Not-So-Secret Poetry
Poems by Kathleen C. Thompson
Welcome.
You found this page.
It is tucked away for a reason.
Maybe that reason is fear.
Maybe I worry the questions I am asking matter too much to risk losing credibility beneath one more layer of art.
The book is theatrical enough.
The website may already be testing the structural limits of metaphor.
And yet—
this is me too.
This is me on the page.
Not one polished version.
Not one professional voice.
Every different facet of the same person turning toward the light.
And I love writing poems.
There. The secret is out.
Before A Trial of Color became A Trial of Color, I had always planned to write about perception.
Maybe it would be a book of poetry.
Maybe a book so full of poetry that no one could quite decide what shelf it belonged on.
Some things survive every revision.
Two poems eventually made their way into the testimony of A Trial of Color because prose could not quite hold what I needed to show — the mind the machine met, the language already living inside it, the places where explanation stopped being enough.
Poetry could.
This is simply a quiet place for the other poems.
The ones I am inspired to write.
The ones that arrive sideways.
The ones that need less argument and more air.
Nothing flashy.
No grand theory.
No exhibit sticker.
Just poems.
I love them because they can say something enormous without raising their voice.
Because they leave room for the reader.
Because sometimes the truest thing is not a conclusion.
It is an image.
A sound.
A line break.
A little white space where the meaning keeps moving.
So yes.
It is tucked away.
But not hidden.
And now that you are here—
welcome.