I bought a few ears of butter & sugar corn at a farm stand yesterday morning. All afternoon-- through grading assignments, doing laundry, revising a poem, walking the dog—I let thoughts of sweet corn move through me. Rather, I let the textures and possibilities of taste rise and fall through the permeable membrane of my consciousness. I have a fine taste memory, as I think many cooks have. I can taste ingredients, combinations of ingredients. It’s been very hot and humid, so I’d made a mild chicken salad with red grapes, tarragon, and toasted pecans for supper. Corn with a spritz of lime juice? I had a bright fruit note in the chicken salad. A jazzed-up caprese salad? No, two dishes with the same texture. Creamed corn? Not on such a hot day. I remembered my new corn zipper early in the afternoon, and while stripping the kernels from their cobs, a few thoughts came. Not just about the corn dish.
The corn zipper strips three rows of kernels at a time in long pieces. I picked one up and looked closely at the cut side, where three white rows were weeping a very sweet juice. Tercets, I thought, long-lined tercets. I sat at the desk and tried a revision of an elegy I’ve been wrestling with for months. Did the weeping kernels point me in the direction of the elegy? Did the long three-row piece nudge me to try a different tack? As I shifted the lines around, I thought, chipotle, the sweet bite of corn needs a masculine pairing and an aggressive cooking technique. There it was: a quick corn fry with bits of smoky chipotle. There it was: another window into a poem that had felt sealed, ungenerous.
Most of us know that Hippocrates wrote “First, do no harm.” This edict is used by Western medicine in the oath that physicians use as part of a covenant to their patients. Hippocrates also wrote, “Let food be thy medicine” and most of the world (China and India) relies this connection between food and health. I learned to as well.
Five years ago, realizing that poetry was not going to pay my bills, I took a seven month long course at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in Manhattan. They train “Holistic Health Counselors” (HHCs) who then go and open practices in which they use a broad range of theories and research about nutrition to help clients improve their health. I found the education, which ranged from Ayurvedic medicine to the latest scientific research in nutrition being done at Harvard, deeply helpful. I opened a private practice as an HHC in 2007, just as the economy imploded. I lasted only a year, but my training led me to a writing gig as a feature writer for the “Conscious Kitchen” column at Natural Home & Garden magazine I developed healthy vegetarian recipes and wrote short pieces about the nutrition and history of each recipe. It was great fun to write these articles, the pay was good, and it was a thrill to see professional photographs of the recipes I’d developed. They looked far less appealing in my kitchen as I tested them!
Leslie McGrath's recent post about the similarities between writing and cooking reminded me of this passage, by Charles Simic:
If not in bed, my next writing-place of choice is the kitchen, with its smells of cooking. Some hearty soup or a stew simmering on the stove is all I need to get inspired. At such moments, I‘m reminded how much writing poetry resembles the art of cooking. Out of the simplest and often the most seemingly incompatible ingredients and spices, using either tried-and-true recipes, or concocting something at the spur of the moment, one turns out forgettable or memorable dishes. All that’s left for the poet to do is garnish his poems with a little parsley and serve them to poetry gourmets.
-- Charles Simic, New York Review of Books, February 10, 2012
I’ve promised pie filling today. Here it is in the form of a literary controversy which, like the pie plates, doesn’t appear to have gotten much light. The 2012 edition of Pushcart Prize anthology contains within its introduction by publisher Bill Henderson the following statements:
“I have long railed against the e-book and instant Internet publication as damaging to writers. Instant anything is dangerous — great writing takes time. You should long to be as good as John Milton and Reynolds Price, not just barf into the electronic void.”
I think very highly of the Pushcart Prizes. I believe that annual poetry anthologies are a vital means of getting poetry more widely read (beyond the walls of other poets’ bedrooms and academe.) They also serve as a kind of enormous flip book. A look through a decade’s worth of this kind of anthology gives the reader a sense the prevailing preoccupations and styles of American poetry during that period.
