This week on Poetic Resurrection we welcome Los Angeles Poet Laureate Lynne Thompson. We discuss her poem Invention, her experiences of being an adoptee. We laugh about rejection letters and go into detail about her journey in becoming the poet laureate.
Lynne Thompson is Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. She is the author of Start With a Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, and Fretwork, winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. Thompson’s work has been published in Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry 2020, among others. She sits on the Boards of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books and chairs the Board of Trustees at her alma mater, Scripps College.
Available wherever podcasts are available and the following:
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https://poeticresurrection.podbean.com/e/colors-of-life-lynne-thompson/
Her website is: https://www.lynnethompson.us/
Invention
If he could have, he would have
whispered my name like an old wish—
would have admitted
I am your father
I am a rage of teeth
I am absent but no marathon of deletions I am
your dancing foot’s “Why Ya Wanna Make Me Blue”
the heat from a hastiness of cooks
I am the distraction that is every father
(Maybe one day I’ll find him among
a rascal of boys — neither a man
nor a lad — but this day isn’t that day—)
If he can, he should reach out to me — say my name like an old wish:
admit he acted like a knot of toads
a shell of electrons
a breakdown in his woman’s plans He should say
he can never tell me why or why or why not
Just that he was never a hum of hymns knows he
was never relevant in any of my lunar years was
a smokescreen & all-ways a plague of questions
Printed by permission – The Night Heron Barks, October 2020