Comments on: Poetry on the Menu

By: Dixon L. Creasey, Jr.

Dixon L. Creasey, Jr. — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:31:23 +0000

Here’s a poem about food competitions:

http://yellowfat.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/bake-off/

By: Laura Helmuth

Laura Helmuth — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:29:35 +0000

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

By: Amanda Bensen

Amanda Bensen — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:55:28 +0000

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

By: Laura Helmuth

Laura Helmuth — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:37:09 +0000

M.F.K. Fisher’s instructions for preparing a tangerine, from “Serve it Forth”

http://cbrulee.tripod.com/wrtext/mfk.html

By: Ed

Ed — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 02:42:19 +0000

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/

By: Amanda

Amanda — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:53:46 +0000

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.”

By: Brian Wolly

Brian Wolly — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:40:47 +0000

Lisa, you left out my favorite food poem, “Beans, beans…” What gives?