April 24, 2009
Poetry on the Menu
An example of some less refined food poetry (Courtesy Flickr user DML East Branch)
April is National Poetry Month (it’s also International Cesarean Awareness Month and School Library Media Month, but I couldn’t find the food angles on those), and the literary food journal Alimentum is celebrating by distributing “menupoems” to participating restaurants in New York and a smattering of other cities.
This is the second year in a row the journal has compiled a broadside of food-related poems, designed to look like a menu. Last year’s menu included a translation of a Pablo Neruda poem called “From The Great Tablecloth,” a poem by Doug Magee called “Praline To A Kiss,” and several by the “menupoem inventor,” Esther Cohen, including “Posthumous Hummus” and “He Only Wants,” which starts (PDF):
he only wants
caesar salad with chicken
although there are occasions,
rare enough, where he
will order shrimp
I tried to think of other food poems, and two quite different ones came immediately to mind. First, the simple yet evocative “This is just to say” by the American poet William Carlos Williams, which I learned 20 years ago in a college introduction to creative writing course. It begins:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
The other poem, dissimilar in both style and intent, is Robert Burns’s “Address to a Haggis.” Whereas Williams paints a quiet domestic portrait, Burns raises his homeland’s humble national dish to heroic status, a proud symbol of Scottish identity. Here’s but a nibble:
Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace
As lang’s my arm
Very loosely translated, that means, “you, haggis, are one gorgeous, noble ball of innards.” The poem in its entirety, along with a more thorough translation, is provided by the World Burns Club.
Kim O’Donnel at A Mighty Appetite also served up a few tasty food poems on her blog last year, including two by a former New Hampshire poet laureate, the late Jane Kenyon.
Do you have a favorite food poem, or has food ever moved you to pen verse?
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Lisa, you left out my favorite food poem, “Beans, beans…” What gives?
I especially like “From Blossoms,” by Li-Young Lee, which contains this lovely stanza:
“O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.”
More here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171754
There’s also Allen Ginsberg’s trippy “A Supermarket in California,” in which he imagines shopping with Walt Whitman! (“I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”)
And on a silly note, I’ll never forget this little rhyme I learned as a child (the author is anonymous, as far as I know):
“I eat my peas with honey;
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.”
There was a knock on the door. It was meat. More food poems here:
http://www.tomatom.com/2009/02/love-poems-for-cannibals-or-vegetarians/
M.F.K. Fisher’s instructions for preparing a tangerine, from “Serve it Forth”
http://cbrulee.tripod.com/wrtext/mfk.html
Kim’s got a new (and rather profound) food-themed poem on AMA today, I notice:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/mighty-appetite/2009/04/stop_share_and_taste_the_poetr.html
This Billy Collins poem is only sort of about food, but it cracks me up every time.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19797
Here’s a poem about food competitions:
http://yellowfat.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/bake-off/