What I did not know, and what concerns me, is that the publisher of the Pushcart Prize anthology seems to be saying that literature published in electronic form is of lower quality, thus not considered for their prize and their publication. This has caused a great deal of concern among certain online literary magazines, some of whom have decided to no longer nominate for the Pushcart Prize.
This goes on for about thirty more episodes -- in Chinese or Mongolian, your guess is as good as mine. Genghis Khan (real name: Temujin) was a pretty bad guy but what the hell. The Mongols under GK and his successors did great until defeated by the Mamluks in 1260, partly because the Mamluks had stronger horses. The Mamluks were also horrible. Interesting that a couple of Mongol expeditions sent against Vietnam by Kublai Khan were defeated by the Vietnamese guerilla fighters. I guess "Charlie" had some tricks up his sleeve even then. As longtime visitors to this site know, Mongols today are very interested in poetry. The film entitlted "The Weeping Camel" is a wonderful resource about contemporary Mongolia.
Librettist ("The Rothschilds"), playwright, and Emmy-award winning screenwriter Sherman Yellen celebrates the jubilee of his marriage in this post via Huffington:
<<<
When we married on a sweltering June day in 1953, the chance of our marriage lasting was remote -- even when divorce was something of a rarity in our world. Born in the early Depression years we came of age in post WWII America. I'd just turned 21, a recent college graduate with a determination to make my living as a writer, and Joan was 19, and an amazingly beautiful girl at a time when Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman set the standard. We met at college, as many people did who married early. We were far too young to have settled feelings, and we had no jobs or money: a recipe for a marital disaster.
Neither of our parents had been divorced. Mine had soldiered through some difficult years, while hers had enjoyed a good marriage, so divorce was not in our DNA.
We were outspoken, opinionated, stubborn -- oh, so stubborn -- and not afraid of snapping a judgment or having a good fight. No smart bookmaker would have given odds on our marriage enduring for six years, let alone 60. Young people in love in those Eisenhower/Kennedy years didn't live together first as 80 percent of the couples do today; they got married amidst a family celebration and a lot of ugly wedding presents: silver-plated table top cigarette lighters, crystal ashtrays, and enough wooden salad bowls to launch a life devoted to nothing more than smoking and eating iceberg lettuce and pale pink hot-house tomatoes.
We were Depression era babies who married in "The Age of Anxiety" when fear of the bomb, the Russians, juvenile delinquents, and flying saucers lived side by side with Father Knows Best, comedian Milton Berle, the poems of W.H. Auden, and the dreaded, indefinable "existentialism." Although TV had made its steady incursions into movie-going, it was still a time of superb filmmaking. Storytelling was an art that then depended on good writing and performances, not special effects. Brilliant film stars acted in literate movies such as Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve and On The Waterfront and superbly crafted comedies such as Some Like it Hot filled the big theater screen with laughter and glory. And so we have lived from that Age of Anxiety to the Age of Kardashian where a glut of celebrities whose work nobody has ever heard of go in and out of rehab as the cameras roll and turn their sad, soft disorders into hard cash. Life may be far more expensive than it was in the '50s and '60s, but fame and fortune are so much cheaper.
Okay, enough from the grouchy old man -- on with the story. >>>
I’ve been dying to show you all these beautiful old pie plates we found recently. They were resting on a beam above the ceiling of a bedroom in our house. The house was built in 1749 and is thought to be one of the first farmhouses in my town of Stonington, CT. Like many very old houses, it’s been added onto over the years. Still, it’s a little old Cape Cod style home which once was a sheep farm, then a Christmas tree farm, now home to a boat builder and his poet wife. My husband Bill is one of a dwindling breed. He and the ten other men who work at his shop restore old wooden boats. It takes decades to learn to do what they do. Imagine building furniture which must fit a hull’s swoop and curves so perfectly that it can function well in years of rough seas.
We have a saying at our house: if it’s food, Leslie can cook it; if it’s wood, Bill can fix it.
