The Best American Poetry

"Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this . . ."

            It was warm inside the bakery. Howard stood up from the table and took off his coat. He helped Ann from her coat. The baker looked at them for a minute and then nodded and got up from the table. He went to the oven and turned off some switches. He found cups and poured coffee from an electric coffee-maker. He put a carton of cream on the table, and a bowl of sugar.
              “You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,” he said.
              He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven,the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. “It’s good to eat something,” he said, watching them.    
             “There’s more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There’s all the rolls in the world in here.”       
             They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he’d worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes.Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn’t a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.         
        “Smell this,” the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. “It’s a heavy bread, but rich.” They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

(from "A Small Good Thing" by Raymond Carver)

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A Look Back: Poets on Thanksgiving

First, a poem:

Thanksgiving
 

Later, after dinner, we examine your uncle’s photos

of trees, flowers, waterfalls, birds

until I just can’t stand it another second.

I am not at one with nature.  Never was.

Some of the people can be fooled all of the time,

even when you yawn right in their faces.

 

Guests, or ghosts, have taken over the house,

lounging in the living room, watching t.v.

Ugly images of war and politics are all I see.

Cancel the rest of the holidays, please, until this

knot can be untied and our hearts released.

 

-- Terence Winch

 

Gratitue for the Simple Gifts (by Laura Orem, 2011)

Boxed in, Blue Humorous and Bleary Eyed (Bildungsroman Holiday by Jessica Piazza), (2010)

How to Chop a Fuckton of Onions (more Bildungsroman Holiday, by Jessica Piazza)(2010)

Bildungsroman Holiday (by Jessica Piazza, 2010)

A Poem for Thanksgiving (by Martha Silano, 2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2009)

A Poem for Thanksgiving Week (by Laura Orem, 2009)

Venerdi Nero (?) by Moira Egan (2009)

Happy Thanksgiving (2009 - photograph)

"We Gather Together" (2009 - video)

A Thanksgiving Post (by Laura Orem, 2008)

Thanksgiving and Black Friday (by Jennifer Michael Hecht, 2008)

Your Brain on Turkey and Fixings (by Martha Silano, 2008)

Live Poetry Blogging on Thanksgiving (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

(Not so) Live Blogging, 10:54 pm [(by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Live Thanksgiving Blogging 12:26 pm (by Sharon Mesmer, 2008)

Happy Spanksgiving, from the flarflist [by Sharon Mesmer, 2008]

Pre-Thanksgiving Emergency Narrowly Averted (by Martha Silano, 2008)

From the Archive: Thanksgiving 1977, Albany NY [by Stacey Harwood]

My father had died suddenly in February.  The approaching holidays aroused more than the usual anxiety as we considered how we would celebrate without him.  I was living in Albany, NY, working as a waitress at the Victoria Station steak house, having dropped out of college during what would have been my final semester.  The Refer Switchboard, a community social services agency, put up a sign in the Honest Weight Food Co-op calling for volunteers to help with the preparations for the annual free Thanksgiving dinner, then in its eighth year. Word had spread that the dinner would be bigger than ever with roughly 2500 guests -- stranded students,  the homeless, the lonely -- expected for turkey and all of the traditional fixings. The next day, I took a trip to the wholesale vegetable market in Menands, bought a bushel of butternut squash to roast and puree in my apartment kitchen. I dropped off my donation at cooking central, the kitchen in the First Presbyterian Church at the corner of State and Willet, and once there, decided to stay on to help out with the remaining preparations.  Over the next several days leading up to Thanksgiving, I pitched in whenever I could and wherever extra hands were needed.  I must have peeled and chopped a thousand onions, so many that I grew immune to my tears. The church kitchen was always warm and fragrant with the aroma of caramelizing onions, carrots, and celery, the holy trinity base of so many dishes.  The volunteers during the daytime shifts were mostly older women involved with the church who were matter of fact and took no special notice of me. At night, the younger volunteers took over.  I looked forward to walking in, tying my apron, and getting to it, all business. 

