From Lawyer to Poet with Lynne Thompson

Speaker 1: 0:05

Hi, I'm Jane Leder, host of Older Women and Friends. You know, when it comes right down to it, I find aging to be a complex affair Highs, lows and everything in between. But as I see it, the one constant is change, and the key is how we adjust, how we transition. Do we start a new career, write that book we've had rolling around in our heads for years, move to warmer climes to be near our grandchildren, continue teaching or researching or coaching other women, or do we just hang out, travel and have a good time? The guests on Older Women and Friends have many stories to tell, to share, about what they've been up to and what they've learned along the way. So turn up the volume and join me on Older Women and Friends.

Speaker 1: 1:14

For quite some time I thought about a series of episodes with older female artists as guests. So when a publicist contacted me about Los Angeles poet laureate Lynn Thompson, I jumped at the chance to learn more about her. I was intrigued by Lynn's personal story of being raised by Caribbean or Caribbean immigrants, of changing careers from lawyer to poet and of writing about women's joys despite all the negative forces against them. Lynn is bullish on poetry and how the genre gives her a voice to tell her own story and the stories of others. Her goal is to bring poetry to as many people as possible. Listeners, you're in for a treat, lynn. Welcome to Older Women and Friends.

Speaker 2: 2:09

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be with you this afternoon. Where did you grow up? I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I'm the youngest of five four boys and then my parents decided to get what they wanted, so they adopted me Best thing they ever did.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Good move, absolutely, so. That's interesting. So do you know any much about your ancestry, or is that not an issue for you?

Speaker 2: 2:39

It is an issue for me, and I was fortunate to meet both my birth mother and my birth grandparents. My grandmother could trace her roots to Madagascar, and that's very unusual in the African-American community, and I think it happened partially because the individual who came from Madagascar ultimately ended up in Canada, and I think telling his story and repeating it to subsequent generations was an easier thing perhaps than if he had been in the US.

Speaker 1: 3:12

Interesting, interesting. Well, even as a kid. And you had, what did you say? Four older brothers, correct, aha, aha. Well, that leads, of course, to what do you think you learned in that household during childhood, as the youngest and as the only girl?

Speaker 2: 3:31

I think I was very lucky in that household in that my parents who were relatively conservative, I would say, but they did not treat me any differently relative to education than my brothers and were always encouraging me to do anything and everything I wanted. Of course they didn't guess that one of those things would be a poet, but beyond that, they taught me to believe in myself, to go after what I wanted, and I can't think of a better lesson for a child than self-belief and encouragement in what is possible.

Speaker 1: 4:10

And was poetry a part of your life in any way when you were a kid?

Speaker 2: 4:17

growing up my dad was a closet poet, and I say closet because my mother was the practical one. My dad to me was more of the romantic and she said is there any money in it? And well, we all know the answer to that. And so she didn't see it as a very young age, until I went to law school and that kind of put the kibosh on it. But yes, I was raised in a household of readers and my dad in particular loved poetry.

Speaker 1: 4:54

Well, let's talk about that. Kibosh First of all, of course, you've mentioned I mentioned that you began your professional career as a lawyer. What was it about being a lawyer that attracted you?

Speaker 2: 5:11

I love the logic of it that if you just take, forget all the stuff that goes with the actual practice of law, but the law itself goes from A to B to C, you can see how it's built. Whether or not you agree with a particular law, you understand how it's constructed. And so I think that idea and the idea of justice what I naively believed was justice at a young age were very intriguing to me. I mean, I grew up in Perry Mason and the Defenders and you know justice always prevailed, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 5:49

So I think I was interested in the intellectual composition of the law, and was that something that you were able to sustain, or were you ultimately disappointed?