Once upon a New York Times, there was a Sunday section called "The News of the Week in Review," which was a non-parody version of "That Was the Week That Was" -- TW3 for short -- the British TV hit of 1962 or '63 that crossed the great pond and introduced David Frost to the countrymen and -women of Robert Frost.
Such a magazoon today would tell you, in elliptical Winchell style, that Mexico, Latin America's second biggest economy, is hosting a presidential election this year and the candidates include "a Hitler admirer, a self-confessed adulterer, and a strictly informal entry, an ex-Playboy model turned production assistant, Julia Orayen," who is evidently running on a cleavage campaign (source: Barron's, June 25, 2012, "Magical Games" by that irascible master of Wall Street skepticism, Alan Abelson). . . Texas Monthly tells us that Larry Hagman, Dallas's main man, was about to have a nervous breakdown in 1965 or '66 when his Hollywood buddy Peter Fonda came to the resuce and took the beleaguered actor to a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert. David Crosby generously handed Hagman a few tabs of acid and it had the desired effect. "I realized we don't disappear when we die. We're always a part of a curtain of energy." After his epiphanic Whitman moment, Larry gradually gave up acid in favor of leaves of grass. When he dies, he says, he wants "marijuana and wheat planted" in the field where he is buried. People "would harvest it in a couple of years and [bake] a big marijuana cake. People will eat a little Larry." . . . You wonder what the pictue of Helen Forrest, nee Fogel, in the upper left signifies? Keep wondering. . . Meanwhile, in Thailand they have their own version of Thai-dye T shirts. According to Andrew Biggs of the Bangkok Post (as quoted in The Week, June 22, 2012), Thai people of all ages and both sexes sport shirts with crude legends printed on them -- like "Heil Hitler!" or "I'm a cunt" or "Fuck Maggie Thatcher." The Interviews with T shirt wearers revealed that none knew what the words they wore meant. They bought the garments simply because they looked Western. . . Check out the current issue of Harper's. which has an excerpt from Paul Auster's forthcoming memoir, expertly done in second-person POV, a previously unpublished Albert Camus column from 1939 praising the power of irony, a smart, well-researched piece on Walmart by Dan Halpern (not that Dan Halpern), and a terrific prose poem by Mary Ruefle ("Little Gold Pencil"). . . Give up? I was listening to Helen Forrest swinging with the Harry James band when I began writng this column and ended with Bll Evans brooding at the Vanguard.. . . DL
The limbic system, one of older parts of our brains (the cerebrum, where conscious thought coalesces, is the newest part) is the seat of emotion and memory formation. It’s also the part of the brain that governs our sense of smell. There’s a direct route between the sense of smell and memory. Think of the thousands of scenes in literature in which a character’s memory of a long-ago event surfaces because of an association with a particular scent: a grandmother’s perfume, a father’s cigarette, a warm dessert lifted from the oven. These examples have always struck me as unsubtle, even trite. This may be because scent operates more on the level of the unconscious. Its memory-finding ways are working constantly in the background. And writers develop practices which help us orient ourselves in our work by using scent as a marker.
A couple of months ago, a friend --I’m waving at you, Laura Orem-- sent me a bag of chocolate mint (yes, there is such a thing) which she’d grown and dried. I keep it on my desk and breathe deeply of its sweet herbaceous scent, which calms me and takes me to the sense of joyful risk from which I write.
My office here at home is off the kitchen and I go back and forth from desk to stove during the course of the day. I realized that I wander into the kitchen when I’m stuck in my writing/grading/editing. Cooking is an essential act of creation. For an adept cook, it has all the elements needed for the creation of a poem, followed by much better odds that it will taste the way it should.
