Chicken Spaghetti

Fruit Crazy

Go, Go, Grapes! by the late April Pulley Sayre was my pick (ha!) of the week for one of the classes where I volunteer. Subtitled "A Fruit Chant," it's a lot of fun to read aloud: "Rah, rah, raspberries! Go, go, grapes!/Savor the flavors. Find fruity shapes!" Each page has a large photo of delicious-looking fruit, and, as you can tell, the text is really a poem of rhyming couplets.

This particular group, a smaller combined class of K-2 kiddos, shares complements freely. One friend told me, "Nice job, Miss Susan," when I finished reading. The children enjoyed trying to remember all the different kinds mentioned, and I asked them what their favorite fruit was. "Ice cream!" replied another friend. "Oh, ice cream is delicious," I said. "But what about fruit?" After insisting again on ice cream, he eventually admitted to raspberries.

So, a poem of a book for a Friday during National Poetry Month. I recommend it!

The Poetry Friday roundup is at Janice Scully's Salt City Verse on April 8th.

Photo by Tomás Castelazo, from Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

 

Go, Go, Grapes! A Fruit Chant

April Pulley Sayre

Beach Lane Books, Simon & Schuster, 2012

Poetic Census

Isn't this poem fun? With the start of National Poetry Month and the government's release of the 1950s census happening on the same day, the Center for Brooklyn History offered a fitting poem to address both! The poet is Edgar H. Ryniker, a member of the Brooklyn Poetry Circle.

The April 1, 2022, Poetry Friday roundup takes place at Heidi Mordhorst's blog, My Juicy Little Universe.

Spring News

First up is a link to UNICEF and its humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. While I've intended to do so for some time, I'm going to make my donation as soon as I finish this post. √

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I have no smooth transition from that to some good personal news, but I'll go ahead. In the fall, I started submitting a lot of my work, and recently two poems have appeared online. Unlost Journal published my cento "You Keep Me Waiting in a Truck" in #28: Discomfort Index, and "Now or Later," a New York "overheard" poem, found a home at the UK-based Street Cake Magazine. (It's in Part 2 of the current issue.) I was thrilled with both of these acceptances. Street Cake is currently open for submissions, so if you have some poems that lean toward the experimental, why not give it a shot! Same for Unlost, which specializes in found poems, when it reopens.

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The Poetry Friday roundup for March 25, 2022, is at Amy Ludwig VanDerwater's blog, The Poem Farm. (How can it be the end of March already?)

Photo by ST. Part of Nancy Blum's glass mosaic "Roaming Underfoot" (2018) at the 28th Street stop of the #6 subway line, Manhattan. Fabricated by Miotto Mosaic Art Studios. Commissioned by MTA Arts & Design and New York City Transit.

A Revealing Subway Ride

"The Lovers," by Timothy Liu, is a cool poem that I glimpsed recently as I was leaving the shuttle that runs between Grand Central Terminal and Times Square in New York.

The trains were pretty empty that day, and right after I jumped back onto the shuttle to grab a photo of this work, I noticed a man there taking pictures of a young woman. She was wearing a coat, and underneath it, she was naked from the waist up. Facing the guy, she held the coat wide open as he snapped away. I had stumbled onto, well, I don't know what I'd stumbled onto, but it was a bit more than I expected at 9 a.m.

Anyway. Below I have a picture of some of the art represented with the poem. The original series of mosaics is installed at the subway stop for Lincoln Center. Titled "Artemis, Acrobats, Divas, and Dancers" (2001), it's by Nancy Spero. Both that art and the poetry fall under the auspices of the MTA Arts & Design program, which "encourages the use of public transit in the NYC region by presenting visual & performing arts."

When asked about why he writes, Timothy Liu told the Kenyon Review, "At its best, poetry is a calling, a practice, a guide. It helps me get where I want to be going."

 

Photos by ST.

The Poetry Friday roundup takes place at Elisabeth Norton's Unexpected Intersections today.

Overheard Conversation & Inspiration

Today a group of writers known as the Poetry Sisters has published poems inspired by overheard conversation; Mary Lee Hahn has the links. Y'all know I love it! Thank you for the shout-outs, Sarah Lewis Holmes, Michelle Kogan, and Carol Varsalona. I'm still working on my own compositions in this particular genre and trying to get them published. Most journals want unpublished work and count blogs as publication, so I haven't been able to post them here. Argh. 

That said, I do have something super fun to share: poet Bernadette Mayer's extensive list of journal ideas ("write once a day in minute detail about one thing") and writing experiments ("Write a work gazing into the mirror without using the pronoun I"). It's housed at the University of Pennsylvania's Electronic Poetry Center. Penn is the home institution of one of my all-time favorite classes, "Modern and Contemporary American Poetry," on Coursera. (It's free. Take it!) Mayer is one of poets whose work we study. In the introduction to a series of essays on the poet, the journal Post45 says, "If the last half century has a poet of daily life — of its dreams, babies, children, jokes, meals, sex, love, labors, and writing — she is Bernadette Mayer."