Speaker 2: 6:02

Well, once you become a litigator, you are a lot less romantic about the cases. They are not like what you see on television. They are not resolved in an hour and people are people, whether they are lawyers, judges or whatever. So you find those that are inspiring and you find those that are disappointing. But ultimately I'm glad that I practice law, that I have an understanding of how it works. It's kind of poetry adjacent in that it is about language, but in the law you're trying to convince and persuade and in poetry you're trying to illuminate and let the persuasion take place on the part of the listener or the reader on the part of the listener or the reader.

Speaker 1: 6:55

So at what point did you decide that you were going to go toward the romantic in you and head on over to poetry versus the law?

Speaker 2: 7:00

So I practiced for not quite 15 years and literally woke up one day and said the thing that's wrong with your life is you're not writing poetry. And I thought, hmm, that's an interesting thing to spring into my head. And I knew that if I wanted, or I believed that if I wanted to do that, I needed to be in a workspace that was less stressful than being a litigator, than being a litigator. So I left the law firm where I was working and took a job at UCLA as the director of their employee and labor relations office. It wasn't that it wasn't stressful, but it wasn't stressful in the same way, and I found myself able to carve out time to write, time, to read time, to go to every poetry reading I possibly could, et cetera, to try to figure out what is this world that I think I want to be part of. And for me, fortunately, it worked out.

Speaker 1: 7:59

Well, you mentioned something about not the way to earn a gainful living, or certainly a pile of money, and yet now I'm hearing that you've been how you had to juggle. It was a juggling act, and so I wonder if you can let our listeners know how you came to some kind of solution with all of that, particularly for women who are maybe thinking about changing professions, perhaps dealing with elderly, older parents and then juggling work and then having a creative foundation. How do you do that?

Speaker 2: 8:41

I'm not going to sugarcoat it and say that it's easy. Certainly my job, and as I was getting more deeply into it, my mother was aging, so there were caring responsibilities involved there. What I did find, however, is and I don't mean this unkindly and I do include myself we waste a lot of time In a 24-hour period. We waste a lot of time, and what I taught myself to do was to try to take advantage of every minute that I could, even if it was just 10 minutes, to write down three lines, knowing I'll come back to it later. I made ample use of my car phone, for example, I had a long drive between my home and the UCLA campus and I would literally call myself with ideas with oh, change this line. So when I say wasting time, the corollary to that is figuring out those moments that can be useful to you if you really think about what you're trying to accomplish. This probably doesn't work for a visual artist. You can't paint in the shower, probably Every free moment that you have. I mean, I always had pencil and paper at the ready. I always had a tape recorder at the ready, and I think there are ways, if you are patient, to work around the demands of your life, and if that means you only write 15 minutes a day or you only paint 15 minutes a day or you only compose, yes, it's going to take longer to get where you want to go, but you will get there. I really believe in that.

Speaker 2: 10:22

One of my favorite poets, lucille Clifton, had, I think, five or six children, and if you read Lucille, most of her poems not all, but the vast majority of them are very short. When I say short, I'm saying 10, 11, 12 lines perhaps on average. And she said she did that because when the children were small and she had to care for them, she would memorize her poems until she put them all down at night and then she could sit down and write what she remembered. Wow, I mean, what an inspiration, right? So there are ways to accomplish it and you just have to accept it may not be the best way, the fastest way, but you will get where you want to go. If you think about I've got this 20-minute slot, this is how I'm going to use it. It's sacred, it's mine, that's it.

Speaker 1: 11:15

Don't bother me, don't interrupt me, this is mine, having a sacred time in a spot, I think, at least in my life. I can certainly say that that's essential, absolutely essential. Well, it's interesting because I read that you always wanted to make something, but that you are not or were not, or don't describe yourself as a visual person, a visual artist. I just, you know, to A come to that recognition, which is you know what? I really am not able to draw that little cat over there. It's just, it's not going to happen. Where do you think, in addition to the influence of your father reading to you often as a young child, where does this love for words come from?

