The Best American Poetry

Drinking With Grad Students [by James Cummins]

You have to let these poets, half your age,
have every way with you they hanker for--
like stuff you in a bamboo tiger cage,
or stomp your eyeballs on the barroom floor.
The beer helps them imagine grinding "smokes"
out on your hands--they'd slide stilettos in
between your ribs and thread bicycle spokes
through both your balls like shish kabobs; and grin.
It's just their fantasies they've trapped you in;
tomorrow all this stuff will be forgot--
they'll get back to the rhythm of the days.
You'll all agree this is the "Age of Tin,"
and all of us are wise when we adopt
the cool, protective-coloring of praise.

The Godfather of Trolling, or Who Was Lucian? [by Michael Fontaine}

One hundred years ago, in April 2020, we were lucky to host Michael Fontaine as our guest author, just as his timely translation of Vincent Obsopoeus's How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing (Princeton) came to print. Michael continues to explore this subject and has recently published a companion piece in Classical Wisdom Litterae. Here's an excerpt with a link to the full essay. The publisher has generously agreed to drop the paywall for the November issue. A bonus: check out the stunning illustrations, especially those of the Dürer frescoes, for which Michael needed special permission to share. 

Continue reading . . . 

-- sdl

ps. Click here for parts one, two, three, four, and five of Michael's April blog posts.

Just In Time For Rosh Hashana: The Jewish Food Society Podcast [by Stacey Lehman]

One of the highlights of 2017 was the opportunity to participate in Schmaltzy, a Jewish Food Society live storytelling event where celebrity chefs, grandmas, tech entrepreneurs and culinary mavens tell personal stories about when food, family and tradition converged in their lives.Before what seemed like an audience of hundreds, I told my tale of learning to cook for my husband following his cancer treatment and diagnosis of celiac disease. If you want to read about and listen to the event, which took place on November 6 in Greenwich Village, New York, you can do so here. It was fun! 

Naturally the Jewish Food Society has figured out how to flourish in this time of hardship. You can find lots of fantastic recipes on its website and now you can listen to its podcast, which launched this week. The podcast revisits live stories from past Schmaltzy events, and dives deeper into the storyteller’s experience of family, identity, and of course… food. I can’t wait to listen to the first episode featuring baker Zoe Kanan in preparation for Rosh Hashanah. And I'm looking forward to episodes from Adam Richman and Jake Dell, and more!

L'Shana Tova! 

--sdl

Two Dozen Reasons to Make Dinner [by Adrienne Su]

Twelve Ways Cooking Is Empowering:

1. When you look into the refrigerator at what used to elicit a wail of “there’s nothing to eat,” you see the makings of a frittata, pizza, or fried rice.
2. After making and eating the frittata, pizza, or fried rice, you can gloat about not having wasted the scraps in the refrigerator.
3. Scraps in the refrigerator start to look less like clutter and more like material for a creative project.
4. If you’re working on a creative project unlikely to generate income, such as a book of poems, you can turn humble ingredients into excellent food.
5. What’s in your food is under your control.
6. You can’t always control how a dish will turn out, but you can learn from disappointments.
7. Even with occasional disappointments, your house smells terrific and feels like a home.
8. After cooking, you’re forced to clean your house, or at least the kitchen, thus supporting another round of cooking.
9. You can directly support people who are sick, mourning, occupied with a new baby, protesting, or simply living their lives.
10. If you live in a place where restaurants don’t serve what you long for, you can still have many of the dishes you crave.
11. You have fewer cravings for sweets and snacks because you don’t feel, after a meal, that something is missing.
12. Fewer things are missing.

Twelve Usable Cookbooks:

1. America’s Test Kitchen, Bowls
2. Irene Kuo, The Key to Chinese Cooking
3. Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook
4. Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
5. Peter Meehan et al, Lucky Peach Presents 100 Easy Asian Recipes
6. Urvashi Pitre, Indian Instant Pot Cookbook
7. Susan Purdy, The Family Baker
8. Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking
9. Lorna Sass, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way
10. Ellen Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook
11. Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food
12. Online archives of Fine Cooking magazine (technically not a cookbook, but as trustworthy as #1-11)

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 5, 2020)

The Two Kinds of Poets [by Adrienne Su]

I have an informal, untested theory that when it comes to sustenance while writing, there are two kinds of poets: coffee poets and food poets. Coffee poets (who in some cases could be considered tea poets) can go half the day or longer without solid food; their focus is sustainable without the distraction and mess of eating. Coffee poets who are also capable of writing in public spaces are doubly blessed, as they can log many hours in a cafe without having to incur the expense of meals with their beverages, or the interruption of leaving for lunch. Bringing a thermos, they can bide their time in libraries, getting lost in the books they’re reading and writing, enjoying a communal version of a solitary activity.

