School Rules, Lupe Mendez

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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.


Street Guide

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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

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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

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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"

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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

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The Mural


Street art

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

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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

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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'

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Gone Fishin'

River-

bank veteran,

grizzled heron gazes, 

lifts one foot, takes a giant step,

impales.

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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.)

Blue-bike-with-sunflowers-by-trina-bartelVintage

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


Favorite Poetry and Poetry-Related Books of the Year

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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

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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!