Speaker 2: 12:09

I think I am no different than many writers who will tell you we read avidly and we read broadly. So I will. I remember being at my brother's house one day and he had this book about different flowers and plants and I was just made this was long before the phones and all of that I was just making a list. He said why are you doing that? And I said one day I'll. I was just making a list. He said why are you doing that? And I said one day I'll use one of these in a poem. And he just looked at me like, okay, lynn, we'll just indulge you, right.

Speaker 2: 12:44

But we poets are infamous for having books of weird things, of unusual things. Because we like words, we like their etymology, we like how they sound, we like how they can. You know, we like homonyms and synonyms. We're just crazy for words. And I think I just got that through being a reader from a very young age and feeling that the world was so interesting. There were so many things I would never know, but I would make an effort to try to know them Fair enough.

Speaker 1: 13:11

Well, let's have you, if you don't mind, read one of the poems from your new collection.

Speaker 2: 13:18

I'm happy to tell you my new collection is Blue on a Blue Palette. It was just published this past April from Boa Editions in New York, so I'm thrilled from Boa Editions in New York.

Speaker 1: 13:33

So I'm thrilled, congratulations. So I would love it if you could read a poem. It's called A Woman's Body Aging Still Loves Itself.

Speaker 2: 13:38

Absolutely. A woman's body, aging, still loves itself, kisses the air that surrounds it, loves the lips in full pout that surrounds it. Loves the lips in full pout, famous birthplace of all kisses, the belly, brown round, kisses its inverted button and the shoulders. Oh, how I kiss my shoulders, my nose, kissing lilies in a purpley night sky, my neck, long as forever, fit for 20,000 kisses, 20,000 kisses for each cocoa breast and nipple, for the lower arms that encircle each other. Then kiss, kiss, even the ears, french kissing to tunes of Django and Debussy, the upper arms wishing to kiss their tender underarms, thread of both hands kissing the lifeline and my cheeks colored bronze with kisses, lashes that kiss my eyes that kiss everything. They see my forehead, a map of the places where kisses live long. Long live my kinky hair braided with kiss after kiss after kiss.

Speaker 1: 14:51

Lovely, Thank you. So we were talking a little bit before this and I mentioned this poem and so I had written in my notes, just so. You know, many older women, including me, struggle to accept our bodies as we age. So my question to you is going to be was this poem a personal pep talk or rallying cry of sorts for other women?

Speaker 2: 15:22

Actually, it was a little bit of both. It started off as you said. Many of us struggle with the way our bodies change as we age. It's a natural part of life. We will make ourselves miserable if we don't accept it. So I wanted to say listen, lynn, you've got this body, you should love it. People would kill who are in more dire straits, maybe physically, with various challenges, to have the body you have. You've got your legs, your arms, your eyes work, your ears work, everything's working. You should love this body. So it started there. But then I realized I wasn't alone in this feeling and really wanted to say to every woman out there big, small, short, dark, long hair, short hair, whatever, love your body. It is serving you. It is the one thing you absolutely have, although people are challenging that these days, but it is yours and you should embrace it.

Speaker 1: 16:20

Yeah, I'm going to think I'll put this poem up on my refrigerator or someplace where I can read it on a daily basis. Well, talking about aging and women, are those two themes that are important to you that you continue to explore on a regular basis?

Speaker 2: 16:40

The aging to some degree, but the womanhood or woman-ness to a much greater degree, and that was the way that this book came about. Was someone suggested to me, while I was serving as poet laureate and not writing as much as I would have liked, that maybe you should started looking at the poems that I had, I realized that so many of them dealt with womanhood, our histories, our anger, our happiness, our sexuality, our joys, our frustrations, our confusion, our losses, and so when I started to realize that that was what was happening with these poems, I said, oh okay, those will fit into a book. And the color blue interestingly ran throughout a lot of these poems as well. So that's how Blue on a Blue Palette came about.

Speaker 1: 17:40

And why do you think blue was running through through you, through? The Blue was running through?