Last Saturday I had a bucket list experience: I spent two hours with in a high-end kitchen supply outlet store with my daughter, who works there, and her employee discount. I realized that I bought things not only because I needed them, or wanted to replace an older version, but also because the words used to describe them were too delicious to forgo. The “corn zipper” is a case in point. This tool allows a cook to strip an ear of corn right from the root of each nib. The promise of efficiency is delivered in the word “zipper” and I can only hope I hear that zipping sound when I first use it to make succotash. Succotash is a Narragansett Indian word for “broken pieces”, first cooked along the coast of New England where corn and lima beans were plentiful. It’s a simple mixture of the two vegetables, a little salt pork for the fat, and some milk or cream to hold it together enough to make it a dish. It was an inexpensive meal, a thrifty way to put leftover corn to use.
I also bought a tube “umami paste”. Umami is part of the flavor spectrum (sour, salty, sweet, and bitter) and first was known to the Japanese, whose cuisine traditionally combines foods to produce a savory taste like that’s found in fish, mushrooms, cheeses, and fermented foods like soy and fish sauce.
I was writing this really serious comparison/contrast between Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, which is a very good book, especially the first fourth or so and there are sentences throughout that are stunners ( I was disappointed the narrator didn’t change at all but I think that was a problem of not depicting other characters besides the narrator very roundly or deeply. Oh I really got into it, and I didn’t even say what I just said.) But then I went to band practice and the thought of continuing this essay thing…Ugh. I’d rather talk about music and my night. And so I present what I was listening to on the way home, an album that only ripens, as it’s the perfect critique of hyper-capitalism and love in capitalism and gender stupidity and intelligence and all the music perfectly enacts the lyrics and the lyrics match the music. More Songs About Buildings And Food, folks, by The Talking Heads. Listen to the whole album. All the songs are of a piece.
So many strident, dramatic, in medias res first lines:
Oh baby you can walk, you can talk just like me…if that’s what you want to do.
"Damn that television...what a bad picture!" "Don’t get upset, It’s not a major disaster."
When I came home from practice, my roommate had just gotten home too. She had been visiting her family in Townsend and was exhausted from driving back in the rainstorm, which was the true rainstorm to break the heat wave. She had had to pull over in the rainstorm and pee in a cup she was telling Little T and me, Big T. (We’re both Tanyas and thusly distinguished thusly) Isn’t this the kind of detail people put in blogs? Like PR for the world? Anyway, there were rainbows I had missed but they had pictures they assured me. J was exhausted but she had a bunch of love letters boys had written her, well mainly one boy, and an all purpose, meaning without dividers! (sic) notebook from ninth grade. On one page is a poem, on the next notes from science (Importance of Rivers) , the next notes from math (“I never leave a radical on the bottom!”), the next from Spanish (Hispanic Location: Costa Rica..visited during: Spring Vacation…enjoyed: the animals, beautiful water( (la agua fuy muy bonita)), the people)…future plans to see people: next verano), the next from math (**All repeating numbers are rational!), songs lyrics (Hold me/Like the River Jordan), notes from science, you get the idea, then a draft of a long break up letter which might have only served as preparation for a pretty intense breakup (As you will see, J. had some Loves.) I won’t include the letter, but I will a little of everything else. Forget about the Notebooks of Malte, here is the notebook of my roommate, J.
But first a love poem: My soul cries every time we depart I leave a piece of myself each time+ Sex with you is provocative I always raise an eyebrow at the display++ +++But you always satisfy In your arms I feel nurtured+++ +++And I do not care for my future or life+ The door to my heart is closed And the lock has snapped shut+++ Can I please throw away the key?
Apparently, this boy was a Communist. J. was on his record label, Pro-Soviet. She remembers telling her orthodontist about it when she asked her what was going on. J. says from the kitchen, she’s still technically signed…
Here’s another from the same boy is written in Italian. As far as I know, J. doesn’t know any Italian.
Lo so sembra io vado un poco fuori bordo con usare Rancid sui mei nastri, (apparently this letter was accompanied by a mixtape) Io sono sicuro lei puo relate…
Szymborska wrote in a poem that her soul was “as plain as the pit of a plum.” Such an apt self-description for a poet whose work, like stone fruit, is sweet flesh grown around a corrugated reality.
