When Lynne Thompson received word in 2021 that she had been named poet laureate of Los Angeles, she wondered if the email was some elaborate phishing scheme. Once reality sank in, her skepticism turned to worry: How might she best serve when Angelenos couldn’t gather in person to celebrate owing to strict pandemic protocols? Thompson knew it would take creative reimagining to find ways to reach audiences and connect a city famous for its stark contrasts, complexity, and sprawl. The moment led her to be both proactive and reflective, and even allowed her time to refine some existing work. Now she has a new collection, Blue on a Blue Palette, a book that draws inspiration from her native city, women’s histories, and racial reckonings, stitched together by a sturdy throughline of persistence.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The poems in Blue on a Blue Palette vibrate. Some feel like edges of dreams; others tip into present-day traumas. How long have you been chipping away at these?
As poet laureate, I was not writing to the same degree, but I had all these poems. A good friend, David St. John, said, “Lynne, if you have poems, you really need to be thinking about putting a collection together.”
There wasn’t a grand idea. So many of the poems were about the joys, the rage, the frustration around the history of women. I thought something was there. Looking through, I realized there were a lot of references to the color blue and the blues. I thought if I could find ways to insert the color in poems without being overly obvious, that could be a throughline as well.
You do enter “blue” through various doorways, but you also experiment with the page itself.
I invented—or I believe I invented—a form based on the combination of the cento and the villanelle called the centenelle. I wanted to play with the metaphor that women present themselves in so many ways—as mothers, teachers, doctors, politicians, and sometimes all at once. I wanted to get all that in, and the experimentation was part of that.
You were named poet laureate as the city—and world—were in lockdown. What was your experience?
Thank goodness for the miracle that is Zoom, because I did almost everything in 2021 that way. Going into schools, reading in libraries, reading for other organizations. Also: I can’t do any interview without a shout-out to the Los Angeles Public Library system. They’re fantastic. They allowed me to tape a mini-podcast, Poems on Air. Every week, I read a poem, often by a local poet—but not exclusively.
The second year, things opened up more. I was able to go to the libraries and to organizations. The thing I enjoyed the most was when, in August of the second year, I held what we called “A Day of Poetry in Los Angeles,” which I cohosted with the inaugural poet laureate of Anaheim, Grant Hier. We had about 125 poets in the library rotunda and got a fabulous picture. About 60 poets read. They were so happy to be back in community. It was a joyous occasion. It really was the highlight of my term.
Did you convene with former laureates to learn about their strategies?
At one point, Luis J. Rodriguez reached out: “Lynne, if you need anything…” He’s always so supportive, as were other laureates across the country. We were all going through the same thing. So it wasn’t “Poor Lynne, having to do this during a pandemic.” It was all of us. They were so kind and so helpful: “What are you doing about this? How are you doing about that?”
In the poem “The Ways of Remembering Women,” you mention Elizabeth Short—the Black Dahlia—and Betty Nuñez, witness in the Sleepy Lagoon trial in the 1940s, and how they became eclipsed by the news stories that enveloped them. What drew you to these women?
Having been raised in the Leimert Park area, I remember my mom saying that “there wasn’t anything over there”—where they found Elizabeth Short—that it was “just an open field.” The name “the Black Dahlia” becomes representative of this horror, dehumanizing her, minimizing her. I’m trying to look past that. We have all seen movies and read novels, but this was a real living, breathing person who ended up in this hideous tableau. And Betty Nuñez is even less known. We know why that is. I don’t need to spell it out; just look at her surname. Who are these flesh-and-blood women? I really consider this part of what I’m trying to do with this book—that until we tell our stories, from our point of reference, they won’t get told.
Let’s talk about landscapes and nature, in particular your poem “Red Jasper.” When you are writing about Los Angeles and place, what do you seek to pin to the page?
My friend Patricia Smith said, “Listen! Everything you want to write about, every poet you know wants to write about, so you’ve got to figure out some different way to get into this subject.” So that incident at the end of the poem, on the freeway…I don’t remember ever seeing a hunter’s moon before, but coming down the 5 and then that curve north on the 110, literally everybody stopped. This moon was ginormous. You could see people saying, “What the hell is this?” I started thinking about this drive we all take. We don’t think about it. But here in this moment, we do. So, frequently I find something and figure I can get at some history and add something sensory, to make people think about L.A. in a slightly different way.
You see poems everywhere?
Everywhere. Every conversation. Every movie. Everything I see happening around me. I had to kind of train myself to do that. When I started writing creatively, I was still practicing law and working at UCLA, so I had to maximize every opportunity to look for material for poems. I just try to observe, to see where those ideas might come from.
I’m curious about forms and shapes that pull you in as a poet. Do you find there is a style you find yourself gravitating toward?
I did not get an MFA. I’d gone to law school. I was so done. I expected I would have to educate myself. Well, not myself. There’ve been many, many people who have helped me. But it wasn’t a formal education in terms of an academic program. So I started out saying, “I am not going to write in form. I don’t have to do that.” The truth was I was scared of form. And again, Patricia said, “Well, if you don’t know about it, read about it.”
After a while, I began to get interested in people: Terrance Hayes, who works in what we are now calling the American sonnet, and Diane Seuss and Gerald Stern, who had done it years before. All of this is different from the Petrarchan and Elizabethan sonnet. As I was studying, I became interested in how form could be modified or changed, or recognized as something new. For example, even though it’s not a cento per se, the poem “Assemblage” is really my way of honoring the artist Betye Saar, a woman who is creating every day. The poem, by using the titles of her artworks, writes an accessible biography. So really, I’m always looking for opportunities.
Who do you go to, on the page, for sustenance? For inspiration? For wisdom?
I go to Jane Hirshfield when I want to be Zen and mellow, Terrance to see his wheels turning, Patricia as a reminder of what is possible. David Baker takes me into other worlds. And I don’t want to leave out Lucille Clifton, who is at the top of the food chain in making amazing points with such brevity.
And, of course, Peter J. Harris…
His perspective on joy is something we really need now. Radical joy. When he was running the workshop at the World Stage in Leimert Park, I remember a sign on the podium—a bull with a line through it. Basically: No bullshit. That’s very emblematic of Peter. He’s kind. But he’s not going to be anything but genuine.
He and I were doing a reading, and he read a poem that was a praise song. Listening, I thought, “How come I haven’t written a praise song?” What were the things I was grateful for? Life is short, and we need to sing its praises; that’s straight from Peter. It’s the last poem in the book.
Speaking of gratitude: Post-lockdown, what do you find yourself musing about or celebrating more than before?
What I learned is that I really love my town. Early on, I got into my car and just drove. Downtown, at Third and Hill, I stopped and got out and stood in the middle of the street because nobody was there. Nobody! I thought, “This is so dystopian!” It made me think of Octavia Butler. But it also made me realize: OK, yes, our world is completely screwed up. But really, what’s the point of all of this? The bustling of life that fills our ordinary days. This human community. We’re still trying to figure it out. As a writer, I’m invested. I still want to know how the story turns out.•
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