The doors to the church opened at 11:00 on Thanksgiving day. The line of hungry diners waiting to enter wrapped around the block and into Washington Park.  Inside the church, the tables were set with linen and adorned with flowers.  The meal was served on China and eaten with stainless steel cutlery; no plastic or paper. The dining room, a gigantic auditorium, was decorated at one end with an overflowing horn of plenty. We served the main courses cafeteria style but from beautiful chafing dishes.  Volunteers circulated like waiters in restaurants to refill coffee cups.  At one point, the room fell silent then erupted in applause when several dozen cheesecakes arrived, a last-minute donation from Juniors, in Brooklyn. 

My sister Amy, my brother Hunter, and my mom made the two hour trip from Monsey, NY to volunteer with me on Thanksgiving day. My roommates were away with their own families so everyone would have a place to sleep. (I lived in a three bedroom railroad flat above my landlord, a Pakistani couple with two small children.  Mrs. Siddiqui cooked non-stop, with spices she brought back from twice-yearly trips to her homeland. The aromas drifting upward from her kitchen seduced my uneducated senses; I begged her to teach me to cook whatever it was she was making on any given day.  That's another story. )

Our plan was to volunteer for a few hours and have our own dinner later back at my apartment. But there was so much to do and so many to feed.  Plus, we were having fun. So we stayed on well into the evening, sharing dinner with the other volunteers and helping with the clean-up. Turkey never tasted so good.  The secret, revealed to me by the head cook, was to turn the bird part way through roasting to let the fat trickle down into the breast meat. 

The picture above was taken by Skip Dickstein, the photographer for the Albany Times Union assigned to cover the event. I'm in the middle, flanked by Amy and my mother. Skip had stopped by the church earlier in the week and taken my picture while I was at work chopping onions.  I flirted with him shamelessly, thinking that by doing so I could get a print of the photos.  

-- sdh

Poets Do Thanksgiving: Karen Resta

I'm already sick of turkey. I'm sick of the idea of it, disgusted by the thought of it, huge, pale and looming on the kitchen counter, threatening and nasty, unconciliatory like the approach to a war. Those goosebump pimples on its hide, the nasty neck looking like someone's severed penis captured and wrapped in tight plastic with dangling gizzards, bloody liver, little gobs of excess fat, it all adds up to sheer terrorism, and I won't have it. Not for the rising aroma from the oven that serves as the fireplace-replacement of our times, steely and meaningful; not for the drumstick which screams like a Medieval painting when wrenched free from its tendons, hungering peasants and small children alike.

-- Karen Resta

The Bookstore [by Michael Schiavo]

11 Housatonic Street, Lenox, MA

I’ve worked at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts since at least last Wednesday.

If you get that joke, then you’ve probably been to The Bookstore where you’ve probably met owner Matthew Tannenbaum. Matt’s been in the book business for a little while now. He recounts the beginning of his career as a bookman in the chapbook-sized My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor (on sale during business hours; come on in). He’s working on a longer memoir, so I won’t, nor for reasons of plausible deniability do I particularly want to, divulge the details—which are wild, heartbreaking, historic—suffice it to say that The Bookstore came into his care during the nation’s bicentennial year and, despite claims to the contrary, he’s been serving the people of Lenox and the greater community ever since.

The Bookstore is a New England City Lights: a thriving counterculture symbol not simply because of Matt’s connection to banned-book champion Steloff nor solely because of his own place in that continuum (e.g. the poster trumpeting Matt’s reading of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, the photo of him shaking hands with Vaclav Havel) but precisely because it’s a shop stocked by a man who knows that reading a book, whether the pulpiest mass market, the most surreal love poetry, or the humblest picture book, can reveal in any person of any age limitless reservoirs of imagination, of wonder, of hope. In the E-Age, selling print books is about as countercultural an activity as you can engage in in these United States.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only, that puts me in my car 2 ½ hours ’round-trip three days a week. On one of those three days, I usually get a compliment on the store’s selection, which has been cultivated by Matt through nearly four decades of his own literary love affairs—but is also the result of a bookman having a deep and ongoing conversation with his community. Because he loves to hear what people love to read, whether they’re old friends or new acquaintances, they in turn allow Matt to suggest books they might not otherwise consider, enlarging their own point of view. It’s buoying to observe and it happens all the time.

