Chicken Spaghetti

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.

*****

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.

Poetry Friday and "Lunch with Laura"

The Poetry Friday roundup is here. Welcome! Please add your links to the Mr. Linky after David Moody's "Lunch with Laura."

David's poem first appeared on Chicken Spaghetti in 2006. He was a Cataloging Librarian at the University of Detroit Mercy, and although I did not know him well, I always appreciated his humorous contributions to an online reading group I belonged to. I was sad to read recently that he has since passed away. His poem still makes me laugh, so I'm featuring it again today. The inspiration, clearly, comes from the children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

*****

Lunch with Laura
by David Moody

If like Shakespeare you'd be makin'
Just pretend you're Francis Bacon
Frying up some Romeo and Juliet.
If on Updike you've been spying
Rabbits still are multiplying
And I do not think that they have stopped it yet.
If your name is Charles Dickens
All your characters will sicken
As consumption hits them with a hacking cough.
If you give a mouse a cookie
You're no literary rookie
And your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

If you think that John's the Irving
Who is truly most deserving
Say a prayer for Owen Meany and for Garp,
If with Hemingway you're writing
There'll be lots of bull and fighting
But be sure to take some time to catch a carp.
If you fish with Joseph Heller
Who's a funny kind of feller
Then a catch of 22 is not far off.
If you give a mouse a cookie
Then you're something of a bookie
And your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

If Fitzgerald had a Zelda
Still he didn't have Imelda
Just a bunch of stuff that hit him with the blues.
If Bill Faulkner's work is gnarly
His relationships are snarly
And it's difficult to tell just who is whose.
If you're munching on a pita
While devouring Lolita
Then I think that you are reading Nabokov.
If you give a mouse a cookie
There's no need to take a lookie
For your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

If you're Huckleberry Finnish
And your hair resembles spinach
Then some one has put a Mark upon your Twain.
If Tolstoy's your inspiration
You'll depict the Russian nation
And will probably wind up beneath a train.
If you feel that you must grovel
It's a Dostoyevsky novel—
Crime and Punishment of young Raskolnikov,
If you give a mouse a cookie
And you don't look like a Wookie
Then your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

If your brains begin to boil
Reading Arthur Conan Doyle
Then we can deduce a case of Sherlock Holmes.
If O'Henry makes a living
Then the Magi will be giving
And you'll sell your watch to buy those fancy combs.
If there's books of all description
Starting off with science fiction
Then you might be reading Isaac Asimov.
If you give a mouse a cookie—
Well I gotta tell you, Pookie,
That your name is Laura Joffe Numeroff.

*****

And now it's your turn.

August Best: Slow Lane

In past years I've had a great time participating in the Sealey Challenge, in which you read a collection of poetry a day for the month of August. It's a great way to catch up with new work and older poems that you've never read before. Last year, though, I bombed out after two days, which is like quitting the New York marathon while you're still lacing up your sneakers. For that reason, I set a very modest goal yesterday: read one poem a day from The Best American Poetry 2023 (Elaine Equi, guest editor; David Lehman, series editor). This way I'll be ready for The Best American Poetry 2024, which débuts on September 3rd.  My hope is that taking my time with the book will inspire some projects, too.

Yesterday's poem was "The Bluish Mathematics of Darkness," by Will Alexander, and today's is "Covering Stan Getz," by Michael Anania. You can read the latter work online at The Cafe Review.

The Poetry Friday roundup for August 2nd is at author Laura Purdie Salas's place.

Following in Alexander's footsteps led me to this video of Getz on the BBC's "Shirley Bassey Show."

An Ilya Kaminsky Poem Rides the Subway

Last week I shared a subway ride with this poster from the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority's long-running "Poetry in Motion" series. It cheered up my travels, and so I am posting its Instagram link. Readers might remember the poem from Kaminsky's collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019). The art is by Elisabeth Condon.

The Poetry Friday roundup for July 26th takes place at Marcie Flinchum Atkins' blog.

Writing Resource: Submissions

Hi, poetry friends. Happy summer. Perhaps you, like me, are looking for places to submit your work. (Do it, do it!) Heavy Feather Review maintains a terrific, up-to-date resource called Where to Submit. You'll find lists of calls for submission from presses, chapbook publishers, journals, and more.

Diane Seuss fans should note that there's a good interview with the poet in the journal from back in March. She talks to William Lessard about her new book, Modern Poetry (Graywolf, 2024). She says about writing poetry,

Keats called it negative capability and Lorca called it duende. That’s my religion if I have one. The capacity to sit with complexity and darkness without trying to solve it or fix it, and to reflect it and portray it and examine and explore it without trying to mend it.

Clearly, one poet always leads to another. I enjoyed Lessard's own "What Are You Optimizing For?" in Hyperallergic.

The Poetry Friday roundup for June 28th is at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Photo: ST, Granada, Spain, 2024.

On the Mend?

Ways To Get Over A Broken Heart
           Inspired by Carlos Antonio Rancano’s Evidence Or How To Get Over A Broken Heart

           by Dustin Brookshire

I.
Get lost in the woods.
Scream at the trees
and the goddamn birds.

Continued here.

*****

Angry, funny, slightly scary. I loved it. I found this poem by Dustin Brookshire at Diode Poetry Journal, and plan to order his chapbook Never Picked First for Play Time (Harbor Editions, 2023), based on the title alone. Also at Diode, I enjoyed Jason Koo's "Post-Honeymoon Reception" and its take on a variety of personal relationships.

