Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Colors of Life - Lynne Thompson
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Colors of Life - Lynne Thompson
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.
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
Reprinted by permission – The Night Heron Barks, October 2020
View all episodes
By Sonia Iris Lozada
5
55 ratings
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.
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
Reprinted by permission – The Night Heron Barks, October 2020