Food is everywhere in literature, and rightly so. Often this is explained as “all human beings eat.” But the universality of eating is only a small part of what makes food so damned compelling. Humans are eaters, but we’re also growers, harvesters, shoppers, preparers, sharers, and finally, eliminators, of food. The words for food, its preparation and consumption act like magnets. Mentioning a meal on social media is a guarantee of numerous positive replies. The words for food waste—from garbage to shit—are universal derogatories.
A fine poem takes full advantage of the spectrum of sentiment around food, using it as metaphor and gesture. Brittany Perham, whose first collection, The Curiosities was recently published by Parlor Press, uses the end of a meal as a conceit for her speaker’s address to her father in the poem, “Missive (1)”:
Alex Green’s poem “Blue Door Option” was first published in New Ohio Review 6, Fall 2009. It’s wonderfully paced and narrated with an authenticity of weirdness that I find terrifically appealing. When students ask how to know if one’s poem should be lineated or in prose format, I invariably say a lot of words that amount to a mystified shrug. What I want to do is point to a poem like this one and say, See? When it is a prose poem it just IS one. Prose poems aren’t distinguished just by the primacy of narrative, though certainly that’s part of it. They tend to create a headlong momentum and upwelling, an unstoppable sweep, which is a bit more difficult to achieve in lines. The very act of lineating can promote a sense of decelerating deliberation -- a somehow more measured effect. (Of course it’s foolish to generalize, therefore I’m compelled to do it.)
I love the fear expressed in this poem that an unwell magician might leave a trick un-undoable; and the idea of a magician’s falsetto “you could feel across your shoulders,” as if he could palpably throw his voice. If that’s true, then surely Roy Orbison was a magician too. Actually, I thought immediately of Andy Kaufman when I first read this poem, so it was gratifying for me to learn today that Kaufman also went by the name of Nathan McCoy.
Here’s Alex Green’s poem.
Blue Door Option
Everybody knew the magician was dying and this would be his last party. And it was too bad because all of his ex-girlfriends were there—even Stacey Mitchell, the news anchor who he had lived with on a houseboat when he held his breath for the whole summer. He was taking requests. He would do whatever we wanted. He would make birds explode from his chest, steal wallets from anyone in the room, build a house of cards on the back of his hand—all we had to do was ask. But no one did, because everyone was sure he would crack in the middle, fall to the floor and leave something suspended they could never fix. So instead of magic, he sang an old Nathan McCoy song about losing something in Hawaii. He had a falsetto you could feel across your shoulders. His hands were thin, he hadn’t slept in two months, and you were the only one who knew a few weeks earlier he had parked his car somewhere and never saw it again. When he was too sick to come out for his own garage sale, he told you to give everything away. You watched people take his couch, his television, his doves, and you felt like you were officiating a robbery. If you’re a decent magician, he once told you, when you die people will miss you. But if you’re a really great magician, they’ll always think you’re alive and in the middle of the best trick of all time. Even though you watched him fade in front of a machine, heard his breathing disappear like a radio station slipping off the air, you still look for him. In the eyes of the teller at the bank, in the stands at minor league baseball games, in the credits of independent movies from Iceland—you suspect everyone. He was that good.
- - - - - Alex Green is the editor of the online music magazine www.caughtinthecarousel.com and the author of The Stone Roses (Continuum), which is a cultural and political examination of the legendary Manchester band's debut album. His collection of poems “The Wide Gates Of The Lowlands” has just been completed, and he recently collaborated with director Tom DiCillo (Living In Oblivion, When You're Strange) on a screenplay called Years Of Summers.
This week we welcome back Leslie McGrath as our guest blogger. Leslie's first poetry collection, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage,won the 2009 Main St Rag poetry prize. Her poetry is widely published and has been translated into Portuguese and Romanian. McGrath is also a literary interviewer whose interviews regularly appear in The Writer's Chronicle. If she could publicly admit to a love affair with a specific food without being shunned, that food would be Swiss chard.
Welcome back, Leslie.
In other news . . .
