Lynne Thompson, the fourth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, is the author of Blue on a Blue Palette (2024), published by BOA Editions in April. Q&A Editor Gauri Awasthi conducted the interview.
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Gauri Awasthi: There is a deep sense of play – on the things that are said and expected to be said – especially in relaying women’s experiences. Like in “A BIRTH MOTHER WEARS A COSTUME HER DAUGHTER WILL NEVER FIT INTO” the speaker says: “Some thought the mother said taproot / Some thought that woman said resigned / but her daughter mouthed immaculately conceived.” Could you speak to this restraint and play on what can be said vs what is said on the page?
Lynne Thompson: I believe anything can be said on the page. The issue may be whether the writer has the courage to say what needs to be said. I can’t deny that the opinion/effect of what I write, particularly as it pertains to family, swims around in the lap pool as I develop a new piece. I think I relied on metaphor in this poem to convey the road to resistance where the speaker ultimately lands.
GA: Wow, I love that idea of having courage so much. In the vein of the effect of what you write affecting others, the poems often swing between the “We” and the “I” throughout the collection. The “We” shifts often seem to invoke a specific kind of womanhood and lived experience as a black person in America. The speaker writes to Elizabeth Short, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many others. What responsibilities are you considering when writing about people whose voices have been silenced?
LT: When a speaker seeks to evoke dead spirits, particularly those who dominate the public zeitgeist, the moral complexities can be almost crippling. In the poems you cite, I’ve chosen (with perhaps a lack of courage) to skirt obvious problems by either placing myself in vaguely similar circumstances (“Boketto”) or attributing the “facts” to journalists and other writers (“The Ways of Remembering Women”) or, finally, by briefly citing a singular irrefutable fact—“my name is George-Died-With-Your-Knee-On-My-Knee” (“Our Ancestors, Enslaved Once, Said Juneteenth Would Never Be”).
GA: From the title to the many images of “Blue” the book sings to. You reference Mary Ruefles’s “… The Sea Deep as Love” in “Sticking Point” and “Joni Mitchell’s Ode” in “Sometimes Light,” and there are poems like “Blue Haze” and “Pale Blue,” among others. There is a sense of kinship with other titles and works that deeply meditate on the form, color, or feeling. Could you speak to your obsessions with the word as color and feeling and perhaps about blues as poetics?
LT: The blues as poetics covers such a vast temporal space, it makes my mind explode. On the less daunting scale of the poems that you cite in Blue on a Blue Palette, I can say that in many instances the color appeared organically, that is without planning other than trying to describe, visually, the emotion being conveyed in the text. Of course, in compiling the manuscript, once I saw how often the color appeared, I looked for other opportunities to insert it without overdoing it.
GA: Since you touched on compiling the manuscript, could you speak about your sectioning process and the pauses in the manuscript? This is also your fourth book of poems. How has the process changed or evolved?
LT: The pauses are certainly intentional; the stories of women are not, after all, run-on sentences. There are steps forward, backward, and always, there are silences. The pauses act as metaphor for that reality. Generally, however, for me compilation is the most difficult part of the process. I would say the main change from Beg No Pardon to Blue on a Blue Palette is that I trust myself more to come up with the correct organization and I forgive myself if the organization could have been arranged differently. Isn’t that true of most things?
GA: The centos in the book based on the works of (or variations of ) Sonia Sanchez, Carl Phillips, Kwame Dawes, Terrance Hayes, Ai, and Joni Mitchell’s lyrics, amongst others, all changed my reading of the work and the speaker’s awareness of their literary lineage. Besides using the cento as a form, the speaker also invokes other poets and figures whose work is in conversation with theirs such as Nina Simone, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and others. I found the usage of the ‘citation form’ in your poems “An untamed rebel resists Octavia Armand’s poem ‘Soneto’ consisting of fourteen lines each asserting yo soy un hombre sincero,” “My Alchemists Dream in Cursive,” and in “Melancholia (a draft)” compelling especially with building on philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s ideas as discussed by Simone White in her book Dear Angel of Death, “Just as through citation a secret meeting takes place between past generations and ours, so too between the writing of the past and the present a similar kind of meeting transpires.…” Could you describe your choice of using the cento and the citation form?
LT: I love this idea of a “secret meeting,” and now you’ve given me a reason to seek out Simone White’s book! I’m constantly learning from contemporary writers/artists as well as our creative foremothers/fathers and as a result looking for ways to both honor them and to incorporate their creative impact into my own work. For me, the cento and the citation form (which I had been calling foot-noted poems up until now!) are one way to do that. I’m also interested in building on what I’ve learned from them. Thus, the poem “Frankly, when asked about the autonomy of my body, I consider my inner assassin” is a cento where I braid lines of Diane Seuss’ Frank: Sonnets and Terrance Hayes’ American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin into a loose pantoum, or as I’m calling it, a “centoum.”
GA: I can’t help but ask about the effects of poetics in times like ours, especially what advice you have for young poets just starting out, as the Poet Laureate of Los Angeles.
LT: For new poets, both the young and not so young age-wise, I would recommend that they read everyone—contemporaries and past masters to develop their understanding of where poetry has been and where it’s going. Then write. Write the poems that may never leave your desk. Write the poems that have potential to go out into the world. Then revise. And revise again. Then let them “gestate.” Then ask yourself (and poets you trust): is the poem ready to step onto the stage? Forgive yourself when you’re wrong. Celebrate with the libation of your choice when you’re right.
GA: What is next in the writing world for you?
LT: At the urging of a poet I admire (I won’t share a name to protect the poet!), I’m considering compiling a new and selected collection of poems. I was somewhat resistant at first, but when we consider that none of us can know how many solar returns will be allotted to us, it seems like a worthwhile project.
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