If you’ve read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, you might have seen Matt’s name before. This contemporary epic of motherhood and community was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street in Lenox, down the street and around the corner from The Bookstore. Almost everything in Lenox is down the street and around the corner. Matt appears a couple of times, but the most notable occurs near the end of Part III, on page 53 of the latest New Directions paperback (NDP876). On the preceding page, standing in the health food store, the question comes: “You think something like a book will change the world, don’t you?” The answer, in the next line: “I do, I take pleasure in taking the milk with the most cream”. A few lines later brings us to this wonderful decision:

 

Let’s go in to the bookstore to see Matthew Tannenbaum

The dream figure of the boy-father-mother who turns into

The recalcitrant bookseller as we do

                                                     I look over the shoulder

Of a girl flipping through the pages of a book of women’s faces

All beauties, bigger than life, black and white

                                                                  Scavullo on Beauty

You study poetry and read magazines upstairs

                                                                     Let me tell you

The titles of all the current books:

                                                 The Suicide Cult, The Ends of Power,

The Origin of the Brunists, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

War and Remembrance, The Winds of War, The Dogs of War, Dog Soldiers,

Mommie Dearest, My Moby Dick, My Mother Myself, By Myself, Uncle,

Mortal Friends, Nappy Edges, Tender Miracles,

Song of Solomon, Delta of Venus, The Women’s Room,

Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down,

The Night People, Shepherds of the Night, A Dream Journey,

Daniel Martin, Delmore Schwartz, Edith Wharton,

Time and Again, Better Times Than These, Centennial,

The Professor of Desire, The Honorable Schoolboy,

Heart Beat, The Third Mind, Jack’s Book,

Beasts, The Magus, The Flounder, The Fabricator,

Words of Advice, Secrets and Surprises, Dispatches,

Prelude to Terror, Full Disclosure, Final Payments,

The World of Damon Runyon, The Stories of John Cheever,

Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Praxis,

The Annotated Shakespeare, The Last Best Hope

And Chesapeake

 

There are lots of beautiful things about this passage. There is no more “upstairs”—it’s now a slightly elevated section of the store with our children’s books. We don’t sell magazines; you can find a selection at Loeb’s Food Town next door, as well as newspapers. You can, however, still come and study poetry, as we’ve got an entire wall of it in the adjacent Get Lit Wine Bar, where I bartend on Friday nights, sometimes Thursday mornings.

Owner Matthew Tannenbaum behind the bar at Get Lit

It’s also a delightful snapshot of the publishing world in the late 1970s. One title in particular stands out: My Moby Dick by William Humphrey, a romp about a colossal trout and the fanatical angler out to hook him. It’s out of print, and we recently tracked down a used copy for someone. The Lenox connection is significant: Melville wrote Moby-Dick not but a few miles from The Bookstore at Arrowhead, on the Lenox-Pittsfield line. I pass by it every day on the way to work.

In my own decade-long career as a bookman, I’ve worked at various Borders and Barnes & Noble locations. I was the textbook manager at the Yale Bookstore. For a number of years, I was a manager at another great independent, the Northshire Bookstore, in Manchester Center, Vermont. I’ve worked for and with great people who have enriched my literary vocabulary, often in ways I never would’ve predicted. I’ve also worked for and with people who, in the end of the day, could’ve been selling hemorrhoid cream for all they cared, so long as you bought something from them.

The Bookstore is different.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a customer who, rather wistfully, goes on about how great it would be to own a bookstore. I try not to disabuse them. Those reveries of lounging around, talking literature the live-long are quickly erased when you have to deal with the day-to-day operations of unpacking, stocking, ordering, organizing the store. It never ends. But since we’re working with books, it’s a joy, and occasionally, moreso than any other bookstore I’ve worked at, we do get a chance to kick back and talk. About books, yes, but also about life. That is, after all, where the books comes from. It helps when Bookstore friends like Alice Brock, Bill Corbett, Harry Mathews, or Geoff Young stop in to say hello.

Anyone drawn to this blog is probably aware that the publishing industry is in—O clichéd phrase—a state of flux. We talk about this from time to time at The Bookstore. The conclusion we always come to is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is: to stock the best books, new and old, by the best writers from a variety of eras and styles and let great readers come find us. And they do. Every day.

