Two Questions
1. How long is your acknowledgements page? V. Chang addresses this topic on her blog. (Blog rolled to your right.) Is it better to publish a book containing mostly previously-published work, or mostly new work? This is something I've never even thought about.
2. Why do I love food, love poetry, and hate most poems about food?
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13 comments:
Come to think of it, I don't like "food" poems either, but I love food and love poems, although I know I don't love food as much as you! My husband does. Everything he says is food-related. Trips we take have only food memories. It's so funny. I do, however, like food references in poems and I occasionally write about food. Come to think of it, a poem is coming out in Gulf Coast that has a lot of food references in it (our family used to have a restaurant).
I really hate food poems too. I mean hate. But think of how many famous poets have poems about onions or blackberries. (The exception that proves the rule for me is Plath's "Blackberrying," one of my favorite poems by anyone.) Food poems seem to me to be almost like poems about writing. Or movies about making a movie.
I can't really think of any food poems off the top of my head, but maybe it's similar to why I don't like poems about particular works of art: it seems an attempt to replicate an experience in a medium that's not meant to convey the experience to begin with, so it just sounds like reportage.
This may be an unpopular and/or irrelevant opinion.
I agree, the medium for representing food doesn't seem to scream poetry, or even paintings. Food is very real and often many dishes are a work of art on their own. Experiencing the real deal is what you need to understand it. You need to smell it, see it, taste it, and understand the texture to really understand it. Plus, I've never met anyone who has the same feelings about all types of food as myself. I want to be the judge, rather than reading of someone else's.
I do however think that poetry involving things that morph food would be interesting. Maybe something on Microwaves and Marshmallows or Torches and Sugar?
I personally find these comments against the presence of food in poetry totally horrific and obscene. There are four or five things essential to human life: sex, oxygen, water, shelter, and food. Oxygen I could see as not being a big deal for a lot of poets because we kind of take it for granted and it's easy to forget it's there. And water is a bit like that, too, though there is plenty of water in poems. Shelter, too, but lots of people like to write about buildings and structures, or at least imply that they are there-- in fact you could argue that shelter is always present in a poem in the form of its form. Sex is not so easy to forget aobut, and poets generally don't have trouble incorporating and liking that, though you'd never know it if all you read is Language poetry and quite a bit of post-avant stuff in general (someday some critic will write of the relationship between repressed sexuality and textual experiment, I'm sure). But food?? How could anyone say they don't like poems aobut food? Would you anti-foodites argue that there is little good fiction aobut food, or that fiction shouldn't be "about" food? Have you ever read Hemingway? Marguerite Duras? Why should poetry not have great poems about food like fiction has great stories and novels where food is importnat? You'd all be dead if it weren't for food. To say what you are saying, including Tony Robinson, whose blog was partly based on food, and who now is astoundingly saying he doesn't like poems about food, is like saying that you are a poet but you don't like to write poetry! You'd be dead without food. If it weren't for food, you couldn't even think about death, the main subject of poetry. You couldn't go to poetry readings or win poetry prizes. You couln'dt go driving to see the foliage in the fall. And what about having children? There is nothing without food, not even poetry. Thinki of a sestina: would a sestina be possible without food? You can survive on papyrus, but not for very long. Erasmus said something stupid once: He said: If I come into a little bit of money, I don't go out and buy food, I go out and buy some books. Earasmus was a bulemic and a pederast. Has anyone ever been to a hog roast? now there is a subject fo poetry. Also, now I fully understand why I went throught the trouble of sending Tony Robinsons my ancient and rather priceless paperback of the Alice B Toklas cookbook, and he hasn't made a damn single recipe from it yet. Roast potatoes for, my left foot!!!
Kent
Frankly, I like poems about things that kill us rather than sustain us.
Ode to Carbon Monoxide! Poisonous Fungi Sonnet!
There's just more at stake.
Well, I said I hate MOST poems about food. Not all of them.
Anyway, Kent, one of these days I'm gonna cook the Toklas dish that requires a half pound of butter to scramble six eggs. But i'm trying to lose weight right now.
*PLUG* Check out my 29 Cheeseburgers *PLUG*
*duh* Yeah, 29 Cheeseburgers is where it's at. I can't believe I forgot it. Those poems transcend their foodiness.
Actually, one of the hot "young poet" books of the past few years was Joe Wenderoth's Letters to Wendy (I think that's the right title). It's about eating hamburgers and such and fantasizing about Wendy. I remember reading a number of those and very seriously and wondering what all the fuss was about... I remember Wenderoth's picture was on the cover of APR and he looked very serious, almost mad about something. So "food poems" *can* be the ticket to success, see?
Kent
Uh oh. Does this mean I have to pull all the food and kitchen poems from my books?
I'm going to have to challenge all y'all on this one and side with Kent. Go see the blog. Will be putting up deeeeeelicious food poems for the next few days! And yes, 29 Cheeseburgers would be a greasy, cheese-topped place to start!
Tony, your buddy Nick Twemlow has a lovely poem called Dear Consommé in the forthcoming LIT, too. :)
Thank you Shanna for siding with me. At least someone is open to what I have to say. Tony Robinson is nice to me in private, but then he always makes fun of me in public. Or says something dismissive or snide-- like that long comment I wrote yesterday, the one that included the quote from Erasmus...it took me thirteen and a half hours to write that, to get it just the way I wanted it. And then what? It's ignored, ignored by all the cool young poets who edit cool magazines, like Verse and Canary and Forklift Ohio and the Kenyon Review, except for a quippy comment from Robinson, the stuck up chef who manages to look like the man of a hundred faces and hairdo's and bodies(how do you do that, man?), who tells me more or less to relax, he'll get to the little priceless, rare book I gifted him months ago whenever "he's damn well and ready." Yeah, I know, I'm old and fat, and there's nothing to gain by siding with the likes of me. Still, I will say: The sentence by Brooke about thinking about the avocado and getting horny is the best blog comment sentence I have read in a loing, loing time. How's things in Illinois, Booke? Oh, wait... I'm in Illinois, too. I forgot.
go eat your fish tacos, Robinson. I'm through with your blog.
Kent
Dear Kent Johnson,
I adore you. I adore your long posts. I love you more than my beloved fish taco.
I love food and I think I've written poems in general that contain food or make food references. I stand corrected, belittled, humbled.
Can I be nice to you in public and mean in private?
Love,
Your Humble Servant,
Tony
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