Teka-Lark Lo's Los Angeles

Steph Cha interviews Teka-Lark Lo about her relationship with her hometown of Los Angeles and the city's influence on her poetry at Los Angeles Review of Books. "For me, I can’t write if I don’t live." Lo explains, "I don’t want my writing to be divorced from reality." Let's start there: 

I want to live a full life. I like to fill voids. I’m filling the darkness of L.A. with glitter and laughter. I am a writer, but I am also a documentarian. I want to document what has happened, but I want it to be entertaining. I do work in regards to environmental issues, but I’m a poet first. I feel that being a writer in this day and age is the ultimate in activism. We help people to remember. We provide people with a guide to what happened in the past and what to do in the future.

The Queen of Inglewood is your first book of poetry, and it has a very distinct focus and point of view. Can you talk about how you started putting this book together? Did the poems come first, or did you build them around the themes of the book?

The first few poems came and then I decided to develop a theme around materialism, capitalism, and fame. I view L.A. as a microcosm of the American dream on cocaine. I find most political poetry painfully literal. I feel that you can talk about issues of exploitation, sexism, racism, and classism and at the same time be artful. I feel that most people are rather intelligent, they are just exhausted. I write for a person who is an adult and is thinking at a higher level. I don’t think most adults enjoy literal interpretations on political topics in poetry form, because it exhausts them. We all know greed is bad. If you’re an artist, your job is to say that in an artful manner to get people talking about inequities. I want people to be entertained, listen to what I am saying, and then think of solutions. Most people probably won’t get to the solutions part, but I think currently when we’re so inundated with news and information, the information that will stand out is the information that is presented creatively.

Learn more at Los Angeles Review of Books.