Lynne Thompson is the award-winning author of four collections of poetry and was the 4th Poet Laureate of Los Angeles.
Lynne Thompson served as Los Angeles’ 4th Poet Laureate and received a Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of four collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2015); Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield; and,, Blue on a Blue Palette, published by BOA Editions in April 2024. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series (Kenya) and the Vermont Studio Center. She serves on the Boards of the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, and Gulf Coast, as well as the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa, among others. Thompson’s website can be found at www.lynnethompson.us.
Like Choosing Which One To Be Forever Changed Into
The dragonflies are only the first thing.
There are places, still, that no moonlight ever conquers
and there’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to.
There’s a slant of light I used to call Self Portrait
having been lost unfindably
where your dragonflies are only the first thing.
It’s easy to confuse estrangement with what came before.
When did our yard get this swollen?
What happened to the meadow I can’t stop coming back to?
My heart is not so much broken as beating.
Maybe stamina’s just a fairer form of stubborn
and dragonflies are forever the first, the only thing.
It is our shadowed tenderness I break inside of,
a forest that stands at the exact center of sorrow
alongside a meadow I can’t stop coming back to.
Then again, everything is findable, even now.
See how sky becomes an echo of what’s flown through it?
There are dragonflies which are only the first thing
and also, the meadow. I can’t stop coming back.
In this version (a wishlist),
a mother, compelled or complicit,
decides to keep her child,
decides to disobey, to resist,
decides blood is thicker than blood.
The mother, in this version,
is wiser than she has been told:
she remembers the consummation
and smiles; she remembers
the conception as if she can
pinpoint its ultimate insignificance.
In this romance, her child smells
of rosemary and piss on sheets,
has eyes the color of no god’s pupils,
has DNA flecked with wily witticisms.
In this un-tragic, the father is peripheral.
Whoever’s opinion matters less than.
Her child won’t fall to ground in either
version, doesn’t wonder or wander clad
in barkcloth, and this is the child who
plays well with ridicule and farce, every
synonym being more than another
illusion, another product of thievery
which raises those thorny questions of
reparations, amends, recompense; see
the Late Latin reparare: to restore but
who restores the mother who declines to
resist, to disobey, to keep her child—she
who is the essence, the lasting version of—?
In this life, this eight to the bar,
I am single-voiced,
generous— despite
this bubble burst of life’s techno-madness,
the density of its point-and-penciled vanishing.
I wish I could hear Coltrane live—
not looking down,
inside every step,
between,
while I languish here—
corner of Pacific O,
unable to be anywhere else,
my gun wiped clean
almost—
Highway 61 Blues
—you begin with a sound wrapped around a syllable—
Quincy Troupe
Wocha take me Bobby J? Woncha take me
up the trail outta New Orleans, past Natchez
past Vicksburg, all the way to Rollin’ Fork?
You and me gonna beat the boll weevil,
gonna beat the bent back heat all the way
to Duncan, all the way to New Africa been
on my mind. I’m lookin’ for a blue devil,
a blue devil to set me free from floodplains,
from Yazoo, from Tallahatchie, fly free me
all the way to Greenville, Tutwiler, all teh way
to Clarksdale where my gutar just gotta moan
Preachin’ Blue all the way, all the way, all the way
and I’m hollerin’ loud I been `buked and scorned
Willie Brown; I been beat down Howlin’ Wolf;
hey Kid Bailey, got any scratch? Can you get me
to Shelby where blues ain’t dead? So said some
pretty one-eyed gal who gav eme two six stringers
and a hard drum, said pace yourself, pace yourself
and yeah, Mr. Jimmie Cotton soothe me sure with
some sweet, sweet devil music to keep me movin’
outta sullen heat and deep blue and
Jim Crow and sharecrop—no mo’ dry throat,
no mo’ hot whipe, no manny sold to don’t know
where, no white man’s cotton but no forty acres
and no goddamned mule, yeah, so take me, Bobby J,
all the way to Memphis, out west to Houston
up east to Cincinnati, up north to Chi-town, away
from the woncha, please Stop Breakin’ Down Blues.
The Day My Brothers Met Malcom X,
they knew our Antilles-bred parents were
wary of black Muslims: mother gave hijabs
a cold one-eye when she saw them troublin’
the innocents on our streets. However, our
folks did enjoy the bean pies those bow-ties
sold outside a branch of the Bank of America
but not quite as much as the brothers enjoyed
meeting Minister Malcolm in the barbershop
of the Hotel Watkins, perched majestically,
Adams Boulevard, Sugar Hill. The brothers
gave up chairs of favored barberettes—Angie?
