Oysters, Pure and Simple (by Damon McLaughlin)

When my mother and I were recently, briefly in Boston, she wouldn’t try oysters. We’d been in New Hampshire at Toad Hall (see previous post), and that day Legal Harborside was our final destination before we headed out. We had just enough time for lunch before returning our rental car and catching our planes.

Like my mother, I too had never tried oysters before Legal, but with rare exception I am a seafood lover and always have been. When I was a kid, I once ate some 30 individual pieces of fish at a fish fry: bluegill, crappie, walleye, bullhead—whatever the catch had been from local ponds and the Mississippi, which was just down the road. Oh, my love for fish! Such gorging made me sick, to tell the truth, but after a year or so I was back on track as a fish loving fool.

Then there was the night I kicked this lopped-off, gray-brown catfish head the size of a softball. One of the dogs must have it hauled out of the neighbor’s garbage, and I—a good-natured, pre-adolescent boy—gave that sucker a swiftly running thwack! Only instead of a thwack! it was more of a spluuuugh . . . as my foot swept through that mushy head like it was rice pudding—all those fly babies staring up with disgust, that decomposing fish smell swimming into my nose even now, many years later as I recount the event.

But my love for soon fish returns. I try sushi for the first time. Forget about it. I eat mussels. Delicious! I try caviar on a little piece of toast. Disgusting! But then I learn from Andrew Zimmern that what I ate was probably low quality, over-processed salmon roe. Zimmern, who’s eaten some disgusting crap I would never consider, has convinced me the real deal is a delicacy. I’d like to try crayfish, too, and many other odd sorts of aquatic delights. They may be nothing exciting to you, but I grew up in the Midwest about as far from . . . the ocean as you can get. I grew up on, yes, fish frys, but also on pot roasts and potatoes, BLTs, venison, more potatoes, cucumbers, corn, raspberries and strawberries when they were in season, and more corn. Going out for seafood meant heading down the road to Eichman’s, which was attached to a gas station, for a basket of French fries and heavily battered popcorn ship, which I thought was delicious. And it probably was.

Anyway—I find myself with my mother in Boston, and we’re going to eat lobster since neither of us normally can get or afford quality, fresh lobster in our respective states of Arizona and Iowa. She orders a lobster salad, and I order a lobster reddened to perfection—the whole beast—fries on the side.

And the oysters, of course. I bow to the server’s choice since I don’t know what to select. She brings out a Bluepoint, a Wellfleet, and a Raspberry Point in that order, I believe, ranked by size and flavor. They’re on a bed of ice with a small black ramekin of customary Mignonette sauce, another of a horseradish concoction, and a third of an Asian-inspired, sesame-flavored sauce. There’s a lemon wedge and a bottle of hot sauce. I use everything. And I love it. I could have eaten 3,000 oysters, as it turns out, and wish I had ordered a few more so I could have offered my mother one without secretly desiring it myself. I did offer her an oyster, but she declined—adamantly. So, I slipped each one off its shell and chomped down with my newfound delight.

And as for the poetry in this post? There were three reasons I wanted to write about oysters, one of which was my mom’s boggling refusal to eat them, two of which were poetry-related. The first is that a lot of my poems utilize images of fish and water. Always have. I’ve tried to avoid it—and can—to make sure I’m not relying on that imagery as a crutch, but my natural inclination is toward fish for whatever reason, and since I don’t have a psychotherapist to shed light on this tendency, I thought perhaps writing about it from a different angle—a BAP blog—might be productive.

The second is that I am soon to embark on a traditional forms project, one that will revamp what I did as a grad student for a class called the Craft of Poetry, co-taught with poet Vince Gotera. It’s because a number of poets/teachers have told me they still find the fruits of our labors invaluable that I’ve decided to update it—quite a bit actually (anyone interested in the project should feel free to contact me—you’ll cut down on my cold-call solicitations). To prepare for that original class, I spent 4-5 months doing nothing but writing in form. I had very little experience with form at that point—with poetry, to be honest—and was scared to death I’d have to teach this stuff. But the truth is—I loved those months. Probably that experience of experiment is one of the most defining times in my life as a writer. I don’t believe I’ve ever learned more about poems than I did then.

Anyway, to make a long reminiscence short, it occurred to me that I could turn this whole oysters business into a metaphor for experimentation in poetry, whatever the form—trying something new while locating your place in tradition. It’s an apt comparison I suppose, but kind of . . . not worth it as it turns out. Sometimes fish are just fish. And I love them. And I’ll leave it at that.

 

Comments

[Laura Orem]

Lobsters in butter are poetry.

[Lisa]

Indeed, they are. How sad, then, to develop an allergy to all shell fish late in life. No more lobster boils for me...

[Laura Orem]

That's the saddest thing I've ever heard.