Melinda Thomsen : part five

What are you working on?

My forthcoming book Armature searches for the beauty in day-to-day living, but it also touches on my ancestry and family conflict, so my current writing projects go there. My ancestors on both sides of my family owned slaves, so my poems speak to my unease, confusion, and disgust toward their accepted superiority, and how this idea of “being better than others” got passed down through the generations. When I reviewed J. Chester Johnson’s book Damaged Heritage for Big City Lit, I realized that my family’s damaged heritage basically reflected white supremacy, which most likely led to mental illness, arguments, and unhappiness my nuclear family suffered.    

I discovered these ancestors while researching over 15 patriots that fought in the Revolutionary War, so the Daughters of the American Revolution could preserve their stories.   Writing from historical documents is rich for poetry, but it takes me a while to figure out how to enliven people from past centuries. I discovered a slave named Cesar, who was owned by my patriot ancestors Abijah and Enoch Comstock in Connecticut.  Books like Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Natasha Tretheway’s Monument, Descent by Lauren Russell, and The Anatomical Venus by Helen Ivory have given me examples of how to animate historical figures. I really don’t know how this collection will turn out, but my sense is that Cesar will be a guiding force on my father’s Connecticut side, and the slave owner, James Rollins, will anchor my mother’s Alabama side.

Melinda Thomsen : part four

Where does a poem begin?

My poems usually result from an image that haunts me.  Recently, I went outside and saw on the side of our house a blood colored stain that swept off to the north in a spotted trail.  Another time, my husband was using a chain saw to cut logs into firewood, and it freaked me out.  These glimpses I collect and either write about them shortly afterward or keep them in a notebook.  Once I start writing, I try to describe what happened in detail.  I basically overwrite the scene until I notice phrases that shake with energy.  This is the messy place where my poem really begins.  Sometimes I use a form to help find those places. Shakespearean sonnets come to me fairly easily, and if I have a mess of a draft, I try to see if containing it in a form helps. If it doesn’t, I break the form apart again.   

The poem begins when it surprises me.  It’s like the poem’s spirit starts speaking from its images and vocabulary. I love to find the “flow” like when reading poems such as Ada Limon’s “How to Triumph Like a Girl.” Her poems have an inevitable “flow,” which makes them so satisfying. When my poems begin, it feels like I am channeling what the poem wants to say.  Actually, it looks like the beginning of the poem is also where it starts careening towards its end.  

Melinda Thomsen : part three

Why is poetry important? 

Poetry is an art form that needs little to no materials. A pen and paper is about it, so it’s accessible to all income brackets.  It’s also a neat, portable art form. You rarely have to clean up after yourself or require a large place with a furnace to create your poems. All your materials inhabit your brain. Every time I teach a class, I tell the students that their stories are important. Everyone needs to tell their story, so others will listen.

Poetry is the way I tell my story, and how my soul speaks to the world. We live in a harsh world, and so we’re seeing an influx of diverse voices in contemporary poems, and it is about time. George Floyd’s murder definitely affected our poetic landscape, and Amanda Gorman’s poem at the Biden’s Presidential Inauguration gave a voice to those who have been ignored for so long.   

Getting an audience for poetry has always been difficult, but Ross White, the Executive Director of Bull City Press, pointed out at the North Carolina Writer’s Network Online 2021 Spring Conference, “if more people write poetry, we all rise together.” For myself, when I find new poets with vibrant voices like Taylor Byas, Tiana Clark, and Lukas Ray Hall, I am excited because they teach me ways to hone my own voice. The world needs each of us to make it a better place. We inhabit our planet for some reason, and poetry speaks that reason to the world.

Melinda Thomsen : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

Bill Matthews was my professor at City College in the late 1990s. I applied to City College because I loved his poetry. However, I found a brilliant teacher, too. His vocabulary and knowledge of literature blew me away.  He taught me that writing was not just throwing it up on the paper, but being well read was equally important. I had that creative spirit in my poetry, but without the analytical ability of a well-read mind to craft it, the poem was limited in its reach.  As my reading grew, I built a toolbox of resources I could use to connect more events, people, stories, images, and vocabulary within my poems. 

At our first class, Bill referenced at least twenty major works, which made me realize the extent of my literary ignorance. So, after that workshop, I set a goal to read fifty books a year.  My library card melted.  I read classic novels from Middlemarch to Anna Karenina and poets from John Donne and Phillis Wheatley to Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath. Any writer he mentioned in my classes, I checked out their books from the library.  

I not only read to expand my vocabulary but to discover poets who resonated with my way of writing and made me feel less alone in the world.  Poets like Bill Matthews, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and Richard Wilbur taught me how to accurately describe images and address the more difficult subject matter I wrote about.  

Melinda Thomsen : part one

Melinda Thomsen’s full-length poetry collection, Armature, was an Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2019 Lena Shull Book Award and forthcoming in 2021 from Hermit Feathers Press. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks, Naming Rights and Field Rations. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Rattle, New York Quarterly, Poetry East, Stone Coast Review, Tar River Poetry, The Comstock Review, and North Carolina Literary Review, among others. Other awards include 2019 Pushcart nomination from The Comstock Review, First place in 2019 Robert Golden Poetry Contest, and semi-finalist in the 2004 "Discovery" / The Nation poetry contest. She teaches at Pitt Community College and lives in Greenville, NC with her husband, Hunt, two cats, and one chicken. https://www.melindathomsen.com/

How did you first engage with poetry?  

In my late twenties, I worked as a fashion designer in New York City. I went into clothing design because I loved drawing and sewing, so I figured design would be a good career. Unfortunately, working for a fashion company was not as creative as I expected. Although my designs sold well, the owners stayed with the best selling designs season after season. They offered them in different colors and patterns until sales slowed down. As a result I spent most of my time in meetings with salespeople on what to keep in the line, checking the specs when the designs went into production, and confirming changes by fax (I know I’m dating myself here!) with our factories in Hong Kong and Macao.    

Because I needed to be more creative, I turned to writing. William Matthews says it all (except I wasn’t 17) in “Mingus at the Showplace:”  

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, 

and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature….

William Mathews, Time & Money, Houghton Mifflin Press, 1995.

I scribbled my first poems on pages in my Bible. They were not good, but they let me pour out the disappointment that had been building over the years. Poetry also gave me a voice that I’d never used before. When speaking, I couldn’t verbalize my opinions quickly, and so others ran over me during a conversation. My role became listener, but writing gave me time to craft my words, so when someone read what I wrote, they got a clearer idea of what I was trying to communicate. Without poetry, I would lose the ability to express myself, and I’d shrink back into the background.