Lynne Thompson : part one

Lynne Thompson is the Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. She’s the author of three collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, Start With a Small Guitar, and Fretwork. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, and Best American Poetry 2020. She sits on the Boards of Cave Canem and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I’ve come to believe that some poems are never truly finished and the good news about that is the poet’s right to make changes to a poem that seem appropriate even years after it was written or even after it’s been published. This has happened for me more than once and I suspect it will happen again. For example, a poem that I published in my first book was not the version I was happiest with; as a result, I republished it in edited form in my second book!