Chicken Spaghetti

Street Guide

A Guide to Composing Street Poems

Street poems are what I call the found-language poems I've put together from lines I've overheard. They come from not only the street but also restaurants, museums, theaters, subways, etc. Examples are "Fix This One Thing,""A Day Like Any Other," and "Now or Later" (PDF; in the journal Streetcake). I overheard my lines in New York, but anywhere is good.

In cities we are used to blocking out what is not necessary for us to know getting from Point A to Point B, but unblocking is the first step to listening for lines.

Material must come from people you don’t know. You may use questions strangers ask you directly and things they say to you. Those are fine.

You can’t make up any sentences, but you can break them up and add conjunctions if you like. It’s permissible to remove uhs, likes, ums, sos, etc. 

Walk slowly and stop often. Take the train and the bus. Eat by yourself. Drink coffee alone. Linger by the information booth. The people nearby are your collaborators.

Take care with names. Your goal is a poem, not libel.

Honor your collaborators. Remember what Grace Paley said, something along the lines of, “Every character deserves the open destiny of life.”

Keep an ear out for loud, one-sided cell-phone conversations. 

If you hear something that makes you think, “I want to hear the rest of that story,” that kind of line is gold.

The more languages you know, the better. Include non-English verses in a regular font, not italics.

Announcements, transit and otherwise, are always welcome. You will hear a lot of announcements. 

Cursing is okay but only in moderation. Same with snooty remarks.

Fill up a big cache of lines before you start putting together the poem. That way, they’ll rumble around in your head for a while and make connections on their own.

Finally, make up your own rules, of course!

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The Poetry Friday roundup is at author Laura Purdie Salas's blog on March 17th.

Photo by ST. That sculpture is Jim Rennert's "Listen" (2018). Sixth Avenue and 55th Street, NYC.

This Must Be March

                                                          
what makes march         special
who makes march          madness
what makes a march      a march                                                                     
who owns march
what month is march     for
is it march                        today

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I made this poem using autofill suggestions on a Google search, then added some tabs. You can read it several ways, although the formatting may be off if you're reading on a phone.

On Friday, March 10, Heidi Mordhorst has the Poetry Friday roundup at her blog My Juicy Little Universe.

Photo by ST: Detail from Yayoi Kusama's mosaic mural “A Message of Love, Directly from My Heart unto the Universe” (2022), at Grand Central Terminal, NYC.

The TBR Stack

I'm so looking forward to jumping into this TBR stack from the library, but first have to finish Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. It's long, fascinating, and completely absorbing. I'm almost done.

The stack:

Milkweed Smithereens, by Bernadettte Mayer. At Chicago Review of Books, Mandana Chaffa writes, "I cannot overstate how much Bernadette Mayer’s work, and the poetic ethos and play she championed, means to me and to the poetry community at large. She celebrated the ordinary as extraordinary, equal parts funny and revolutionary[...]"

We Are Mermaids, by Stephanie Burt. I'm a big Stephanie Burt fan; an academic who writes in an accessible way, she's so dang smart, and her interests and subjects are wide-ranging. (Readers looking to learn more about contemporary poetry can start with Burt's The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them.) We Are Mermaids is a collection of poems; I heard about it on Han VanderHart's Of Poetry podcast, and knew I wanted to read it.

Space Struck, by Paige Lewis. I've read it before and look forward to reading it again. "Over and over again, the characters in Space Struck seek the natural world but encounter institutions, which in the collection (and, one gets the uncanny sense, in our actual lives) are rapidly becoming one of the last ways to experience nature," says Emily DeMaioNewton at Ploughshares.

Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up, by Remica Bingham-Risher.  I heard the author on the VS podcast, made a note of the book (a collection of essays and poems), and happily bumped into it at the library. Bingham-Risher, "mines the experiences of Black writers in this jovial mix of memoir, essay, and homage to her literary 'guiding voices,'" according to Publishers Weekly.

Poems Are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres, by Amy VanDerwater. The author (and Poetry Friday regular) mentioned this book just last week on her blog, and the library had it! I know it will help with ideas for reading and talking to my first and second grade friends about poetry. (I'm a volunteer reader in a several public-school classrooms.)

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The Poetry Friday roundup is at Tabatha Yeatts' blog today.

Publication News: "Called Home"

I'm happy to report on Poetry Friday that a poem of mine, "Called Home," has been published at Unlost Journal's Issue #30: The Motivation of Winter. Link here.  I won't say too much before you read it, but this one borrows language from Southern obituaries.

It's my second publication at Unlost; the first was "You Keep Me Waiting in a Truck" in Issue #28.

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The roundup of Poetry Friday posts is at Molly Hogan's blog, Nix the Comfort Zone, on February 17th.