As a food poet, one whose energy levels are better maintained by six small meals a day versus three large, I envy coffee poets their long stretches of concentration. They aren’t constantly reminded by hunger of their profane, alimentary existence as human animals. When they write at home, their kitchen sinks don’t fill with dishes within the first three hours. Their keyboards don’t get sticky or greasy. They don’t end a day of writing only to realize that, bit by bit, they have eaten all of last night’s leftovers and there is nothing for dinner.

The inimitable Kazim Ali is a coffee poet: “Early morning is my writing time-- and coffee is the key to my experience. I buy beans from local roasters, preferably organic. My favorite is Mexican coffee, the darker the roast the better. I used to hand grind the beans (more for the meditation quality of doing the work, rather than any notion of coffee purity) but now I just have a little grinder for them. In the past I swore by the french press or a pour-over if I was only drinking a cup, but these days I make drip coffee in a coffee-maker because it’s easier to make a lot and keep it hot. If I don't drink it black, I'll drink it with stevia and almond or oat milk. Mahmoud Darwish (in that rapturous extended passage near the beginning of his memoir of the Beirut bombing of 1982) says ‘Coffee is the sister of time,’ and I believe it. I hover over sentences with that warm company.”

Kazim, who in addition to poetry has written memoir, criticism, novels, and translations, while also building a distinguished record of editing and teaching, is clearly driven by more than coffee. Yet knowing this detail about his process suggests that we food poets might do well to streamline the way we work, to be more like coffee poets, only with food. We can’t cut food-preparation time down to that of brewing coffee, but we can aspire to limit it on certain days.

Generally, when cooking, I find that I have to be all in, mindfully trimming fat, fishing out lemon seeds with a tiny measuring spoon, intuiting the springiness of dough. Otherwise, I cut or burn myself, or over- or undercook things. Most “quick and easy” recipes don’t work for me; they spur an inattention that ends in disappointment. Yet on the rare occasion that I find myself free to write for a day or the better part of a day, I don’t want to dwell in cooking. I also don’t want to resort to a giant pot of stew that has to be eaten so many times that you never want to see it again, the way dogs resign themselves to their kibble after begging for what you’re having.

Here are a few ways to hang back from the kingdom of cooking while trying to sidestep taste fatigue:

* Embrace the powers of the microwave, which generates less dishwashing than conventional cooking and in summer keeps the kitchen cool. I’ve been making the Szechuan Green Beans in Barbara Kafka’s Microwave Gourmet for decades; it cooks in the dish it’s served in. (Barbara Kafka started out as a poet.) Marie T. Smith’s memorably titled Microwave Cooking for One helped me finish my last book; the chili and the fish chowder are as simple and good as promised, and the recipes multiply for when you’re not isolating. Julie Sahni’s Moghul Microwave contains miracles, too, among them Parsi Chicken and Savory Keema Cake.

* Cook extra of whatever you’re making the day before, but make sure it includes two or more of these elements: spicy, sour, bitter, fermented, or contrasting textures. Having to eat the same dish over and over is more tolerable when it has complexity; it takes me a long time to tire of Chinese spicy noodles, in vegetarian or carnivorous versions, hot or cold, inflected with some or all of these: sesame paste, peanut butter, black vinegar, chili oil, a touch of sweetness.

* Cook extra dinner before your writing day, but with specific plans to transform the leftovers into something different. Two books that can help with this are Leftovers by Kathy Gunst and Green Plate Special by Christine Rudalevige.

* Do what my parents did when raising teenagers and working: order rice-based takeout meals, then extend them with your own rice and vegetables, keeping the vegetables easy: sliced Napa cabbage simmered in chicken broth, stir-fried broccoli or asparagus.

