Food and Poetry Week 1
Corned Beef and Cabbage by George Bilger
“I can see her in the kitchen,
Cooking up, for the hundredth time,
A little something from her
Limited Midwestern repertoire.”
This poem is filled with double meanings and subtle metaphors, his opening line could be interpreted as him watching his mother as a child, or him visualizing her as an adult, and he continues to hold this mystery until the ending stanzas. The overlapping sentence structure also lends to this disorientation of time and place, with many lines in the poem seeming to start in the middle of sentences and run into the following line.
“The red wine pulsing in its glass,
A warning light meaning
Everything was simmering
Just below the steel lid
Of her smile, as she boiled
The beef into submission,”
His mother’s anger, repressed behind the smile, is boiling in tandem with her dinner, and I find this metaphor to be visually powerful. He goes on to say he can “feel her anger rising” as he chops a head of cabbage with her broken handled knife, experiencing powerful emotion triggered by food and cooking. This piece makes a strong demonstration of the connection between memory and food. While before I could only guess, his possession of her knife is the first true hint that he is remembering her after her passing.
“Missing her, wanting
To chew things over
With my mother again.”
Closing with another double meaning, this short poem made me feel as though I was being taken on a journey through his mixed emotions for his late mother as he cooks a meal from his childhood, and these closing lines demonstrate a tender yet powerful yearning for more time with her, to re-experience his memories with her, and in a way it seems he made this meal in an attempt to do that.
“You love apples So let’s speak Of apples“
This poem is an absolute beauty, Peter Heller seems to be comparing someone he loves deeply to an apple. It is another short one but it is so gently romantic I read it over several times and came back to it again throughout the week.
“Say I were to hold you in my hand like an apple round and red
And kiss you in bites on the table or“
This comparison to eating and kissing someone you love, or to holding someone you love, reminds me of the discussion of eating and erotica. Our dialect as a species surrounding love and food has so much overlap that it’s an easy parallel to make as we already have so many natural associations. Take the word “lovebite” for example.
“Under the tree where you dropped tump
And you reached up in cool shadow on the grass
And bit back crunch: God“
I am still thinking about the structure of this poem. While I do not know the intention of the three sections in each line, after a few reads-through I began to hear each section in a different voice, almost as if this were three people talking to their lovers. Playing with grammar and structure is one of my favorite things to do in poetry so I think this could be a really fun one to use as inspiration. I also very much enjoyed the idea of the apple biting back, not only did it personify the apple further, but it invoked a level of absurdity that perfectly matched the style and tone of the writing.
Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.
Samuel Butler II
The opening quote from Samuel Butles II provides a good idea of where the poem is going, and I enjoy the feeling of intimacy it invokes.
“I’m going to murder you with love;
I’m going to suffocate you with embraces;
I’m going to hug you, bone by bone,
Till you’re dead all over.
Then I will dine on your delectable marrow.”
This idea of eating someone you love plays into the idea of love as an all-consuming factor of life, being so head over heels in love with someone that it becomes part of your very being. What sets it apart in my opinion is the violence yet tenderness of the description of killing your loved one to do so, giving the poem a much darker tone even though the idea of eating someone you love in itself alludes to violence. It is an interesting push and pull between the tones of violence and the tones of love, reminding me of “cuteness aggression”.
“So you will summon each dry grain of sand
And move toward me in undulating dunes
Till you arrive at sudden ultramarine:
A Mediterranean to stroke your dusty shores;
Obstinate verdure, creeping inland, fast renudes
Your barrens; succulents spring up everywhere,
Surprising life! And I will be that green.
When you are fed and watered, flourishing
With shoots entwining trellis, dome, and spire,
Till you are resurrected field in bloom,
I will devour you, my natural food,
My host, my final supper on the earth,
And you’ll begin to die again.”
This paints a picture of the author as mother nature in a sense, her loved one is her most precious creation, cycling through life like all things but always coming back to her. I enjoyed the storytelling of this poem, the narrative is open for interpretation but the message of her love and overwhelming, gluttonous desire is unmistakable throughout. I really enjoy the structure but that is probably because it reminds me of the way I like, which may be a good reason for me to try something new with my writings for the next two weeks.
