LINE LEVEL #10
Welcome to LINE LEVEL: Craft Lessons from Poets of Color, a monthly column in which writer, editor, and educator Joanna Acevedo zooms in on an element of craft from the work of BIPOC poets. LINE LEVEL unfolds in three parts: an excerpt of a poem, followed by a contributor’s note, followed by Acevedo’s own exploration into the poet’s world of language. Guided by a curiosity that yields learning, we are invited to consider historical context, stylistic influences, and more, all the way down to the level of the line. This month, Acevedo discusses “Song for Africa Leonard Cohen Never Knew He Started,” from Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024) by Lynne Thompson.
Song for Africa Leonard Cohen Never Knew He Started
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long—
long as the river Mananara
long as the miles between the Malagasy
and the bondsmen of Kentucky
long as memory long as the concussions of kidnap
long as every equation plotting the distance between
earth and its backlash between sun and the bursting
of hyacinth, daffodil, mustard seed,
seed most fruitless, carried across the sea, perhaps from Benin
once misprized as French Dahomey and
before that when the land was confused
by the dynasty of the Edo—its people most majestic
most black and black and black and the people are movement
—see how they excite here and here—
secrets in our gardens, stunning among the periwinkle, creeping
myrtle, confederate jasmine, floradora in spring and in summer
when they are most Stephanotis floribunda, curling around
and over and under and
have you ever seen such movement—long as the river Mananara,
long as the miles between us and the Malagasy?
O bougarabou, dance me oh so tenderly and dance me very long
Contributor’s Note // Lynne Thompson
“Song for Africa Leonard Cohen Never Knew He Started” is a marriage of my love for artists as well as for histories, both public and personal. The poem plays with the ways in which artists inspire other artists to ponder creativity and the ways in which it can be reimagined to serve a creative’s purpose.
In this poem, I turned to a beloved song of poet, Leonard Cohen: Dance Me to the End of Love. I settled upon one of my favorite lines which ultimately became the poem’s epigraph. The impact of repetition—anaphora—relies on the word “long” from the quoted line (behind which was hiding the concept of “longing”) to revisit my personal ancestral history that begins in Madagascar, then speaks of its people (the Malagasy) as well as one of its rivers (the Mananara). The poem then travels to Kentucky where my forefather was enslaved.The poem also demanded that it stretch beyond personal history, however, and so it references Benin, French Dahomey, and the Edo people (which is a nod to poet Lucille Clifton who traced her roots to this part of Africa.)
I can’t recall the source of the floral references in the latter part of the poem, although I suspect they “appeared” because of the allusions to movement; because my mind’s eye could see the flowers dancing—if not to the end of love—to something that lead them to sway back and forth.
Lastly, naming the bougarabou in the poem’s closing line is a nod to drums commonly played in West Africa which I inserted to aid the poem’s speaker to dance tenderly, to dance very long…
Craft Lessons from Poets of Color // Joanna Acevedo
Lynne Thompson’s “Song for Africa Leonard Cohen Never Knew He Started,” uses a variety of poetic techniques in order to build its structure, the most visible being the anaphora that shapes the early moments and then are echoed again later in the poem. Sound is deeply embedded in the function of this work; Thompson herself comments that the genesis of the poem was a Leonard Cohen song—which we can catch a snippet of in the epigraph.
Anaphora, epigraphs, space (both visual and sonic) and of course, rhythm itself—all of these are working together to build the landscape that Thompson invites us into. Although the poem covers a lot of historical ground in a relatively small space, bringing us from Thompson’s own familial connections, traced from Madagascar to Kentucky, and then into stories like poet Lucille Clifton’s and beyond, past Thompson’s own story and continuing on, the sonic structure creates a place where we are constantly touching base, returning to the center of sound that Thompson returns to over and over again. We never feel lost. The sound recurs—Thompson in tight control—and as readers we feel safe when we hear the familiar tones, beats, rhythms. At times it feels as if Thompson is untangling the threads of history to find there is another and even more tangled history lying underneath, but her reaction is not to back away, rather she is approaching her discoveries with a creative and inventive edge.
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Epigraphs like the one that Thompson uses are an excellent way to introduce found text into a poem. It’s common for a particular line of a song or a poem or even a piece of a novel to spur a new poem or the exploration of a new idea, and using an epigraph can be a good way to connect readers to the context or catalyst of how these ideas have emerged and developed. Even if the reader doesn’t understand the entire story of how the line and the following poem are linked, putting these elements in conversation with each other is a great way to start a poem or enter into the poetic space, especially when one is writing in a new environment or being published by an audience who isn’t necessarily familiar with their work and its goals.
