3 Questions with Malik Thompson
MALIK THOMPSON (he/they) is a Black queer person from Washington, DC. His work has been published in the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships and residencies from organizations including Cave Canem, Lambda Literary, the Anderson Center, and Sundress Publications. He can be found on IG via the handle @latesummerstar.
Associate Editor Siobhan Murray talks with Malik Thompson about their work from Issue 75, out now!!
Your poem “Overture” explores desire as the speaker lies on a shore beside their beloved and ends with a powerful, startling final image of the beloved’s hand. Can you elaborate on what, if any, responsibilities poets have when writing about intimacy?
This is a great question and one, honestly, I don’t believe I’m equipped to prescriptively answer. What I am able to do, rather, is speak to my own teachers and inspirations.
Intimacy haunts and bewilders me, as subject matter in literature and art as well as my personal experiences of it in my day-to-day life. I feel most compelled by intimacies that are depicted as complex and uneasy—I am interested in tenderness, yes, but tendernesses that feel, both, ephemeral and earned. My favorite depiction of intimacy lives within Toni Morrison’s Sula; the way Sula and Nel orbit and drift away from one another astounds me—their intermittent moments of closeness and distance are complicated and lush, filigreed by the characters’ inability, and lack of desire, to expunge the other’s presence from their lives in spite of the ways they’d transgressed against one another.
Although I began with mentioning Sula, I believe poetry, among the language arts, is best-suited for rendering the compound and sometimes surreal elements of intimacy. The poet Jean Valentine troubled or completely collapsed time, reality, dream, and self in her poems, the poems often addressing an amorphous and shape-shifting “You.” I love this element of Valentine’s work because it is demonstrative of how our experiences with—and understanding of—intimacy offers transparent glimpses into our interiors.
The white space of the poem creates a variation of line length similar to the “green waves” that buckle in the first stanza. How did the sonic quality of the poem shape its title?
The definition of “overture” I was most concerned with when choosing the title is “an approach or proposal made to someone with the aim of opening negotiations or establishing a relationship.” I consider this piece a gesture toward deeper intimacy between speaker and addressee, an attempt to overcome differences in experience and identity to better understand one another. That said, I believe the musical definition of the word “overture” suits the poem as well due to the way similar sounds patterns book-end the poem.
I was compelled to title the poem “Overture” due to the ambiguity of the word and the way both definitions speak to different elements of the poem.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about your poem that we don’t know?
I wrote this poem during my second year at Cave Canem in the summer of 2024. The existence of this poem is indebted to Jean Valentine, whose work taught me not to fear what is strange or inscrutable.