This one is very short so I’m just going to share the whole thing below and give my quick notes. This one is short, sweet, and demonstrates the fine line between food and erotica, it has a cheeky tone that plays with the bounds of pleasure in eating and food. Its hints of sexuality are playful, but ultimately never leave the kitchen.
“Let me cook you some dinner.
Sit down and take off your shoes
and socks and in fact the rest
of your clothes, have a daquiri,
turn on some music and dance
around the house, inside and out,
it’s night and the neighbors
are sleeping, those dolts, and
the stars are shining bright,
and I’ve got the burners lit
for you, you hungry thing.”
Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo
“The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.”
I love that this poem centers on a kitchen table, coming to college the thing I most looked forward to was my own kitchen table where I would have my own dinner traditions and routines, I called it my domestic wish. I actually find myself eating in the living room more often than not, but my symbolic kitchen table is just as special to me. The second half, referencing needing to eat to live, sounds very much like work I have been doing over the last few years surrounding food, cooking and eating disorders. I loved exploring the layers of emotion poured into this poem, seen through the table.
“The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.”
This line invokes gratitude, Joy, abundance, feelings of warmth and safety. The table feels like a provider and a protector. The meals had on it feel special, more like ceremony than mundane dinners.
“It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.”
This invokes a feeling of respect for the table, it feels like an elder or a respected family member. The table sees you from childhood through adulthood. The childhood has the knowledge to guide the young. Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.
“At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.”
There is faith in the table as a confidant, they trust her with their secrets and their pain. They allow the table to see all sides of themselves.
“Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.”
The kitchen table was the number one place to start arguments in my house, not all the memories there are good. Fights of epic proportions happened over family-style dinners that no one wanted to help put away after, and even if you felt like you won the fight it never felt worth it to have to sit back down at the table.
“We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.”
The table almost feels like it’s part of the lifecycle, but in the way the arrow that points in a circle around a life cycle diagram is part of the life cycle.
“Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.”
The style of this is short bites of sentences, the length ranges and the tones shifts rapidly but in a way that is satisfying to the subject and narrative of the poem. I would love to write something in this style, perhaps combined with elements of Apples by Peter Heller.
Poetry Writing
In my first piece, Gods in my Kitchen, I was inspired by Corned Beef and Cabbage by George Bliger. In my writing I generally have a hard time breaking sentences or interrupting flow for sake of narrative, Bliger’s style challenged me to break my thoughts into different sentences, changing the tone and pacing in a way I am not used to controlling. I particularly enjoy my line;
“My spirit came home through the kitchen window, drifting in on the scent of candied ambition. “
I wanted to capture the image of a pie being set on the windowsill to cool, the sweet aroma drifting through the neighborhood, a warm visible mist like in cartoons. If you have seen Little Shop of Horrors, picture Audry’s dream manufactured home and neighborhood. Somewhere that’s green and all that. I also drew inspiration from Ron Padgetts The Love Cook, trying to add an underlying hint of the passion he inspires in his writing.
In my second piece, Pancakes and Red Poppies I drew inspiration from Food of Love by Carolyn Kizer, her visually use of language and descriptions to paint small images that invoke big emotion is something I really admire, and I wanted to take the chance to wrote something more internally expressive, utilizing this technique. Her descriptions of eating her lover match more in theme with my first poem, but in style I am proud of how much I captured her colorful communication style.
Pancakes and Red Poppies discusses eating disorders so please read at your own discretion.
Both are still in the editing phase, I’m in the process of receiving peer feedback that I will apply starting next week, and I’m hoping to add at least one more to my collection by the end of the next week, although the final edited version will probably won’t be posted until I create my final project menu at the end of the quarter. Each one began with free writing from questions created from research into spiritual needs, human nature, cooking, and fulfillment. From these free writes I identified different themes and ideas that sparked my interest as potential topics, and then highlighting words or phrases I enjoyed to build out my poem.