Gloria?—and the rhythm of old men’s playing
of the dozens in answer to Mr. X’s proposition:
I don’t want to look like I need a haircut but also
not like I just had one. It was May, 1962, when
X came to L.A. to protest the policeman whose
bullet pierced the heart of Ronald Stokes, X’s
friend, a Muslim, a Korean War vet. His crime:
unloading several dry-cleaned suits from a car
parked—legally—near Mosque 27. Malcolm
strode into the Watkins the same day he
preached nobody can give you freedom…if you
are a man, you take it and everybody knew
Malcolm was The Man. Many gotta-get
my-afro-oiled-and-shaped were intimidated
by this Muslim who would grace a 1964 cover
of Jet magazine alongside Cassius Clay,
meaning that two years after X came, life
hadn’t changed here much; meaning most
Afro-Ams—excuse me, Kneegroes—sang
a blues chorus—emboldened, yes, yet fearful—
for this preacher. And my brothers revealed
more about themselves than Malcolm because
they weren’t sure what they were allowed
to ask him. But maybe their untapped rage
rose up, making one brother ask what should
we believe, man making Malcolm mourn: we are
a violent people. When the brothers spoke of it
years later, I understood Malcolm never fully
answered before he took a bullet, 1965, so
the question hangs in the stank air that blew
over Stephon Clark—what should we believe?
THE INTERVIEW
This interview was conducted between Lynne Thompson and Jae Nichelle on August 8, 2024.
You mentioned that “Like Choosing Which One to be Forever Changed Into” is a cento inspired by Carl Phillips. And it is so lovely in its cascading repetition of the starting lines, including how you made use of Phillips’ line about the meadow from his poem “Falling.” Can you share a bit about what drew you to breathe different life into these lines?
I am a big fan of the cento and I’m also constantly looking for opportunities to pay homage to the poets who have inspired me with their work and their friendship. Carl Phillips is one of those people. His oeuvre is amazing and I’ve been re-reading his work and, as a result, I found opportunities to say “thank you” for what he’s gifted to those of us who love his poems. In addition to the poem “Falling”, “Like Choosing….” incorporates lines from the following Phillips’ collections: Double Shadow; Riding Westward; Then the War, Reconnaissance; The Tether; Speak Low; and Silverchest.
The poems you’ve shared have a variety of perspectives and voices. I’m wondering where you view yourself in relation to the words on the page. As a poet, do you feel like you are an observer, a reporter, an inquirer, or a professor? All or none of the above?
I’m often all of the above all at once. In “In this version (a wishlist), a mother, compelled or complicit,”, for example, I am an observer but I am also the child who is referenced. I’m always looking for ways to mix up the perspectives that must, necessarily though not always happily, co-exist.
In an issue of Moria, you suggested that poets read outside of the box—Aka, read more than poetry, but “read recipes, NASA reports, old maps, bills of lading, to name a few.” What’s something “outside of the box” you’ve read recently that has inspired you?
Like so many people, I’m fascinated by the plight of animals in an environment where species are constantly at risk of extinction. I came across an article by journalist Tim Brinkhof about the wild zebras purchased by William Randolph Hearst—who provided the titular model for the movie Citizen Kane—to roam his estate, Hearst Castle, in California. I was fascinated to discover—though I shouldn’t have been surprised—that someone would “import” a species of animal native to Africa to his home as his playmates! I’m working on a new piece that explores this hubris.
You transitioned from a career as a law litigator to a path that allowed you to prioritize creative writing. Before that happened, did you find that your love of poetry and creativity informed the way you practiced law?
Early in my legal career, a judge praised my poetic language in a brief I submitted. He then promptly denied the relief I was seeking! That taught me to keep the two paths separate!
As a person born and raised in Los Angeles who became a Los Angeles poet laureate, is there anything you feel outsiders would be surprised to learn about the city?
I’ve heard visitors and transplants to the City complain that its citizens can be unfriendly. While the geography of the City—and thus the opportunity to find true community—can be difficult to navigate and that difficulty may contribute to negative perceptions, I think, given the chance, Angelenos can be quite friendly and ready and willing to welcome those who are new to the City.
What’s a topic you feel like you could give a TED talk about with little to no preparation?
Transitioning from the practical career of a lawyer (or similar profession) to the (some would say) impractical career of a writer (or similar creative endeavor).
What’s the kindest thing someone has ever done for you?
The kindest act has nothing to do with poetry. It was the decision of my immigrant parents, who already have four sons, to adopt me. I often think of who I might have become if they had not made that decision. It was life-altering and I’m forever grateful.
How can people support you right now?
Here’s a shameless self-promotion: buy my new collection, Blue on a Blue Palette, preferably from your local independent bookstore or from www.bookshop.org or from Amazon.
Name another Black woman writer people should follow.
Tough to choose just one but I’m going to shout out California poet, Nikia Chaney (https://www.nikiachaney.com/) who is not only a wonderful poet but a publisher as well. She’s doing the hard, important work. Check her out!!
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