Chicken Spaghetti

"Every poem is a love poem"

Mural by Sara Erenthal, Allen Street, New York, New York. Photo by Susan Thomsen, 2020.

Today's bit of poetry goodness is the February 26th, 2025, edition of the New Yorker's Poetry Podcast in which Jericho Brown reads a work by Elizabeth Alexander ("When") and one of his own ("Colosseum.") He tells poetry editor Kevin Young, "Every poem is a love poem because somebody just had to write it down. Somebody just had to get it right, and it was out of love, of that moment of writing, out of love for that poem itself..." I highly recommend listening to the interview and readings.

Another of Brown's poems that I like is "'N'Em." You can read it at the New York Times Magazine.

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The Poetry Friday roundup is at Margaret Simon's Reflections on the Teche. Margaret and I grew up in the same hometown and even attended the same church as kids. Small world, right? She's such a thoughtful, talented writer. Go visit!

Definitions

Definitions

Break is a word
That kicks at the end,
With legs of a K
Severing ties,
Though it begins
With a buxom, promising B.

Break can be rest,
Pause measured by coffee,
Perhaps in class,
Perhaps at the office,
A siesta of sorts
As darkness drops in.

Break is a verb
Employed against horses,
Stomping spirits,
Rupturing traditions,
Punting friends,
Into dangerous orbits.

Mend is a word
That fixes the break,
That sets the bone,
That patches the hole.
Mend offers a hand
And does not let go.

How is the adverb,
How is the work.

Draft, Susan Thomsen 2025

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A month ago the Poetry Sisters offered a challenge for February: to create a "__ Is a Word" poem, a form invented by Nikki Grimes and shared by Michelle Barnes. (Thank you to Tanita S. Davis for the background.) The above, a very rough draft, is what I came up with. Should I keep the last two lines or set them free?

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 28th is at Denise Krebs' blog.

Image: Latin dictionary photo by Dr. Marcus Gossler, used under the license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

"After the Winter," Claude McKay

Thank you to Claude McKay (1889-1948) for the following and its title, both of which remind me that one day we'll be done with this interminable winter season. There will be an "after." Bring on the droning bees and the ferns! (See also  Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree" for more bees.) I found the McKay at poets.org, the site of the Academy of American Poets, and it is in the public domain. The Poetry Friday roundup today is at author Laura Purdie Salas's blog. Edited to add: don't miss Tanita Davis's look at McKay's "If We Must Die" over at her place, Fiction, Instead of Lies.

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After the Winter

by Claude McKay 

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
    And against the morning’s white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
    Have sheltered for the night,
We’ll turn our faces southward, love,
    Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire to shafted grove
    And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
    Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
    And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
    Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
    And ferns that never fade.

 

Photo by Susan Thomsen

A Poem by Patricia Spears Jones

Here is a poem by Patricia Spears Jones, whose work I have admired ever since reading her piece in the 1994 anthology Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café. This one is called "Comedy with Flutes," and it was first published in 2023. The Poetry Foundation link includes audio. Do take a listen! I'm adding "Comedy with Flutes" to my own "Resistance" collection. It begins,

Enough of this foolishness—caution gone

She opined

We need a comedy with flutes

Happy Black History Month, happy Valentine's Day, happy Poetry Friday. The roundup is at the blog TeacherDance. 

Photo by Susan Thomsen, 2019.  @ellestreetart mural, part of the @streetartmankind project. New Rochelle, New York.

A Jane Hirshfield Poem

No doubt someone has shared this poem on Poetry Friday before; it's such a good one. I'm still working on my own poems, made of words from headlines in the New York Times. Right now they are coming out really angry, and whether that speaks to the zeitgeist, my own frame of mind, or both, I couldn't tell you! I'm trying to get at my own form but haven't yet arrived. I did realize that unlike headline writers, I wasn't limited by space constrictions, so that let me cut out and paste in some "a"s, "the"s "and"s, and so on. 

I like the repetitions, word choices, and arrangement of white space in this Hirshfield  poem. She has found her own form, and I'm reminded how important it is to read mentor works. That "we" in "Let Them Not Say" keeps us readers on the hook.

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 7th is at Carol Varsalona's Beyond Literacy Link.

Thanks to the Academy of American Poets for its Instagram account, where I found "Let Them Not Say."

Cat Haiku

All purrs, she joins me
On the couch for a minute
Spreading her good vibes.

 

This is Kimchi, one of my resident muses. She's a small cat and a big character.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Nightmare

Nightmare

Tiny burning embers
Blazes
Fire weather
Warnings/increased
Forced evacuations
LA girds
Location, size, containment, and more

Monster winds

Fire’s massive scale
What do you pack?

 

 

Source: The Los Angeles Times, accessed 9 January 2025

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I made this found poem from words and phrases in headlines and subheadings in the LA Times. I wanted to keep it brief. I'm so worried; we're all so worried. See Time's "How to Help Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires."

The Poetry Friday roundup for January 10th is at Kathryn Apel's blog.

No image today.

Rumors and Lies

 

Using ideas from last week, I created another new poem using headlines from the Sunday New York Times. I'll let it speak for itself. Again I thank the late Lorraine O'Grady for the inspiration.

For 2025 I am fortifying myself with, among other things, Year of Wonder: Classical Music to Enjoy Day by Day, by Clemency Burton-Hill. She offers a short essay and music recommendation for each day of the year. Perhaps this will lead to some poems? Who knows!

The last Poetry Friday roundup for 2024 is at Michelle Kogan's More Art 4 All. Word Press bloggers, I apologize that my comments on your blogs do not show up; for some reason, they sometimes disappear into the ether.

Lorraine O'Grady

Here's a short feature in the Yale Review from a few years back. It concerns the work of the conceptual artist/critic/essayist Lorraine O'Grady, who died last week at the age of 90. Eugenia Bell writes,

"Her 1977 work, Cutting Out the New York Times, consists of twenty-six poems made from cut up Sunday editions of the newspaper. Forty years later, she has reimagined and reshaped the original works into twenty-six “haiku diptychs” in Cutting Out COTNYT."

Because of copyright issues, I'm not going to include any images of O'Grady's haiku diptychs, but you can see them at the Yale Review's website, linked above. These pieces and their predecessors look like good mentor poems to use in creating one's own work. Y'all know I can't resist a good process experiment, so my effort is below.

The Poetry Friday roundup for December 20th is at Jone Rush MacCulloch's blog.

Hat tips: Yale Review Bluesky account; ARTNews obituary

 

"Weather Report" ©Susan Thomsen, 2024

Source: The New York Times, Dec. 15, 2024

The Familiar Angels of Handel's 'Messiah'

Messiah (Christmas Portions)

 

by Mark Doty

 

A little heat caught

in gleaming rags,

in shrouds of veil,

   torn and sun-shot swaddlings:

 

   over the Methodist roof,

two clouds propose a Zion

of their own, blazing

   (colors of tarnish on copper)

 

Read the rest at the Poetry Foundation.

 

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Here is a link to Mark Doty reading and talking about the poem on PBS. It's a lovely segment—with singing! Also, if you like choirs and choral music, you might enjoy Stacy Horn's book Imperfect Harmony: Finding Happiness Singing with Others.

The Poetry Friday roundup for December 6th is at Carol Labuzzetta's blog, The Apples in My Orchard.

Seasonal Verse

 

I loved this poem when it popped up on Instagram the other day. There are so many footsteps I'd love to hear again, even the early-morning clomps of my mom's Dr. Scholl's sandals as I tried to sleep late way back when. Or the squeaks of our sneakers as my friends and I played basketball in the YWCA gym in my hometown. The soft, pink-padded galloping of my old cats chasing each other in a tiny apartment. November and, to a lesser extent, October are wistful months, and Crapsey's poem taps into that.

The Poetry Friday roundup for November 29th is at the lovely Tanita S. Davis's blog Fiction, Instead of Lies.

Poetry Friday and "Lunch with Laura"

The Poetry Friday roundup is here. Welcome! Please add your links to the Mr. Linky after David Moody's "Lunch with Laura."

