Remarkable breed
the Short-haired Barka, he is
no Miss'ippi stray
*****
My husband and I talk to and about our dog a lot, so it's only appropriate that the pooch is my muse this week. During National Poetry Month, I'm going for a haiku a day, but I'm sure not publishing them all. I've kept up with quantity so far, but quality remains an issue.
The Poetry Friday roundup is at Margaret Simon's Reflections on the Teche on April 7th.
The following is an excerpt from "Every Poem Is a List Poem," by James Davis, which I really liked in a recent issue of the Nashville Review.
[...]Every poem
is about life, especially the ones about death, and life
is a list of lists: A and D, bucket and shit,
top tens and next-ins, and the list
goes on [...]
To read the rest, click here.
*****
As a big fan of lists, list poems, lists of lists, listings, list-making utensils, etc., I chose this poem to highlight today. Mary Lee Hahn hosts the Poetry Friday roundup at the very fab A(nother) Year of Reading on March 31st. We're on the verge of National Poetry Month, and while I feel great enthusiasm about it this year, I have nothing planned so far. I better start making a list.
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!
*****
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.
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
*****
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.
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.)
*****
The Poetry Friday roundup is at Tabatha Yeatts' blog today.
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.
*****
The roundup of Poetry Friday posts is at Molly Hogan's blog, Nix the Comfort Zone, on February 17th.
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.
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
*****
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.
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.
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.