Tommye Blount : part five

How does a poem begin?

This is one of the questions that always makes me feel like a bad poet, because I don’t have one set way of approaching poems. There are some poems that arrive to me quite fast like “My God, Lick Him Clean” from my book Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books). Then again, that might not be the whole picture.

The painting that sent me to the poem, “Portrait of Christopher D. Fisher, Fourth Reich Skinhead, 1995” by Peter Williams, had been in my head for years. It’s on view in Detroit of Institute of Arts (DIA). Before The Pandemic, I was a frequent visitor to the DIA, so the painting was always a stop on my perusal through the galleries. Nightmarishly grotesque yet somewhat whimsical, the painting challenged me and terrified me.

The DIA approached me about participating in a poetry series called “Poetry is Art / Art is Poetry.” They asked me, and a few other poets from Detroit, to pick a painting from the African American gallery, and write a poem in conversation with that painting. Of course, I knew it would be Williams’ painting. The actual writing of the poem took three months, but, unbeknownst to me, I had been writing it in my head over the years, each time I visited the painting.

With all of that said, I do think I write poems in my head, but don’t realize that I am doing that work. When I am pressured into writing a poem, a deadline or something like that, is when the thing actually comes out. Then there are some poems that, at the time of creation, I think of as false beginnings. I have abandoned many of those only to come back years later and go, “Oh, I know what you were after now, Tommye.” So I guess both are true for me in how poems begin: sometimes it requires pressure to get it from my head to the page; and other poems require a few years for me to catch up to their initial impulse.

Tommye Blount : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Music—pacing of syntax, patterning of sound, and metrical prosody—is at the service of the speakers in my poems. In other words, music isn’t just a perfunctory or happenstance occurrence, but it is there to help, or work against, a speaker navigating a specific moment or event or thought, which I think is one of the responsibilities of lyric poetry. When a poem fails to have a handle of its music, it can read as false or flat. An often-used example of music and speaker working in concert to affect tone is Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” with its constant volley of baby coos (all of those freaking o’s) over grotesque and dark imaginings of a father. I’ve heard people giggle when they read the poem aloud, but when one pays attention to the images, the effect is unsettling.

On the other hand, because I am a poet who believes in breaking rules, if a poem intentionally lacks music, but amps up other qualities, the result can be just as effective. So, yes, music or the intentional absence of music are very important considerations when I am writing.

Tommye Blount : part three

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Vievee Francis is always my first answer to this question. A brilliant poet, and also a dear friend, who was my first poetry teacher. Through her example, the mysticism that often gets assigned to poetry was quickly dismantled. Francis taught me that poetry is work, not magic. It demands the same attention as building car engines on a Detroit assembly line—which I have done. This is not to say that there is no play involved, play is so instrumental to my process, but Francis taught that I have to chaperone that play as well.

Carl Phillips’ work was also pivotal to how I came to understand writing poems. Rock Harbor was my introduction to Phillips. Poetry, both its consumption and creation, demand patience—this is true of Carl’s work. There was such an organic connection between the lines of desire and the lines of syntax that just thrilled me to track and parse out in Rock Harbor. Each time he has a new book out, I gobble it up immediately. Before Carl Phillips, I never realized that (absolutely!) poets still work in sentences. Even when the best poets are manipulating traditional sentence constructions—I am thinking of my dear friend and poet francine j. harris now—there is still an awareness of the sentence’s power.

Then, of course, there are Cornelius Eady, Toi Derricotte, and Cave Canem, where I was lucky enough to workshop with so many: Patricia Smith, Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips, Erica Hunt, Colleen J. McElroy, Claudia Rankine, Cyrus Cassells, and Ed Roberson. Cave Canem instilled in me the audacity to demand more of my writing, while at the same time affirming that I have the know-how to be capacious and hold space in the larger poetic landscape—one beyond my hometown of Detroit.

Finally, where would I be without my mentors, and friends, who taught me more than poetry at Warren Wilson College: Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Martha Rhodes, A. Van Jordan, and C. Dale Young? Among many lessons under their tutelage, I learned (in actual practice) that my writing life would always be one in which the two (my writing and my life) will forever be inseparable. One territory feeds the other and back again.

Tommye Blount : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Poetry is the queerest of all the artistic letters—at least more so than fiction or essay. On a formal level, poetry can assume whatever shape it deems vital to its intent: prose chunk, a list, reportage, documentary, instruction, spell—the possibilities are only limited to the practitioner’s imagination. This isn’t to say that fiction doesn’t do this kind of shapeshifting too. To be sure, one only needs to see: the shifts into lyric and verse in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved; Tommy Orange’s There There—with its percussive anaphora in the chapter on the drummer-character Thomas Frank or the essay-like prose of the “Prologue” and “Interlude” chapters; the play that one suddenly finds themselves in the middle of in Christopher Castellani’s Leading Men. No, my point is: where this shapeshifting is a necessity to the fabric of poetry, it isn’t necessary to how we experience fiction—although it is exhilarating when it happens there.

I’m also thinking about how some of my favorite poems handle words as objects. These are word-objects that have varying weight and textures, so that when they hit against each other, they create sound and music and other physical shapes. It’s the poet, for example, who notices the noun “duplicate” is a copy of the verb “duplicate”; or the way “parallel” contains parallel lines; or how “th” in the word “teeth” forces one’s tongue to be slightly bitten by their teeth. Unlike other artistic letters, the presence of word-objects is as vital to a poem’s success as any meaning or news that may be found on an informational level. At its best, poetry has the capability to engage the entire body, in a tangible way, when it is read.

Tommye Blount : part one

A Cave Canem alum, Tommye Blount is the author of Fantasia for the Man in Blue (Four Way Books, 2020) and What Are We Not For (Bull City Press, 2016). A graduate from Warren Wilson College, he has been the recipient of a fellowship from Kresge Arts in Detroit and the John Atherton scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work has been featured in Magma, New England Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Ecotone, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye now lives in Novi, Michigan.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

“Finished” is a word I try not to use when it comes to revising drafts. I’m hardly the first poet to say this—I remember Cornelius Eady at a Cave Canem retreat speaking of poems as attempts—but poems are abandoned and never finished. At least that is the visceral sensation I am after when I am in the act of drafting, because I am suspicious of my body’s circuitry and its lust for neat closure. A mentor once told me, “Have you ever noticed how your poems sort of snap close at the end? It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to pay attention to.” Uneasiness is the final sensation I look for when drafting. A better word is discomfort. Discomfort as nervy as the top of a head coming off—that old nutshell from Dickinson. This is how I know that I have arrived at a place I was never expecting to find. A momentary respite? Yes, because there is always the next poem in which I can attempt, but splendidly fail at, getting to some sense of comfort—read finality. A continuum that, I hope, will never meet its end until I die.