The Poetry Friday roundup for May 3 is at author Buffy Silverman's blog.

I Remember

I Remember

With thanks to Sigrid Nunez and Joe Brainard

 

I remember thinking an elemeno P was a special kind of P.

I remember Spam for dinner.

I remember not knowing how to say “segue.” 

I remember wanting to catch all the turtles on the Reservoir and bring them home.

I remember being mad at turtles.

I remember the dog my parents gave away. She nipped. She was perfect.

I remember chipped beef on toast, which we only ate when my dad was out of town.

I remember the dogs of Sherwood Forest, among them Bosco, Cluny Brown, Pepe, Mamma Mia, and Pork Chop.

I remember diving off the high dive for the last time.

I remember belly flops.

I remember Kick-the-Can on Friar Tuck Circle.

I remember the taste of fear.

I remember including the mussels when I counted how many pets I had. 

I remember carrying my nextdoor neighbors over the pine cones.

I remember never wearing shoes in the summer.

I remember stepping in dog doo.

I remember drinking water from the hose and how you had to wait for it to cool off.

I remember crabapple wars.

I remember Miss Tillie walking down the street in her slip.

I remember wondering why the Howells took so many clothes on a three-hour tour.

I remember the scent of sweet olive by the back door.

I remember my new PF Flyers did not make me run faster.

I remember asking my parents to buy me an ocelot.

 

Draft, Susan Thomsen, 2024

*****

In her novel The Vulnerables, Sigrid Nunez writes, “There is a foolproof cure for writer’s block, according to a teacher I know: start with the words I remember.” The narrator, a writing teacher, recalls assigning Joe Brainard’s book I Remember to her class and then asking them to write in a similar style. Recognizing that some of her students might be intimidated by such an idea, she suggests “they make two sets [of lines starting with “I remember"], one in which they wrote down true reminiscences, another in which they made things up, and intersplice them.”

I could not resist, of course! Nunez’s narrator was right: the sentences just flowed when I started with “I remember.” Making some of it up helped keep me going, though in the end I tossed those parts. I plan to read the Brainard soon; I didn’t do so yet because I didn’t want to inadvertently lift anything. 

Is this a poem? Good question. Was this fun to write? Yes!

The Poetry Friday roundup for April 26th is at the blog There is no such thing as a God-forsaken town.

Found Poem: Urban Nature

Urban Nature

Cityful passing away,
other cityful coming,
passing away too:
other coming on,
passing on.
Houses, lines of houses,
streets, miles of pavements,
piledup bricks, stones. 
Changing hands. 
This owner, that.

Source: Ulysses, by James Joyce

*****

I’m slowly reading Ulysses with a group at a local library, and this passage seemed particularly poetic when I came across it recently. I broke it up into short lines, and gave it a title.

Now I have the itch to go to Dublin and take the Footsteps of Leopold Bloom Walking Tour. But first I better read the next 498 pages of the book.

The Poetry Friday roundup for March 22nd is at Rose Cappelli's Imagine the Possibilities.

Photo by ST.

Lady Liberty

It's fascinating to see where poetry pops up in public spaces. Here Nathalie Handal's poem "Lady Liberty" watches over Zang Toi's hand-beaded New York City skyline cape and Enrique Torres's graffiti jacket; all constitute a display in the super-fun exhibition "This Is New York: 100 Years of the City in Art and Pop Culture," at the Museum of the City of New York.

If the print is too small to see in the photo, you can also read the poem at the Poetry Society of America.

Handal, a French-American poet with Palestinian roots, also translates, edits, and writes plays. And teaches! She's the author of  "The City and the Writer" column for Words Without Borders. You can read more about this multi-talented woman at the Poetry Foundation and at her own website.

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 23rd is at Tabatha Yeatts's blog, The Opposite of Indifference.

Photo by ST (2024).

Poet Evie Shockley

Length of video: 2 minutes, 16 seconds

Evie Shockley recorded this poem a while back as part of the Art for Justice project at the University of Arizona. According to the project's website, 

The University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Art for Justice grant funds a three-year project that commissions new work from leading writers in conversation with the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, with the goal of creating new awareness and empathy through presentation and publication.

I wanted to include the video here to introduce Shockley's poetry to folks who might not know it yet. You can hear how powerful it is. Every morning lately I read a few poems from her new collection, suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), and savor them. Prose poem fans will want to add "the lost track of time" (no online version available without registration/subscription) to their mentor-text lists, and the same applies to those inclined toward ekphrastic works, with "perched." Fortunately, that poem appears on the book's website, which is linked above.

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 16th is at Margaret Simon's Reflections on the Teche. Here's a shout-out to Margaret, our host and my fellow Jacksonian!

Poetry Books to Look For, 2024

If you want to move to the city, you can, Miss Grehan said. And studying poetry at university is a wonderful thing to do. But more important is to read poetry, and write poetry, every day. It doesn't have to be for long. If just once a day, people would read a poem instead of picking up their phone, I guarantee you the world would be a better place.

from The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

*****

Maybe you're like me and enjoy both a good list and the idea of being well-organized. (Write every day? Ha!) Here are some places to read about new poetry titles.

Literary Hub

Sylvia Vardell's Poetry for Children. Sneak Peak List 2024.

Publishers Weekly. A long list and a Top Ten for spring 2024.

The Millions. Winter 2024.

The Poetry Friday roundup for February 2nd takes place at A(nother) Year of Reading; our host is the most marvelous Mary Lee Hahn.

Photo by ST. Part of the mural at LifeBridge Community Services, Bridgeport, CT.