Food Poems

Kent Johnson has suggested that I post food poems by poets who like food on this blog.
I will do that.

Here's a link to one of my own Kent Johnson-inspired food poems.

Here's a food poem by Kent Johnson himself:

Dinner with Some Folks

--for Dr. Samuel Johnson

I was having dinner with Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, and the Count of Lautreamont. Some other minor poets of the pre-war years were there. Lautreamont was dead, of course, and his boiled body was being served in thin slices stuffed into dainty baguettes the shape of the pods of milkweed. Everything was going famously, Picabia was making Vvvvv sounds, holding the severed wheel of his crashed Belogna; Ball was flapping his papier-mache wings at top velocity; and Man Ray's three girlfriends, with their pointed, penitent hoods, were drinking absinthe and whispering mysteriously near the lime tree. Then it happened that Breton gave his ten year old, bowl-cutted son, Aragon, a slice of the Count's perfectly shaped derriere. "Eat," commanded Breton. The child dutifully swallowed and at once commenced to gag and retch, his little hands going to his throat, like the hands of a shot head of state, and he turned violet throughout the whole area of his body. No equanimity here! Nadja began to scream, the chained monkey madly pulled at his sex, and Breton launched into shouts, though not words, but primal, paratactic reports. The sounds coming from the child were those of crows, or something else I cannot yet name. In this moment of crisis, I didn't choke, nosiree, I did not: I sprinted over, wrapped my arms around his waist, thrust my pelvis into his backside, and performed the miraculous maneuver I had brought with me from the future-- the Heimlich, as it is known, squeezing and lifting the little brat's rib cage with all my might in five rapid successions. It worked... For there on the parquet floor, ejected at thirty paces and writhing, covered in a film of slime, was a baby shark. "How on earth did that get into him?" cried Lacan. "I don't know, but I could give a shit," said some South American poet, "So pass the fucking butter."