Thompson uses form as another way to manipulate sound. With the use of the indentations, the way we read is interrupted. Reading the work aloud, there is a natural pause, and on the page our eyes move over the space slowly, creating a beat which changes the way the poem is interpreted. The line breaks are deliberately placed to give the poem its own kind of symmetrical quality without actually center-justifying the work. The indentation also allow for Thompson to continue the listing—the anaphora—while staying in the same line, so the line breaks can continue to add the structure that is clearly her goal.
The anaphora is what defines this poem, even more so than the epigraph or the form. The repetition of “long as,” opens the poem and brings us as readers immediately into the physical immediacy of the poem and its comparisons. Comparison is vitally important to the poem because essentially it is layering different identities on top of each other. The speaker doesn’t appear in the poem until much later after we’ve already been introduced to much of the relevant historical information. As we learn about the parameters of the world that Thompson is describing, we get a seamless picture of not only the beauty of the world but also its fraught and sometimes violent nature.
The poem moves in three distinct sections even if we mostly see the single block of text. The section beginning with “long as,” is providing context and establishing limitations, but these limits are blasted open when Thompson suddenly breaks her own pattern—the anaphora here functions as a rule to be broken rather than a defining feature when we move to:
earth and its backlash between sun and the bursting
of hyacinth, daffodil, mustard seed,
Here we see the indentation and how it functions, but we also see the break in form. The poem continues in its new set of concerns, and this is where Thompson gives us our historical context, mentioning the Edo and French Dahomey. But there’s still another shift, which needed this historical pause in order to make its final gesture. Thompson turns to anaphora again with the repetition of “black,” and from there, the rest of the poem is bursting with color, a kind of ironic celebration and negation of the associations of Blackness and its lack of hue. The rest of the poem, with its lush description of movement in floral terms, verges on joyous. The final moments are musical and still touch base with Thompson’s history, completing her proposed loop.
Thompson’s writing, as with the writing of many poets of diasporic traditions from around the world, is concerned not only with history but how to reconcile history with sustainable creative practice. Contemporary poets with a similar style include Karisma Price with I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande, 2023 and Desiree C. Bailey’s What Noise Against The Cane (Yale University Press, 2021). A third example is Leslie Saniz’ Have You Been Long Enough At Table (Tin House, 2023). Each of these poets use form in an innovative way, and each approach is different from Thompson’s work but working in a similar space as they think about race, history, and legacy.
These structural techniques and the way that poets can use sound—in particular, borrowed sound—are the basis for many poems throughout history. Looking back over the canon, poets from Shakespeare, who invented words when the existing ones didn’t suit him, to poets from the Flarf movement of the early 2000s who used found text from Google search engines to create absurdist poetry, remain at the center of most contemporary poetic trends. Unlike much writing, poetry is meant to be heard as well as read alone. Poetry is a living kind of art, an intersection of voices that bring poets together to make new discoveries about communication, connection, and creativity.
Lynne Thompson was Los Angeles’ 2021-22 Poet Laureate and is a Poet Laureate Fellow of the Academy of American Poets. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Press and Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar; and most recently, Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize selected by Jane Hirshfield. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Thompson is the recipient of multiple awards including an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles, the Tucson Literary Festival Poetry Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series to study in Kenya and the Vermont Studio Center. An attorney by training, Thompson sits on the Boards of The Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In June of 2022, she completed her four-year service as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, and Copper Nickel, and the anthology Beat No Beat, among others.Prize, and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize as well as fellowships from the Summer Literary Series to study in Kenya and the Vermont Studio Center. An attorney by training, Thompson sits on the Boards of The Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. In June of 2022, she completed her four-year service as Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in the literary journals Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, The Common, The Massachusetts Review, and Copper Nickel, and the anthology Beat No Beat, among others.
Joanna Acevedo
Joanna Acevedo is the Editor in Chief of Frontier Poetry. She is the author of three books and two chapbooks, and her writing in multiple genres can be found across the web and in print, most recently (or forthcoming) in The North American Review, Hunger Mountain, and Cream City Review. Nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes, she teaches workshops and creates resources for emerging writers on numerous platforms, receiving her MFA from NYU in 2021. She also holds degrees from Bard College and the New School. To learn more about her and her work, please visit her at https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.