* Team up with a local “food poet” friend whose eating preferences are compatible with yours, even if lockdown forbids eating together. Each of you cooks a dish, then gives half to the other.

Chances are, you will still spend more time in the kitchen than a coffee poet will. But channel Kazim’s observation about the “meditation quality of doing the work,” and adapt the wisdom of Mahmoud Darwish to your own temperament. Spicy noodles, too, can be the sister of time.

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 4, 2020

Grief Canning [by Barbara Hamby]

(Ed note: This post first appeared on this date in 2016 and it became the most popular post of the year, read and shared widely. It seems fitting to bring it back this year, when many might be adding canning to their summer of Covid activities. sdl)

Tomatoes, before and after (photos (c) Barbara Hamby)

Four months before my mother died, I was visiting her in Honolulu. She had quit cooking, and I worried about her getting enough vegetables in her diet. I usually spent the first few days of a visit making vats of soup and pouring the soups in individual containers for the deep freezer she had in her condo. I have a wonderful vegetarian minestrone recipe I'd started making as an undergraduate and developed over the years. I had also started making my own tomato sauce every August, and I'd brought jars to add to my mother's soup. She picked up a jar and asked what I was doing. I explained that I had made the sauce myself over two days the previous August. I ordered a box of forty tomatoes from my local organic market, and spent the first day peeling and preparing the pulp. The next day I made the sauce with basil, garlic, onions, and olive oil and canned it using a water bath.
           My mother shuddered. She had grown up on a farm, and she hated everything about farm life. She couldn't wait to go away to college and then live in a city. She had worked for seven years in Washington, D.C. before she met my father and then followed him on his career in the Air Force, first to New Orleans (where I was born) and then to Washington, France, and finally to Honolulu, a city she loved above all the others she had visited. She had left the farm far behind, but she was horrified to see her daughter embrace an activity that had marred her summers as a girl.
            I didn't really think much about it. So much I had done had horrified her that I was pretty used to this reaction. She was a life-long Republican and Baptist, so we didn't talk about politics or religion. She knew I was a Democrat, which was bad enough, but if she had known how far I had strayed from her Billy Graham take on the world, she would have been truly horrified. If I could have described my beliefs, I think I would have called myself an Epicurean, because I love thinking that we are made of the same matter that makes the stars. Also, I loved Epicurus saying that there was a soul but that it died with the body.
            On the way to all this, I had passed through a Buddhist phase, and it was these years of meditation that helped me forge a beautiful relationship with my mother during the last 25 years of her life. She loved to fight, and I refused to do it. My brother would fight with her about politics, and I would ask him how successful he thought he would be in changing a 60-year-old woman's mind, and then a 70-year-old woman's mind, and finally an 85-year-old woman's mind. But they continued to argue, and they both seemed to enjoy it.
          

My mother, shortly before she died.

  I think we thought that my mother would live well into her 90s, because she was so vital. When she died suddenly at 86, it was a shock. After the funeral my siblings and I cleaned out her condo, and I went back home to Tallahassee, and spent the next year writing, settling her estate, and making jam.
            My mother had a great death. She was getting ready to go to work, and she lay down for a moment and had a stroke. She was still working, still driving, sharp as ever, still beautiful. We all want to go this way, but it was hard on those left behind. It was especially hard on my brother--he was her favorite because he made her laugh--but we all felt it. I thought I had asked her everything, but every day I have questions about her past and mine. My history book is gone. She never wrote anything down, and she wasn't a storyteller. Every piece of information had to be pried out of her.
            This was the year I received a Guggenheim fellowship, so I was working on my project, but after the time at my desk, there were hours that loomed. I could have started drinking, but it just feels so bad the next day. What I really fell into was canning.
            My mother died in August, so once the fall came around, I was back home and it was citrus season, marmalade time. I found a great book, The Blue Chair Canning Book by Rachel Saunders, and I made orange, grapefruit, lemon, kumquat, and clementine marmalades. Chilean cherries came into the market, and I made cherry jalapeno jam, cherries in red wine sauce (gorgeous decorating a coconut cake), brandied cherries, which Saunders calls Christmas in a jar. I made plum cardamom jam, strawberry chamomile jam. Like a witch, I set up my cauldrons on the stove. I had a giant copper pot that my mother-in-law, Josie Kirby, had used to make jams for years in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and I was giving it another workout.
  

Figs becoming jam in Josie Kirby's copper pot. (photo(c) Barbara Hamby)

          I'd go to the market a couple of times a week, and scout the fruits. I made friends with the produce guys. When I had my fruit, I'd put half-pint or pint jars in the dishwasher to sterilize them. Then I'd fill my huge immersion pot with water and turn it on. After the first few batches, you set up a rhythm. While the jars are being scalded and the immersion cauldron is heating up, I put the fruit in Josie's copper pot, and poured in the sugar, lemon juice and sometimes pectin, depending on the pH of the fruit.
            I've learned a lot about pH, because I don't want to kill anyone. And I give a lot of jam away, because there's no way I could eat as much as I make. It's a sweaty business, one that requires concentration and constant stirring. You can't think about all the questions you didn't ask your mother, how she will never excoriate you again and how you'll miss that. No one will ask you about your eternal soul, which I don't think for a minute is eternal. But while I'm stirring a vat of macerated figs or white peaches and saffron or a mix peaches and blackberries, I feel a deep connection with something. Who knows what? Maybe part of the pleasure is lining up the labeled jars in my pantry, which is like lining up poems for a book or the memories of someone who loved you more than she understood you, as if understanding matters.

Favorite canning books:

The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook by Rachel Saunders
Gourmet Preserves by Madelaine Bullwinkel
Mes Confitures by Christine Ferber
Well-Preserved by Eugenia Bone (her recipe for cherries in wine is worth the price of the whole book)
The River Cottage Preserves Handbook by Pam Corbin
Canning for a New Generation by Liana Krissoff
Preserving the Taste by Edon Waycott

Barbara Hamby is the author of several volumes of poetry, most recently On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (Pitt Poetry Series). Her new book of poems, Holoholo is forthcoming in Spring, 2021. She teaches creative writing in the English Department at Florida State University. Find out more about Barbara at her website here.

 

Everything in Its Place [by Adrienne Su]

Poet and memoirist Sandra Beasley cooks differently depending on whether she’s writing poetry or prose: “I’m a tremendous fan of mise en place; one of my favorite wedding gifts was a stack of glass nesting bowls that I use. I’m methodical which, to be honest, is something that I pride myself on as a poet as well… For prose, I’m a mess—indulgent snacking, weird sleep and meal hours, hoping my husband does most of the cooking! I get overwhelmed with the scale of prose projects. I cook better as a poet.”

I can’t help but connect this to Sandra’s facility with forms. Writing a sonnet or sestina is an overt act of ordering raw material, taking the chaos of human existence and working it into a recognizable shape, with strict rules governing what can appear at the end of each line, how many lines there will be, and sometimes how many stresses each line should contain. Many good formal poems break some of the rules, within the bounds of what I call, in the classroom, not looking like a mistake. One could argue that free-verse poems do the same - give shape to the shapelessness of experience - and the best free verse does exactly that. But something about mise en place mirrors the compulsive neatness of rhymed quatrains, the symmetry of a pantoum returning to its first and third lines as it completes its mission of saying every line twice, without ever quite repeating itself.

Here is a curry in progress, in Sandra’s kitchen:

A fellow devotee of forms, I’ve made similar efforts to create order in the kitchen. I share Sandra’s enthusiasm for mise en place, which is essential for the speed of Chinese cooking (the actual cooking, not the prep, being speedy). I also do - or did, pre-Covid - methodical lunch preparation. Ideally, I’d start the work week with four of something like this in the fridge (not five because some weeks included a lunch out or at home):

This was a makeshift sardine banh mi - the carrots and radishes quick-pickled, the baguette not pictured; that’s mayo in the sauce container - and a side of fruit. Other favorites include calamari and white bean salad, with mesclun or farro in the other compartment, or a bowl. It isn’t quick, but making four at once cuts down the time spent per lunch. Seeing the containers stacked in the fridge erases a daily problem from the week and pre-empts the junky snacking that follows a hastily purchased, not-really-what-you-wanted sandwich. Most of all, thinking about lunch is over until the weekend.

Some advance-lunch guidelines: Once you have your stash, don’t give in to the temptation to eat one for dinner midweek; not only will you lose a day, you’ll also get tired of it. Don’t repeat a lunch for two consecutive weeks; you’ll get tired of it. Sauce or dressing should travel in its own container, to be mixed just before you eat. If the lunch involves good bread, slice and freeze the bread for the week, thawing what you need for the next day overnight, or let it thaw in your lunch bag during the morning. Some ingredients have to be added the day you eat, such as avocado; use a reminder app to carry the mental load of remembering to add them. Keep salt and pepper at work. If you have the space where you work and it’s allowed, having a small toaster oven there can be life-changing.

It’s hard to fend off the notion that poetry writing is an irrational, struck-by-lightning activity that doesn’t respond to ongoing effort. For sure, there are days when it seems to resist. But writing of any kind works better when you keep trying, and it’s less intimidating if you view writing as a form of organizing. Sandra reports about her photo: “I use that cooking time for planning writing projects; in this case, I was working toward delivering a commissioned poem on deadline.” I find this reassuring evidence that poems are made, not granted by deities. And on those days when kitchen organization seems impossible and you keep reaching for the chips, maybe that’s a good time to muck around in a larger, more sprawling project, dare I say prose?

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 3, 2020)

Without Restaurants [by Adrienne Su]

Poet Faith Shearin reports from sheltering-in-place in Massachusetts: “We are cooking a ton because even the carry out in Amherst and Northampton has shut down. I miss restaurants more than I can say. I love a lot of food I don't know how to cook: Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese… Our Covid diet consists largely of the things I was raised on. Several generations of my ancestors drank iced tea and fried chicken in eastern North Carolina; I made my first batch of cornbread with my great grandmother before I learned to read. My great grandparents were farmers and corn was their most prolific crop. I was served grits with one soppy egg for breakfast, and cornbread with most soups; both sides of my family were devoted to Brunswick Stew. Nobody could completely agree about the ingredients in this dish so a lot was left to interpretation and imagination. I like to pull the chicken off a freshly cooked bird, dice some onions and garlic, chop basil, then add corn, red potatoes, and lima beans to a broth that is half tomato sauce half chicken broth. One grandmother liked to add green beans; another favored several meats, including pork. Some folks make it thin, with tomato juice, and some make it thicker with tomato paste. I make cornbread like this: 2 and 1/2 cups of coarse ground cornmeal, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1 and 1/3 cup buttermilk, 2 tablespoons of butter. Cook at 375 for 25 minutes. I sometimes serve the stew with a spinach salad or make a fruit cobbler to go with it, or I throw a sweet potato in the oven and serve it with a little bit of butter and brown sugar. I like to cook when I am in the mood and rapidly tire of it when I'm doing it three times a day. I know a lot of people feel like this. The food I can cook well is the food I learned to make from my grandparents; it tastes like childhood.”

Faith and I are old friends. We both call the American South home - Kitty Hawk, NC for Faith, Atlanta, GA for me - but both live now in places where cornbread and Brunswick stew are more novelties than staples. Although my family arrived in the South much later than Faith’s did and our fried chicken was more likely to come from a restaurant than a cast-iron skillet on the stove, I share her connection to fruit cobbler and grits, and felt the estrangement when I first moved North. My Thanksgiving stuffing is cornbread-based. Like Faith, I cherish Indian, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants. My grandmothers cooked Chinese food, but I didn’t grow up cooking with my grandmothers, as the link had been broken by World War II and the Chinese Communist revolution; I never met my paternal grandmother. My mother, driven with her family from their home in Shanghai when she was a child, had to teach herself how to cook Chinese food in 1960s Atlanta, which meant the ingredients were Southern-inflected, the techniques explained in English by Joyce Chen and Grace Zia Chu. But because she knew how the dishes were supposed to look and taste, my mother was well-prepared to use (and adapt) the instructions. By the mid-1980s, Atlanta’s Chinese restaurants had multiplied approximately one hundredfold since my father’s arrival in 1948; many catered to a Chinese clientele. Our lives had reached the point where time was scarcer than money, so we often lived on good-quality takeout plus home-cooked rice and vegetables.