Cinquain: The Mural

The Mural

Street art
Colors shine bright
Artist wields a spray can
The way you might paint a poem
Tonight

*****

On Monday, "street" was the word for Alex Price's Twitter cinquain prompt. As with all of them, I could have gone in a hundred different directions; I can't wait to start a poem with "streetcar."

What's a cinquain? Answer here.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at Carol Varsalona's Beyond Literacy Link on February 10th.

Photo by ST. Mural by Craig Anthony Miller at the Knowlton event space and art park, Bridgeport, CT.

Found Poem: Fix This One Thing

Fix This One Thing

You took AP stats?
Uno, dos, tres
The energy I got back
was nasty
She’s just making 
all these mistakes
Cuidado, cuidado,
Maybe it’s around the—
My best teacher
was Kiran Desai
I didn’t get lost

This is a found poem. All the lines and the title are things I overheard in New York.

—Susan Thomsen, 2023

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Jan at Bookseed Studio is the Poetry Friday host for January 27th. Go visit for more poems and inspiration on Friday.

Photo by ST of one of Timothy Snell's "Broadway Diary" mosaics (2002) at the 8th Street/NYU subway stop, Manhattan. It depicts the arch at Washington Square Park.

Cinquain: Gone Fishin'

Gone Fishin'

River-

bank veteran,

grizzled heron gazes, 

lifts one foot, takes a giant step,

impales.

*****

After reading Molly Hogan's post about the cinquain last week, I decided to try out it out. On Twitter I started following Alex Price, who has a daily cinquain prompt. Tinkering with the form—five lines with a 2-4-6-8-2 syllable scheme—and thinking about the exact words to use was challenging and fun. Somehow Alex's prompt for "phase" turned into "gaze," and, voilà!

The Poetry Friday roundup for January 20, 2023, takes place at Marcie Flinchum Atkins' blog.

Photo by Susan Thomsen, Connecticut, 2019. Blue heron art by Kevin Costa.

Poetry Friday the 13th: The Roundup

Welcome to Poetry Friday! I feel lucky to host the roundup, which you'll find below. Please join us and submit a link. (If you're having difficulty, send an email to    c_spaghettiATyahoo.com    Replace the AT with a you-know-what.)

I'll start off with my poem "Vintage," inspired by a photograph by Trina K. Bartel which I first saw on Margaret Simon's blog, Reflections on the Teche. (Thank you to Margaret and to the photographer, who granted me permission to use her work.)

Vintage

The Craigslist ad
came out so nice
I decided to keep
Mom’s bike and
ride it myself

The flowers I put
in the basket made
all the difference
and sold me on the idea
of maintaining

—Susan Thomsen

A round of applause goes to all the poets and poem-talking participants. Drop a link here.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

School Rules, Lupe Mendez

Lupe Mendez, the current Texas Poet Laureate, is also an educator and activist in Houston. His poem "Rules at the Juan Marcos Huelga School (Even the Unspoken Ones)," online at the Poetry Foundation, is my pick for today. An excerpt:

[Shout on paper, write boldly,
in a book, in the middle of an open
field, in the street, in the classroom,
make sure your voice shrills.]

I'm grateful to the VS podcast for introducing me to Mendez and many other poets. Just like prior hosts Franny Choi and Danez Smith, the new duo, Ajanaé Dawkins and Brittany Rogers, are super fun to listen to, and their episodes always send me straight to library and bookstore websites looking for the work that was mentioned.

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The Poetry Friday roundup is at Reading to the Core. Next week it's right here, at Chicken Spaghetti.

Photo: Roll-gate mural in the Mission District, San Francisco. Susan Thomsen, 2021.

Favorite Poetry and Poetry-Related Books of the Year

The following are some of my favorites of the year, with links to their publishers. (Not all were published in 2022.) For additional reading suggestions, do check out another, completely current list, "A Handful of Poetry Books to Savor Now and Later," by Mandana Chaffa, in the Chicago Review of Books. 

Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me, by Ada Calhoun (Grove Atlantic, 2022)

Avidly Reads Poetry, by Jacquelyn Ardam (NYU Press, 2022)

Broadway for Paul, by Vincent Katz (Knopf, 2020)

Curb, by Divya Victor (Nightboat Books, 2021)

Customs, by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf, 2022)

The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, edited by Al Filreis and Anna Strong Safford (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

Frank: Sonnets, by Diane Seuss (Graywolf, 2021)

Garden Time, by W.S. Merwin (Copper Canyon, 2016)

The Hurting Kind, by Ada Limón (Milkweed Editions, 2022)

Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance, by Nikki Grimes (Bloomsbury Books for Children, 2021)

Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life, by Margot Peters (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011)

On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays, by Douglas Crase (Nightboat Books, 2022). I'm still reading this one!

Starshine & Clay, by Kamilah Aisha Moon (Four Way Books, 2017)

Stones: Poems, by Kevin Young (Knopf, 2021)

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, by Franny Choi (Ecco, 2022)

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The Poetry Friday roundup for December 30th is at Patricia J. Franz's Reverie.