Last week we were excited to bring news of the upcoming writing conference, “Telling Stories, Discovering Voice: A Writing Weekend for Nurses,” to be held Friday, July 20 through Sunday, July 22. Jim Stubenrauch, one of the conference leaders, writes to let us know that scholarship funds are available. You can find more information about the conference and scholarship eligibility here.
A friend who plans to spend Christmas and New Year's in Greece files this report on that beleaguered and financially challenged nation, the ancient homeland of Periclean democracy, Sophoclean tragedy, Ariostophelian comedy, the Parthenon (left) and Doric architecture (the model of the neo-classical facades that the great capitalist financiers favored), Plato, Aristotle, Achilles, Odysseus, Penelope, Orestes, Electra, Oedipus, Antigone, Teiresias, and the goddess Athena. -- DL
<<<< There are at least two ways of looking at the presidential election in Greece on June 17. The most obvious is that the election of New Democracy's Antonis Samaras (30% of the vote) was a complete disaster in that it basically extends the policies that led to the current crisis, and this despite the fact that Samaras's platform was indistinguishable from the Pasok platform (13% of the vote) until it became obvious that the Syriza antibailout platform (27% of the vote) was too popular to simply dismiss. This in turn led to references from New Democracy about "amendments" to the current bailout program, which has done so little for Greece, the rest of Europe, and the world. However, to my knowledge, no specific amendments have been proposed. . . . Syriza and its candidate, Alexis Tsipras, have a more sanguine view, one exemplified by the parties in Athens on Sunday night when Syriza learned it had come in a fairly close second -- and articulated by Tsipras a few days later in an interview with Reuters (during which, incidentally, he made no reference whatever to the chortling heard from the G7 summit when those august heads of state learned that Samaras had won the election. That chortling was echoed, no doubt, by the EU finance ministers in Luxembourg last Friday). Tsipras and his party believe that the bailout program is doomed and that the new government doesn't have a chance of staying in power. Syriza is ready to take over and reject the bailout, and Tsipras expects this to happen soon rather than later. Anyone who thinks he's being overly optimistic would do well to study the map of Greece in the Wikipedia entry for the June 17th election in Greece, remembering always that capital Athens is more like New York than Washington and that no Greek feels any further from what is happening to his or her country than any other Greek. It's a result of living on 6,000 islands. Yes, it will take Greece a long time to recover, but — longer than it took to recover from the Venetian and Turkish occupations? From the savage civil war after World War II? I doubt it. These are tough people who know in their hearts that it's better to be a truly sovereign state than to be bullied and slandered by Angela Merkel, not to mention the European Central Bank and the IMF. That map of Greece in mind, it can only be a matter of time before Greece defaults on its debt, drops the euro, and starts printing and coining drachmas. Samaras might conceivably keep his job is if he were moving in that direction. But his backers (I almost wrote "his bankers") wouldn't like that, he wouldn't like that, and besides, Tsipras is already there. >>>
You can love both, of course, and we do, but it is fun to compare these peerless singers, and one of our friends may have nailed it. "Billie makes me feel like things are only going to get worse," he said. "Ella makes me feel like things are looking up." The reflection occurred to us today while driving on a spidery network of roads that have "High" in their name -- Highland, Highgate, with different suffixes, "place" and "road" and "avenue" -- and we were in no hurry and were trying out the new Siirus-XM satellite car radio. And then we heard Lady Day's cover of a happy Irving Berlin song from Top Hat, "Isn't This a Lovely Day to Be Caught in the Rain?" She made this cheerful tune sound like a dirge, albeit one with a kick -- DL
June 22, 2012
Movies that break heat waves: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid..."Well we are involved, Etta..."
Skinny, tan women of the Hudson— all ages roast on a little boardwalk in June. Some have fake boobs and some have wrinkles. They all seem to be there alone, giving one another the right amount of space. One faces the road, one lies sunny-side up on a bench. Another, over-easy on the wood pier. I’d like to go back and join them, though I am pale and prefer pants.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark