Lillien Waller x Tommye Blount
The Getting There
There’s a moment in Tommye Blount’s incredible poetry collection, Fantasia for the Man in Blue, when I am certain that he somehow knows where I hide, or, rather, what hides within me. In the poem, “Geppetto’s Lament,” written in the voice of the wooden doll’s creator, the poet writes:
Later in the poem, Geppetto observes that his creation has, “a sissy’s nose, a daughter’s lips. Not the boy || I wished for.” In a subsequent poem, “Of a Wicked Boy,” Blount speaks in the voice of Pinocchio, the pronoun “it” repeated throughout the stanzas, becoming more wooden—and heartbreaking—with every iteration, even as the poem is also charged with the speaker’s sexual longing. Blount writes:
The doll wants to be real, wants to join in, to be accepted, to be touched. The two poems were written nearly twenty years ago, Blount says. It’s a late-summer morning, and we are sitting in a café in Novi, Michigan, where the Detroit-born poet lives. “Are you a real boy, now?” I ask him, inquiring as much to validate my own quest for realness as the poem’s speaker. “No!” Blount exclaims, and we burst out laughing. “And I’m comfortable with that because I’m learning that life is all about questions. For me, at least, it’s not necessarily about arrival. It’s about the getting there, the almost there, the ‘I’m on my way.’”
Two things I had forgotten but suddenly remember about the classic children’s story from which these poems derive their frame is that Pinocchio was understood to be irresponsible and unruly, an ill fit for society, and Geppetto was not merely a woodcarver but the doll’s father.
A finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, Fantasia for the Man in Blue is Blount’s first full collection and is shot through with these precious and precarious dynamics in a number of forms: father and son, lover and lover, the one who longs for and the one who is longed for, Black queer man and a world so often inhospitable to Blacks and queers. So much of what is beautiful about the book is this journey—personal, historical, cinematic—the poet makes and takes us on.
It’s also a journey with certain parallels to the poet becoming poet, something that occurs to me as I read “Palmer Park,” the scene of which is a park on Detroit’s west side where men seek each other for sex under cover of darkness—secret, and often dangerous, comfort:
“I’m starting to write prose now, too, but I always say,” Blount notes, “poetry is the queerest of artistic letters. It can do whatever you want it to do. It can take whatever form it needs to [in order] to exist.”
Blount began to realize himself as a “person with a creative sensibility” fairly early in life and as a poet and a gay man as an undergraduate at Michigan State University—reading Sonia Sanchez and the poets of the Black Arts Movement, attending Black Poets Society events, and taking a poetry course with Diane Wakoski. But it was after college when he met 2010 Kresge Artist Fellow Vievee Francis at an open mic that “this alchemy of different things” began to make its own elixir. It was Francis who helped Blount figure out “What do I do with this now? She helped me truly realize how I connect to poetry and how it connects with my life.”
For some time now, Blount has been writing what he refers to as “fashion poems”—a phrase not nearly expansive enough to capture fully the contexts of history, gender roles, race, and morality the project encompasses. What does a particular garment mean, not only for us when we wear it but also at the time and place in which we wear it and how others might perceive us?
“I have an obsession with the history around fashion—not necessarily trends, but the history around it, the stories around it,” he explains. “I have these poems about the Ku Klux Klan, specifically their mail-order catalog from the turn of the twentieth century that displayed Klan robes, including their descriptions and prices. I was writing poems after each garment, and for a while I was embarrassed that I was writing them. But I’m not now. They’re in the voices of the garment itself, or the person who would wear the garment, and they straddle the line of morality with a hint of irony—so [the speakers in the poems] are saying horrible things.”
Left: Cover of Fantastia for the Man in Blue; Right: Cover of What Are We Not For
It was a deep dive a few years ago into the works of Detroit poet Robert Hayden—including such master works as “Night, Death, Mississippi,” told from the perspective of a Klansman—that helped lift Blount’s reticence around the Klan robe poems and whether he was the right poet to write them. “Reading Hayden gave me permission to be at ease with the paradoxes within these poems, and allowed me to sit [and become comfortable] with them. I used to think, ‘Who am I, a Black, gay man writing about these robes and things from a catalog that should probably die with history?’ Now I consider the other question: ‘Why not me?’”
Blount’s series also includes poems around the late fashion journalist André Leon Talley’s iconic caftans; and model Pat Cleveland, designer Stephen Burrows, and their roles in the infamous 1973 Battle of Versailles Fashion Show—a French/American fundraiser in which the American designers utilized ten Black models (out of thirty-six total), a groundbreaking moment for the industry.
“In writing about anything, my largest allegiance is to the poem. But I also want to make sure that I’m keeping myself accountable,” Blount says. “I’m interested in the truth—not the truth but the truth of that experience. And often that means raising a question and not necessarily answering it but posing the dilemma. My poems are always building on top of each other. I think about it as geography that shifts and moves within a larger place, fractal.”
About the series:
Practice is a series of profiles that consider and amplify the distinctive voices of Kresge Artist Fellows. Each essay is the culmination of long-play conversations with Detroit artists who generously examine their own creative practices and who ask interesting questions of society, culture, and themselves.
About the author:
Detroit native Lillien Waller holds an MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and degrees from University of Michigan, New School for Social Research, and Emory University. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and she is editor of the anthology American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry (Stockport Flats). Waller’s interdisciplinary work has been shown at Wasserman Projects in Detroit and as part of Wayne State University’s public art series In the Air II (2021–22). She has written on a range of topics—including contemporary visual art and design, modern art history, public policy, social justice issues, and American, Caribbean, and European studies—and profiled dozens of artists, scholars, and entrepreneurs. Waller is a Cave Canem Fellow (2001) and a Kresge Artist Fellow in Literary Arts (2015).