Photo by ST of street art by Timur (@timuryorkart).

Ashley Bryan & Langston Hughes

The above collage is original art from Sail Away, a 2015 children's book in which Ashley Bryan illustrated poems by Langston Hughes dealing with the theme of water. It's part of a gorgeous show at the Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, through January 22, 2023. You can also read "Long Trip" in a bigger font at at the Academy of American Poets. My friend and I had the best time at the Morgan, chit-chatting with a friendly security guard about our favorite pictures and taking several turns around the room to make sure of our choices. 

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The Poetry Friday roundup takes place at Irene Latham's Live Your Poem on December 23rd. Happy Holidays to all!

Poem: Open Space

Open Space

Tell us about your friends
You mean M.C.? Who danced on tables
and lit the night up loud
with his Long Island accent?
That friend? I still tend the mug,
a favor, from the prom
He was the teacher, I was the gossip,
The chaperone’s date
They didn’t know
The truth, we were never together
That way though I would
give anything to hear him sing
“There’s a kind of hush”
At the fountain at
Washington Square Park
“All over the world
tonight”

Draft, Susan Thomsen, 2022

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This poem riffs off a line from my feed reader. Last week I wrote about how the New York Times "Well" feed sometimes resembles a font of poetry prompts, so I ran with its offering "Tell us about your friends." All week long the next sentence in my head has been, "You mean M.C.?," so that is indeed what came next. I continue to tinker with this draft.

I have a nonfiction recommendation on the theme of friendship: Hua Hsu's Stay True: A Memoir, which I'm reading now. It's making all the best-of lists.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at Karen Edmisten's blog on December 16th. Enjoy!

Photo by ST

Poetry Prompts from the New York Times

The New York Times and I have a long, one-sided relationship that includes a very sniffy rejection letter for a job I applied for ages ago. Whatever. It's still my favorite paper. Lately it has been sending me poetry prompts for which I am very grateful. I should explain. Every day in my feed reader I get the headlines (and links) for articles in the Well section, and many of them seem like the beginnings of poems. (A few also sound spectacularly unrelated to wellness, but I digress.)

Some examples:

Sadder but wiser? Maybe not

With this weed, I thee wed

Your cat might not be ignoring you when you speak

Tell us about your friends

Falling for your sperm donor

No more hiding

Aren't they great! I really want to hear the poems that start with these first lines. At a certain point I have to start writing them, right?

Anyway. Another source of inspiration has been The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, the new book by Franny Choi. I'm in the middle of reading it, and my favorite line so far is "Every day of my life has been something other than my last." from one of the poems with the (same) title "Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Cooking Fuel." This is powerful work, y'all.

The Poetry Friday roundup for December 9th is at artist & author Michelle Kogan's blog.

Photo: "Iced Tea at the Diner," by ST

Eraser

Happy December, everyone. Where has the time gone? I don't know what happened to November.

Recently I participated in a small-group chat about "Do not trust the eraser," by Rosamond S. King. It's amazing much discussion how this shorter, open-ended poem generated. It starts,

Do not trust the eraser. Prefer
crossed out, scribbled over monuments

I hadn't known King's work at all beforehand, and having read more of the pieces linked on her website here, I find it really powerful. Frankly, I'd enjoy continuing to talk about "Do not trust the eraser," so, if you'd like, let me know what you think! A couple of questions, just to get started: who or what is the eraser? What do you make of the punctuation? Why "mis takes" and not "mistakes?" There are no wrong answers, of course; these are just things in the work that I wonder about.

The December 2nd Poetry Friday roundup is at Reading to the Core.

Photo by ST: Pencil (with eraser) sculpture, Bridgeport, CT

Recommended Reading: Kevin Young's "Stones"

I’ve just finished Stones, Kevin Young’s latest collection, and admired the concision and short lines in this book (Knopf, 2021). Young is not only the New Yorker’s poetry editor, he is also the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. These poems are about history and grief and ancestors, and, a topic after my own heart, the South. In Young’s case, it’s southern Louisiana, where his relatives live. (“The roads here/only lately got names.”) 

My favorite work in Stones is “Speed Trap,” which you can read online at Literary Hub. It’s a found poem (or at least it looks like one), quoting roadside advertisements (“WE BUY GOLD/Soul Food Seafood/Stock Yard Café”), and Young drops in photo-like details of his own (“Stray couch wounded/beside the road”). Driving through, the reader sees the town, its pleasures ("Butts-n-Ribs") and dysfunctions (FEMA trailers, etc.), and the way the word “trap” functions as both a reference to out-of-towners who dare speed and to others, locals unable to leave for a myriad of reasons. 

Stones is well worth your time. It’s already given me some ideas for poems mixing found language with a soupçon of personal observance.

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The Poetry Friday roundup for October 28th takes place at Jone Rush MacCulloch's blog.

Photo by ST.