Speaker 2: 17:47

through you, through the. It's interesting because I would have told you a year ago that blue was not my favorite color and it really isn't I like yellow and lavender but for some reason it just kept showing up.

Speaker 1: 18:12

And I decided to let the muse take me wherever she wanted to take me. Well, let's talk about the muse and the frustration or disappointment that artists of all stripes experience, I am certain, when the muse does not land on their shoulders. What do you do when the ideas are just not there? Or is that never an issue that you have to face? Ideas are just not there, or is that?

Speaker 2: 18:27

never an issue that you have to face. It's an issue, but I have decided to affirmatively not allow it to be an issue and to broaden my definition of being a writer to include reading revision. Sometimes I will literally hand copy a poem that I really like I find in the New Yorker or somewhere else, just to see how it feels in actually writing it out. Poetry myself, but I'm still engaged with poetry and that somewhere along the line that will contribute to my own writing.

Speaker 1: 19:16

That's my theory and I'm sticking to it. Okay, All right, I like it. It's no secret that poetry is not read by a lot of people on a daily basis, Although I did listen to an interview with you where you were talking about being surrounded. We're all surrounded by poetry. Maybe it's in a happy birthday card, you know, or a get well, something or other that we always, or even in jingles in commercials. You know that is poetry.

Speaker 2: 19:47

Absolutely. Anytime you're listening to language, there is an opportunity for poetry to flow. And if you listen to children, they're always making up little rhymes and playing with language all the time and we choose not to call oh, that's just children. Well, yes, but listen to them, really listen to them. They're engaging in that all the time. When I told my family I said I think I'll be a poet now, and my mother said, oh, good grief. And one of my brothers said don't you have a novel in you? And I said yeah, no, I don't think so. 20, 30, 40 lines, I'm good. And I said he said well, nobody reads poetry. And I said you know why that's not true. I know that's not true and you know it's not true Because if someone has a birthday, a baby gets married, graduates, there's some traumatic event like January 6th. Who do they look to? They look to the poets, they don't look to the novelist. January 6th, who do they look to? They look to the poets, they don't look to the novelists, they look to the poets.

Speaker 1: 20:59

For a succinct way to try to think about what is being experienced. So I wish poetry was more read, but but the objective or the result whatever of poetry? It seems to me that, given what's going on in our world today, we need poets more than ever. How do we encourage that?

Speaker 2: 21:21

I think that we are seeing we are living in somewhat of a golden age of poetry. It's being taught at all levels of schooling, particularly at the collegiate and post-collegiate level, and I think I would not have described myself, for example, as a political poet five years ago, but it's gotten to the point point you must speak on issues of book banning, on Supreme Court decisions, on what is happening to our climate, what is happening to the animals on the planet. You just have to speak to those issues. I think, whatever your art is I think dancers are addressing it, musicians are addressing just the world we live in, and it's always been a troubled world.

Speaker 2: 22:10

It's not like it just happened five minutes ago, but the more you write and the more I personally have become more confident in my writing. Yes, I can write about you know, a lovely little meadow, and I will. But that doesn't mean that I won't write about the fact that I can personally see in my lifetime which a blip on the big radar screen, how the climate has changed. I think that poets feel that very strongly right now. There are wars all over the planet. There's just no way to avoid addressing what we are living through.

Speaker 1: 22:49

Well, that's what I was going to ask you. Is that at a certain point? And yet doesn't that lead to extreme frustration, anger, whatever other negative emotions we can label? In other words, if you are out there on the front line and you are using words to try to express and to try to speak truth to power and bring people and help them understand about climate and about racism and about ageism, and here we go, and the list goes on and on ageism.

