No One Gets Off the Hook in My Poems: An Interview with Tommye Blount (poetry, ’13)

Is there a moment, image, memory, or experience from your childhood that jumps out at you now as hinting at or communicating the possibility that you would become an artist, a poet?

Tommye Blount: Nope, never a poet—ha! That was never a part of my thinking as a child. The need to tell a story, however, was always there. My mother worked in an office at Michigan Bell, a typist of some sort. I forgot how it all started, but she would bring big reams of dot matrix paper home. The sight of it just made me so excited. There was something so stimulating about seeing all of that blank space with no lines or margins. It was very different from the green lined paper we would use learning cursive in school. This was an invitation to fill up as much space as I could. I would doodle and write all over the sheets. There was a child’s hunger for maximalism that faded in my teen and part of my adult years.

In those years, and still now somewhat, there is safety in wanting to take up as less space as possible. It’s partly why the book is big. A challenge to myself, I wanted to force myself to take up, and earn, the space of this book. In a world that would rather deny me, a Black gay man, space I wanted to claim it for this book. I did not come to the realization on my own, but it was partly seeing the work of Detroit artists like Tylonn J. Sawyer and Sydney G. James—artists who have created massive murals in which every wrinkle and hair of its Black subject must be reckoned with. When one encounters the work, they have no choice but to consider the subject.

Read the rest of the interview here: https://lithub.com/tommye-blount-no-one-gets-off-the-hook-in-my-poems/?fbclid=IwAR2lLUAhrUsvUJXRmp15qdL412725J88k3c0BogXyvkbkPXkh-Ke5ztIUk4