Medium of the Month: Stacey Harwood; Ghost Poet: Ben Jonson

I'm thrilled to be "Medium of the Month" over at The New School's The Inquisitive Eater. Here's my first selection: 

Stacey Harwood,  poet laureate of the New York Greenmarkets and New School faculty member (where she teaches ‘Food Narratives’), serves as our Medium of the Month for October. She brings the voices of poets past to The Inquisitive Eater this Halloween season. Welcome, Stacey.

 

A persistent fantasy of mine is that someday I’ll convince a team of great chefs to prepare a meal based on Ben Jonson’s poem  “Inviting a Friend to Supper.”

I read the poem as having three parts: the fawning invitation, the description of the groaning board, and the promise of a convivial atmosphere. I love that up front Jonson stresses that the company is more important than the meal. And from today’s vantage point, Jonson comes off as the original locavore: the food must be seasonal and affordable (And, though fowl, now, be scarce, yet there are clerks, / The sky not falling, think we may have larks.).

 Continue reading over at The Inquisitive Eater. . . 

Comments

[Laura Orem]

This is so cool. I think Ben Jonson is one of the most accesibly human of the Elizabethans. You can totally imagine hanging out with him over a meal.

[jim c.]

Hi Stacey and Laura. I love this poem. I memorized the last few lines so I'd always have an appropriate toast but never remember to use them. But I love "No simple word ... shall make us sad next morning"--isn't that just it?

[Catherine Woodard]

"Of which we’ll speak our minds, amidst our meat;" Got to love that mood plus all those m's including the buried one in amidst. "speak our minds, amidst our kale" just wouldn't cut it.

[Matthew Yeager]

Love Ben Jonson for poems like this one:

On Gut

Gut eats all day and letchers all the nights,
So all his meat he tasteth over, twice;
And striving so to double his delight,
He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice.
Thus, in his belly can he change a sin,
Lust it comes out that gluttony went in.

[The Best American Poetry]

Thank you for your comments and for 'On Gut" Matthew. It's terrific. I love Herrick's Ode to Ben Jonson:

An Ode to Ben Jonson
BY ROBERT HERRICK
Ah Ben!
Say how, or when
Shall we thy guests
Meet at those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun?
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad;
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.

My Ben
Or come again,
Or send to us
Thy wit's great overplus;
But teach us yet
Wisely to husband it;
Lest we that talent spend,
And having once brought to an end
That precious stock, the store
Of such a wit the world should have no more.