Chicken Spaghetti

Borrowed Lines: "Going"

Going

(from To Walk Alone in the Crowd, by Antonio Muñoz Molina; translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Bleichmar)

 

He has noticed

with a little dismay,

that travel agencies are becoming

harder to find,

like newsstands,

    stationers,

        hardware stores,

            grocery stores,

                birds,

                    gorillas.

 

For some reason

he can’t understand, almost 

everything

he is fond of

is 

going

 

extinct.

***

This excerpt is from a novel, not a poem, but it inspired me to shape the lines into stanzas and add a title. It’s from To Walk Alone in the Crowd, written by Antonio Muñoz Molina and translated from the Spanish by Guillermo Bleichmar (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). Muñoz Molina’s narrator is a city walker, a practitioner of “perambulation studies,” following in the footsteps of Lorca, Melville, Baudelaire, and Joyce. He’s an eavesdropper, an assembler of collages of the “verbal and visual garbage” that we usually don’t pay attention to, and one of the most astute observers I’ve read in eons. “The city is an unending show, going on all the time,” the author recently told an interviewer.

The Poetry Friday roundup takes place at Rebecca Herzog's Sloth Reads blog on July 30th.

Additional Source

Book Launch: Conversation with Antonio Muñoz Molina, on the occasion of the English translation of Un andar solitario entre la gente (To Walk Alone in the Crowd), on the YouTube channel of the Cervantes Institute of New York. In English.

Photo by ST: Retiro Park, Madrid (2019)

#TheSealeyChallenge

My favorite literary event of 2020 was #TheSealeyChallenge in August, when I (and so many others) read a book of poetry every day. Yes, 31 books in a month! Even when a big storm knocked out our power, I was making coffee on the grill and reading the day's poetry book on the patio. So. Much. Fun. I learned so many things. Water takes a really long time to boil on the grill, and the work of Ashley M. Jones, Tommy Pico, Junious Ward, Nancy Willard, Jenny Xie, Alberto Ríos, Ocean Vuong, et al., is well worth seeking out.

I kept track of the books on Twitter; others used Instagram, Facebook, blogs, etc.

The new edition of the challenge launches on Sunday, August 1, 2021. The poet Nicole Sealey (Ordinary Beast, Ecco Press, 2017) started this endeavor. From the website:

"in 2017, balancing her administrative work with the promotion of her first book left poet nicole sealey with little time to read for pleasure. nicole decided to challenge herself to a personal goal: read a book of poems each day for the month of August. nicole announced her intention on social media and the challenge quickly took off, inspiring its own hashtag: #TheSealeyChallenge!"

You can borrow books of poetry at the library and through inter-library loans (start requesting now!) and buy them at your favorite bookstore. Some good apps for reading e-books include Hoopla, Freading, and Libby. All free, in various systems, with a library card! Don't forget about audiobooks; I plan to to listen to Eve L. Ewing's 1919.

What to read? Follow the website's advice: "while the books you choose are up to you, The Sealey Challenge encourages reading books by marginalized poets. for ideas, browse blog posts from past participants."

The roster of interviewees (and hosts) at the Poetry Foundation's VS podcast and the one at the New Yorker's poetry podcast are also good resources. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the online journal Jacket2 and its podcast, PoemTalk, as well. And Stephanie Burt's books The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2016) and Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems (Basic Books, 2019) contain multitudes.

For books of poetry for children, the LA Public Library's article "21st Century Kids: Embrace Diversity Through Poetry" provides a good reference, and so do NCTE, 100 Scope Notes, the Cooperative Children's Book Center, Lambda Literary (scroll down for the poetry books), and Sylvia Vardell's Poetry for Children blog, among others.

***

For more poems and poetry talk, check the Poetry Friday roundup at author Kathryn Apel's blog on July 23rd.

Photos by ST (2020). Top, NYC mural by Rone, part of a series curated by the organization Education Is Not a Crime. Below, Share TMC graffiti, Westchester, New York.

Poem: Provincetown August 16, 2018

Provincetown August 16, 2018

after Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” (1964)

 

Afternoon at Land’s End

boys everywhere

stopping and shopping

picking up charcoal

filling cars with gas

lining up for ice cream

flying through town

on clunky bicycles, dressed only in

Speedos

 

Good night, Mom, a bass voice called to me

from a porch the night before

Good night.

 

I go for a swim alone at

Race Point, my friends want to

eat lobster,

buy t-shirts in town

The water, the ocean, 

cold but calm and I

can float with my toes

in the air like I always

do, unaware of the 

Great White Shark, 

who waits until tomorrow 

to make the news

 

In the car hot from the sun,

I plug in my phone and read

 

Aretha

 is 

gone.

 

Later

in town, on Commercial, friends found,

a sea-glittery float in the 

Carnival Parade passes, two bearded mermaids

dancing, their speakers blaring

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

And we dance, too.

 

@Susan Thomsen 2021




Photo by Susan Thomsen. Carnival parade, Provincetown, Mass., 2018.

Links

"The Day Lady Died," by Frank O'Hara, at the Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Friday roundup for July 16, 2021, will take place at the blog Nix the comfort zone.

"[Photographer] Joel Meyerowitz Reflects on the Magic of Provincetown," at Aperture

Poem: March 2020

March 2020

from Bartleby & Co., by Enrique-Vila Matas; translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Dunne (New Directions 2007)

 

Full of doubts at home

I must change something

Stammering life, a voice over flow

I let that word 

the impossibility of it 

out of the blue.

 

@Susan Thomsen, 2021

For other poems and poetic talk, check the Poetry Friday roundup at the blog Reflections on the Teche.

A Found Poem for Poetry Friday

A Day Like Any Other: A Found Poem

 

How do I get downtown?

The first two years of

the lease there was one point two million dollars

of rent

 

How do I get downtown?

You don’t want to be with me no more

Fine

 

How do I get downtown?

Get your ass over there

 

How do I get downtown?

I call my dad’s father Gramps

 

How do I get downtown?

That was freshman year

 

Draft ©Susan Thomsen, 2021

I made the poem above with lines of conversation I overheard in New York earlier this week. That's one of my favorite things to do: collect random sentences and rearrange them. (Another favorite thing is taking pics of street art.) When I heard several different people on the crosstown bus asking the central question here, I knew I had to do something with it, and then borrowed the title from the last line of James Schuyler's "Februrary."

You'll find the entire Poetry Friday roundup at author and poet Laura Shovan's blog.

Photos by me. The impressive pigeon art by Michael Paulino (@infamous_moke on Instagram) in the lower photo is part of Uptown Grand Central's Grandscale Mural Project, on and around East 125th Street in New York.