The
Song and its Shadow: Lynne
Thompson’s Deep and Dazzling Blues
Blue
on a Blue Palette by Lynne Thompson BOA Editions (Rochester, New York), 2024 $18.00, Paper; 122 pages
“I am best when I am singing,”
writes Lynne Thompson in her fourth poetry collection, “Blue on a Blue Palette.”
Indeed. Her paean to blues sung through the lives of women is that rare dazzler
of a book that asks to be read over and over again; so alive on the page, this
book’s prismatic reach keeps revealing new facets of singing and meaning and
challenging.
There
is no easy answer to the question “what is a Lynne Thompson poem.” Rather, the
answer is that it never settles, never becomes comfortable. The experimental
reaches of this collection are vast—in abecadarians, centos, variations, drafts,
echoes, self-portraits, villanelles, odes, songs, dirges, dreams, sonnets both
formal and experimental, and of course, blues. In strongly-voiced, quick-turning
poems, she keeps letting the blues into bible verse, nursery rhyme, sonata,
showing us “’there’s a basic rhythm to everything.”
Opening with a line from
Cornelius Eady, “some folks will tell you the blues is a woman,” the blues
certainly is , in Thompson’s hands. Knowing deeply that the blues is never born
out of easy times, song holds and exposes and radiates the injustice,
resistance, action, survival, and histories of women. Her second poem, “A
Confluence of Women,” presents a collective term for the speakers of this book,
gathering women to begin giving voice to the full-throttle hum of their
resistance, hell-bent as we are, their biting humor, “we /
jezebels-on-the-loose,” and their vigor, “a fret of fierce sisters who’ve been /
nearly always misunderstood.” This poem sets in motion the ferocity that keeps
women blazing forward in spite of, as she shows us, nearly everything, through
the many stages of their lives.
The subsequent poem is simply called “Voice” and
continues that need to claim and hear women speak. First, the presumed negation:
Say
woman. You will slide
through a transom. Say
want or yellow or terror. No one hears. Or say nothing. That
says it.
Say yes and then try
to stop saying it.
Then, closing with “Say history. Claim. Say wild.” Fearlessly, this book does
claim the worth and legitimacy and strength and complexity of women’s lives
across the generations (“Like my mother and her grandmother / before her, we
women soar”). Thompson’s blues-on-blue suggests this overlay, and seems a
statement on lineage, on the female canon, revealing the way women are always
carrying forth the strata of their female ancestors even when those connections
have been disrupted through violence or other means.
“I can tell you this about the
bee: the colony is nothing without her.” The future is a long time ago, she
writes, reaching back across rifts to expose them, amidst tracing origins in “A
Birth Mother Wears a Costume Her Daughter Will Never Fit Into,” “A Rage on
Berbice, 1763,” and “Separate/Separate,” among others. In “Voyage,” she writes:
It’s the surprise
whoop of myself, sounding like the homeland I’ve always never
known;
like a leaf cut from its stalk; a dream
of flying,
then drowning, and long affliction.
It’s hard to say where
Thompson is strongest because she is truly firing on all cylinders in this
collection. At 122 pages, each page pulses and sings its essential song. But
Thompson certainly uses her mighty voice and totality of witness, addressing the
cultural violence toward people of color in America, pushing back with “liberty
and justice for no one.”
In “Ode to Bones” she writes about ‘the bones of /
ancestors stolen from Africa’, and in her “Dirge for Murdered Black Girls” and
“Boketto,” she mourns and fights for the lives of Breonna Taylor—“Our beloveds.
You, every you— / (how ruined the lovely)”—and Sandra Bland: “I won’t stop even
if a cop appears from Perdition in a place he has no reason to be.”
Thompson holds both the horrors of violence and blazing resilience in “Our
Ancestors, Enslaved Once, Said Juneteenth Would Never Be,” which is framed
around lines from the national anthem. In the masterful “Once, we were rivers,”
she writes in response to W.E.B. Du Bois’s question, “Would America have been
America without her Negro people,” first imagining an America bereft of its
African citizens, then bringing them in: “Come first the black women and their
people— // Come then the black men running running”—and closing with an
incantatory roll-call, a drumbeat of names and swells of resilience: “There will
never be a last of us—” and “We come / We come like rivers.”
As past Poet Laureate of Los
Angeles, Thompson brings the sprawl and parch and lost seasons of Southern
California to life in poems that take us through the Brea tar pits, Watts,
Shasta, the retablo of San Juan Capistrano, and all the freeways tangled through
smog and drought and non-native palms. Then she stretches across the country,
stopping in Montana, the Midwest, and North Carolina, andin towns that have been
the site of brutal murders in her searing “Torch to Shogun” (dedicated to
Ferguson, Missouri).
Blue on a Blues Palette is an American
triumphin poetry. Its formal invention, capacious voice, and singing; its
interrogation, hard-won praise, its every-shade-of-blue blues; its “juju power
in a terrible century” and its unflagging rebellion—all give so fervently this
necessary and brilliant work from one of our best contemporary poets. “There’s a
basic rhythm to everything” Thompson has shown us, and this book is thankful
proof of that, with the vital music of its rebellion.
I want to close on rebellion.
I want to close on blue. Here is “The Blue Haze” in its entirety:
"We’re like those moonstruck
gypsy-girls who gave Apollo a one-eye, who coax canonical intrigue. We are a
slippery crew—blue in our gyre, blue-black like maggots and never sexless. We
invent a contagion when we steam, when we revenge. Jesus, what an irony!—we
women most holy when wet, we sister-girls who sprinkle suspicion onto a
meadow—phoebe babies lost to our mothers, quislings with no country. We won’t
mark time in a vestibule. We can’t wait to un-tame jive. We violet. We violet
and violet."
