in the Writers in the Schools program in Houston, said he showed her how to be a Texas poet without being parochial.

"It is poetry that is humorous but that makes serious points about our culture," she said of his work.
"There's a critical aspect to it. It's not just entertaining but it also can be entertaining."
The poet Anne Waldman, who published one of Thomas' early chapbooks in 1972, said his poetry "could be quiet, fierce, public, scholarly, sometimes within one poem."
He was also "one of the most well-read people I know in poetry," Waldman said. "He had a real grasp of the English literary tradition as well as the African-American tradition, the African court tradition, what is so exciting here in the last century."
Thomas contributed his time to cultural organizations in Houston. He served on the boards of Cultural Arts Council of Houston and the literary journal Gulf Coast, and on the advisory board of Inprint Inc.
He was a member of Texas Institute of Letters. Affable, even self-effacing, he nonetheless was the type of man who commanded attention when he spoke in public forums.
Funeral arrangements are pending.