David's poem first appeared on Chicken Spaghetti in 2006. He was a Cataloging Librarian at the University of Detroit Mercy, and although I did not know him well, I always appreciated his humorous contributions to an online reading group I belonged to. I was sad to read recently that he has since passed away. His poem still makes me laugh, so I'm featuring it again today. The inspiration, clearly, comes from the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

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Lunch with Laura
by David Moody

If like Shakespeare you'd be makin'
Just pretend you're Francis Bacon
Frying up some Romeo and Juliet.
If on Updike you've been spying
Rabbits still are multiplying
And I do not think that they have stopped it yet.
If your name is Charles Dickens
All your characters will sicken
As consumption hits them with a hacking cough.
If you give a mouse a cookie
You're no literary rookie
And your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

If you think that John's the Irving
Who is truly most deserving
Say a prayer for Owen Meany and for Garp,
If with Hemingway you're writing
There'll be lots of bull and fighting
But be sure to take some time to catch a carp.
If you fish with Joseph Heller
Who's a funny kind of feller
Then a catch of 22 is not far off.
If you give a mouse a cookie
Then you're something of a bookie
And your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

If Fitzgerald had a Zelda
Still he didn't have Imelda
Just a bunch of stuff that hit him with the blues.
If Bill Faulkner's work is gnarly
His relationships are snarly
And it's difficult to tell just who is whose.
If you're munching on a pita
While devouring Lolita
Then I think that you are reading Nabokov.
If you give a mouse a cookie
There's no need to take a lookie
For your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

If you're Huckleberry Finnish
And your hair resembles spinach
Then some one has put a Mark upon your Twain.
If Tolstoy's your inspiration
You'll depict the Russian nation
And will probably wind up beneath a train.
If you feel that you must grovel
It's a Dostoyevsky novel—
Crime and Punishment of young Raskolnikov,
If you give a mouse a cookie
And you don't look like a Wookie
Then your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

If your brains begin to boil
Reading Arthur Conan Doyle
Then we can deduce a case of Sherlock Holmes.
If O'Henry makes a living
Then the Magi will be giving
And you'll sell your watch to buy those fancy combs.
If there's books of all description
Starting off with science fiction
Then you might be reading Isaac Asimov.
If you give a mouse a cookie—
Well I gotta tell you, Pookie,
That your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

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And now it's your turn.

August Best: Slow Lane

In past years I've had a great time participating in the Sealey Challenge, in which you read a collection of poetry a day for the month of August. It's a great way to catch up with new work and older poems that you've never read before. Last year, though, I bombed out after two days, which is like quitting the New York marathon while you're still lacing up your sneakers. For that reason, I set a very modest goal yesterday: read one poem a day from The Best American Poetry 2023 (Elaine Equi, guest editor; David Lehman, series editor). This way I'll be ready for The Best American Poetry 2024, which débuts on September 3rd.  My hope is that taking my time with the book will inspire some projects, too.

Yesterday's poem was "The Bluish Mathematics of Darkness," by Will Alexander, and today's is "Covering Stan Getz," by Michael Anania. You can read the latter work online at The Cafe Review.

The Poetry Friday roundup for August 2nd is at author Laura Purdie Salas's place.

Following in Alexander's footsteps led me to this video of Getz on the BBC's "Shirley Bassey Show."

An Ilya Kaminsky Poem Rides the Subway

Last week I shared a subway ride with this poster from the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority's long-running "Poetry in Motion" series. It cheered up my travels, and so I am posting its Instagram link. Readers might remember the poem from Kaminsky's collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019). The art is by Elisabeth Condon.

The Poetry Friday roundup for July 26th takes place at Marcie Flinchum Atkins' blog.

Writing Resource: Submissions

Hi, poetry friends. Happy summer. Perhaps you, like me, are looking for places to submit your work. (Do it, do it!) Heavy Feather Review maintains a terrific, up-to-date resource called Where to Submit. You'll find lists of calls for submission from presses, chapbook publishers, journals, and more.

Diane Seuss fans should note that there's a good interview with the poet in the journal from back in March. She talks to William Lessard about her new book, Modern Poetry (Graywolf, 2024). She says about writing poetry,

Keats called it negative capability and Lorca called it duende. That’s my religion if I have one. The capacity to sit with complexity and darkness without trying to solve it or fix it, and to reflect it and portray it and examine and explore it without trying to mend it.

Clearly, one poet always leads to another. I enjoyed Lessard's own "What Are You Optimizing For?" in Hyperallergic.

The Poetry Friday roundup for June 28th is at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Photo: ST, Granada, Spain, 2024.