Speaker 2: 23:31

And here we go and the list goes on and on. Doesn't that get a bit frustrating after a while? It is frustrating, but I'm not sure we write thinking that some president, prime minister, chancellor, duke, duchess, king, whatever, will necessarily take it as a call to arms or a call for change or a call for kindness. But it does give voice to that for someone who's thinking there's never going to be change, there's never going to be kindness. And they pick up and I have seen this happen in my life and in my fellow writers they pick up a book and it does change that one person and if it changes that one person, that one person can change two other people. So you just hope that the ripple effect of what you have given voice to, your concern, what you love, what you love a little less, all of that that if it moves one person, it's doing its job because that person so affected is going to move another person. And it depends on the stage.

Speaker 2: 24:40

I think when Amanda Gorman read at President Biden's inaugural, that moved a lot of people on the planet. You can be it If you can see it. You can be it, paraphrasing her very poorly, I'm sure, because I don't have her poem in front of me, but it did resonate, and so for the people that were able to hear it, and in that case millions of people, it made a difference, millions of people.

Speaker 1: 25:10

It made a difference. You speak so passionately about poetry and about your work, and I have been talking with guests over some time now that have discussed the importance of purpose, the importance of being creative, either with a big C, as in a poet, or in a little c I don't know someone using their cell phone to take photos of their expanding garden and can you talk a little bit about what purpose and passion mean for you? You know?

Speaker 2: 25:44

when I started writing, I had a doctor who was also a good friend of a family member of mine. And when my first book came out and I went to see him for a regular visit and he looked at me and he said Lynn, he said I'm not going to worry about you as you age into your life, he said, because I can see the passion on your face and that's what's going to keep you alive and engaged. And so I think it is critical for people, because at some point you may love your job, but maybe you're not going to work at that job forever. The job goes away, unwanted on your part.

Speaker 2: 26:24

You're going to say what else is there. You're going to say what else is there, and if the what else is planting tomatoes in your garden and making sure they grow just right and enough sunlight, and I'm, you know all of the time you spend from the negative into the positive. I think that bodes well for any human on the planet, no-transcript, and it will fill you. And if it's just reading, I'm going to read a new book every other day. Commit to that and do it, and I think it just gives you a focus and a purpose that, if you don't have it. Life is tough, it's tough. All the tough stuff's going to happen. Anyway, find some little bright bulb that helps you escape it for just a moment.

Speaker 1: 27:59

Very wise words. I wondered if you could give us your web address and any information about your other books and where people can find them.

Speaker 2: 28:12

Absolutely Well, I'm going to start with Blue on a Blue Palette, because if I didn't, my publicist and my publisher would put the kibosh on me. The book can be found at amazoncom, amazoncom, bookshoporg or at the publisher boa B-O-A editions all one word com. My other books. My first book was Beg no Pardon by Perugia Press, also available on Amazon Not sure about bookshop, but also available at Perugia Press. My second book, start with a Small Guitar, available from what Books Press, based here in Los Angeles where I am. And the third book was Fretwork from Marsh Hawk Press, available from the press and amazoncom.

Speaker 1: 29:04

Oh boy, that's a mouthful. That's a mouthful Her brain is.

Speaker 2: 29:07

You know, I was almost going to say it's a good thing I don't have 10 books, but I don't really mean that. And then I have a website, lynnthompsonus. It has a contact page on it and I'm always trying to respond. I do respond when people reach out to me on that contact page.

Speaker 1: 29:24

And it is so important and it's so good to get that kind of personal feedback. This has been lovely. I've really enjoyed meeting you. You are passionate and exciting and intelligent and creative. You're all the things that we, as older women, strive to be. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: 29:47

And thank you so much, to you and to your audience, for listening.

Speaker 1: 29:55

Thank you for joining me on this episode of Older Women and Friends. And, speaking of friends, please tell yours about this podcast and if you have any suggestions for future episodes or guests or anything else you'd like to share, go to speakpipecom. That's S-P-E-A-K-P-I-P-E dot com. Forward slash older women and friends. You can send me an audio message or respond to one of mine, because it is your feedback that drives this podcast Until next time.