Anyway, it’s too late to stop now. We don’t have every book ever printed available in the store for you to purchase. No one does, not even Amazon. But we do have a lot of great books, and there’s a good chance a few of those great books you’ve never heard of. So, like I said, come on in. I think of The Bookstore as like Ruthie in her honky-tonk lagoon.

We may not always have what you need, but we definitely have what you want.

* We always have lots of readings at The Bookstore, but one that Best American Poetry readers might be interested in is Peter Gizzi and Bernadette Mayer, Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

The Measure of Her Powers: Reading M.F.K. Fisher [by Amy McDaniel]

It is time for everybody to read M.F.K. Fisher.

As Stacey Harwood reminded me--when I said that food editors always go on about loving Fisher but then don't seem to want to print good prose--"Yeah, but they've never actually read her. Everybody always uses the same quote." 

Fair point. So when she asked me to guest blog this week, it seemed only right that I should pay tribute to Fisher beyond the one usual quote (for the record, it's the one where she answers the question "Why do I write about food?" She says, "It seems to me that our three basic needs for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it...There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.")

Fisher was a sensualist. She wrote frankly about desire and about her several love affairs. Others know her mainly for How to Cook a Wolf, a collection on how to stave off hunger during the war days of strict rationing. But as the oft-quoted line itself punctuates, she's talking about something "more than our bodies." Folded into Fisher's essays are meditations on every kind of love, not just erotic, and every kind of hunger, not just libidinal.

To wit: in The Gastronomical Me, Fisher describes (in one of several chapters called "The Measure of My Powers") a meal shared, at age 19, with her uncle Evans and his son Bernard, both of whom she desperately wanted to impress. Her uncle has spent five days gently guiding her gustatory coming-of-age. Then, in Chicago, asked what she'd like to eat, she says, "Oh, anything...anything, thank you."

Instantly, she realizes her mistake: "I looked at my uncle, and saw through all my gaucherie, my really painful wish to be sophisticated and polished before him and his brilliant son, that he was looking back at me with a cold speculative somewhat disgusted look in his brown eyes."

Her "phony nonchalance" has disappointed him. She sobers herself and studies the menu with real effort. And then:

'Just a minute, please,' I said, very calmly. I stayed quite cool, like a surgeon when he begins an operation, or maybe a chess player opening a tournament. Finally I said to Uncle Evans, without batting an eye, 'I'd like iced consomme, please, and then sweetbreads sous cloche and a watercress salad...and I'll order the rest later.'

I remember that he sat back in his chair a little, and I knew that he was proud of me and very fond of me. I was too. 

And never since then have I let myself say, or even think, 'Oh, anything,' about a meal, even if I had to eat it alone, with death in the house or in my heart.'

So, when Fisher says she writes about more than the body, she's saying the stakes never drop, not even for a second, not even during a sad meal taken alone. There is always someone's effort to consider--the cook, the waiter, the farmer--not to mention one's self-regard. She's writing about becoming an adult, with all the responsibility and delight that entails. The happy conclusion of the dinner is that both she and Uncle Evans learn that she has been worth his time and attention. That is a purely adult satisfaction.

And what a broad, generous vision of love and hunger, to say that they pervade all, so that nothing may be taken for granted. 

Cuttlefish Haiku by Chef Mario Batali

-- sdh

More on Sipping on Sunsets [by Moira Egan]

Don't you love it when the New York Times imitates life? When I saw today's article about sipping on a sunset and thinking about Italy, I couldn't decide if I should laugh or cry. I came back from Sardegna to Rome just in time for the latest heat wave. They've begun naming heat waves here the same way hurricanes are named in the States. Well, sort of the same way: it's not alphabetical and they are named after classical characters, both mythological and historical. The first one I heard about was Charon, then there were Minos, Ulysses, Scipio. Now it seems to be Nero. Insert Rome Burning Joke here. Except there really are fires in Rome, which isn't funny.

But here you see a lovely couple enjoying the sunset over Santa Teresa di Gallura in Sardegna. And here I will confess that I prefer Campari over Aperol, hands down. No, wait, hand holding cold glass beading with condensation--

Quote of the Day: Octavio Paz

“The melting pot is a social idea that, when applied to culinary art, produces abominations.”

Chicken Parmesan Meatloaf Muffin via Chow

Discuss.

-- sdh