Irene Latham has the entire Poetry Friday roundup at Live Your Poem. Photo, ST: Mural by Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada for Street Art Mankind, NYC, 2019.

TV Room Epigrams

TV Room Epigrams

after Bernadette Mayer

I am the VCR

Unused, undusted,

Unavailable.

 

***

 

Over there the Smart TV,

A giant phone, it

Bristles with apps.

Only one in the family

Speaks its language

With fluency.

The other two

congratulate each other

when they arrive at

PBS Passport

in one try.

 

***

 

I am the chair,

Recovered, but

Stained afresh

By blueberries.

Still watching TV,

Appraised at practically

Nothing,

But spared from donation.

 

***

 

Here is the coffee table,

Home to too many books

And half-finished projects,

Hosting winter boots

On the lower level

Where they shed

Their grit

Inappropriately.

 

***

 

I am the charging station,

Currently charging the air

Or trying to,

Because your cellphone

Is in your purse

And you ignore electricity.

 

I’ve been reading Bernadette Mayer’s poetry collection Scarlet Tanager (New Directions, 2005), and was tickled by the section “Toy Epigrams.” (No online link is available for the written version, but you can hear her read them at PennSound, the fabulous archive of poets’ recordings.) That was my inspiration to write these “TV Room Epigrams” in the place where I also have my office, such as it is. An icy day and cancelled plans gave me a chance to read and, consequently, write.

The Poetry Friday roundup for January 7th will take place at the blog Beyond LiteracyLink.

Photo by ST. Queens, New York, 2021.

Poem: Mid-December

Mid-December

 

It’s harder to hear

what everyone is saying

because of the masks

muffling so much

of the usual exchanges,

but a few things

slip through:

“Stay safe,”

“I’ll call you later,”

“Okay, baby, thank you,”

and in Harlem, on 125th Street,

an echo of a man

walking west and singing,

“Alleluia, alleluia.”

 

I wish I had a turn,

something wise to declare,

to inoculate us against

the feeling of Here

We Go Again—and

everything else—

but all I have is that

unexpected but welcome 

“Alleluia, alleluia.”

 

© Susan Thomsen, 2021

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The Poetry Friday roundup is at Jone Rush MacCulloch's blog.

We Got the Beats

Greetings from San Francisco. This is the extensive Beat section at the landmark City Lights Books. Pretty sweet! No poems from me today as I’m on the road, so to speak. (I couldn’t resist a little Jack Kerouac joke there.)

The Poetry Friday roundup is at Merely Day by Day.

Poem: Why Is December Called December?

Why Is December Called December?

 

December is coming
December is here

After December what month is it
December hasn’t changed

December was white
December was gray

December must do
December has days

December is not a noun
December is what season

How is December for Taurus
In December is it cold in Cancún

Where does December come from
What is December going to be like?

***

These autofill poems are such fun to create; many of the lines are ones I'd never come up with on my own. When I was putting together "Why is December Called December?," I once again got a line like one in "November Lost & Found": "December is Spanish." As much as I wanted to use it again, I set it aside. This month's poem asks a lot of questions—such is the nature of a Google search—so perhaps a companion poem could be made of answers. I'll have to think about it. At any rate, this is one way to create an autofill poem:

Method

1. Go to Google.

2. Type in a phrase with the word “December” in it, like “December is.”

3. Before clicking on the results, read what the autofill comes up with.

4. Pick out the best stuff & write it down.

5. Repeat with another phrase.

6. If you speak another language, try using an international Google (for example, Google Spain) to get different results, and translate them into English.

7. Choose the best lines, arrange them, and see what you come up with!

***

The Poetry Friday roundup for December 3rd is at Michelle Kogan's blog.

Photo by ST. Pomme de New York, sculpture by Claude Lalanne.

Girl Scout Badges

I found Chloe Martinez's work through the Of Poetry podcast, hosted by Han VanderHart. On the episode I heard, Martinez read the poem "Not-Yet-Official Girl Scout Badges," and I just loved it, remembering my grown son's Cub Scout adventures and my own Girl Scout days. The list poem offers a touching portrait of a young girl and her mother's love for her, and I look forward to reading more of Martinez's work.

Her poem begins,

Forgetting to Eat Breakfast While Reading Badge
Luxuriating in Bed on Sunday Morning Badge
Catching Lizards by the Tail and Releasing Them in Safer Places Badge

You can read the rest at Moist Poetry Journal, which VanderHart edits. Check out Of Poetry, "kitchen table conversations with poets," too!

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The November 26th Poetry Friday roundup takes place at the blog  There is no such place as a God-forsaken town.

Photo by ST. One of the murals at the Jackie Robinson Alternative Education Complex, Madison Avenue, East Harlem, NYC.