Faith’s lockdown-narrowed diet reminds me that the foods we associate with comfort and home are not necessarily made in the home. Restaurants build meaningful family memory, too. Without restaurants, her longing for, say, tofu with bok choy is no less a part of who she is than her skill in turning out a Brunswick stew; it only joined the family later. This spell of eating what we can is an opportunity to expand self-knowledge. What do we miss the most, and what is different about us without it? What skills from previous generations - even if we have to imagine them, as I imagine Faith’s great grandparents in a bad year for corn, or each of my parents as a foreign student in Georgia, faced with the mystery of buttermilk or white gravy - are we calling on now? What do we know how to cook that, out of forgetfulness or the excitement of the new, we haven’t cooked in a decade and are bringing back because the pantry, or a pandemic-driven sense of continuity with lost forebears, points to it? It’s worth recording, occasionally if not regularly, what we’re eating these days, as well as what we aren’t. One day we’ll be able to look at the list, understand what it reveals, and possibly even write again, with new perspective on who we’ve become.

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 2, 2020)

The Pauses between Poems [by Adrienne Su]

Most of the poets I know have been temporarily silenced, at least in verse, by the Covid-19 crisis. Recent months recall the aftermaths of 9/11 and the 2016 presidential election: impossible to write creatively about, impossible to turn away from. To seek the distance needed to transform experience into reflection feels like closing your eyes at the wheel. To wander into gray areas, so that a poem might begin in one place and end in another, requires a surrounding prevalence of non-gray areas. Now everything is gray, and wandering hazardous.

Was it really only a short time ago that the average poet was maneuvering to maximize writing time, stealing half an hour before a work meeting, setting alarms fifteen, then twenty minutes earlier than normal, or making notes in a parked car or real-life waiting room? As recently as February, as if poem-making conditions were normal, I was identifying strategies for increasing writing time by reducing time spent planning, shopping for, and preparing meals, without giving in to joyless repetition, frozen dinners, or excess takeout.

I’m more of an authority on the latter (not giving in) than the former (kitchen shortcuts), although I’m interested in both. Even before the rituals of eating became central to life under lockdown, I saw every meal as a chance to celebrate being alive and able to savor breakfast, lunch, dinner, or one of the many semi-meals I sneak in between. It’s a near-obsession. Despite repeated culling and frequent visits to the library, I have nearly 300 cookbooks, in addition to several shelves of food nonfiction. Over the years, including many spent parenting alone, I’ve assembled an army of appliances meant to save time - pressure cooker, stand mixer, food processor, programmable rice cooker, immersion blender, Vitamix - but also a number of things that aren’t about saving time: canning supplies, ice-cream maker, pizza stone, cake-decorating tools, and an admittedly neglected manual pasta machine. When there’s room for it, cooking is a pleasure and the closest thing I have to a hobby. Yet I find (or, pre-pandemic, found) myself constantly chafing at having to choose between writing and cooking, and resenting cooking for so being relentlessly non-optional.

Before the novel coronavirus upended routines, I often got up early Sunday, intending to go to the grocery store while everyone else was either at church (this is rural Pennsylvania) or lingering over waffles. I’d list what ingredients needed to be used up, then deploy an Eat Your Books search to create a week’s worth of menus that called for them, thus generating a second list, of what to buy. But I tend to page through cookbooks as if they were restaurant menus: “I’ll have the pesto-grilled salmon, please, with butternut-squash risotto and a side of broccoli rabe, probably followed by peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream,” with the intention, the next day, of switching to Chinese food. The list would grow complicated, requiring stops at multiple stores. By the time I actually reached the first store, it was crowded, and by the time I finished shopping, it was mid-afternoon. If I wanted to make lunches to take to work that week and dinner for that night, I’d have to start cooking right away. What happened to my plan to shop early, then have a little bit of Sunday to write?

Somehow, over time, though, the writing got done. That most of it has recently been about food seems relevant, but domestic chores can be the enemy of writing about anything, including domestic chores. I’ve unwittingly cut other things out - I’ve missed out on most movies, for instance - but, stepping back now, realize that I’m not completely inefficient in the kitchen. Over time I’ve developed a few ways to nourish a day of writing, on the occasion that such a rare day can be found, without too much compromise on taste. This week I’ll talk about some of these ways, with input from a few other poets on sustenance and writing (or sustenance and lockdown).

In the meantime, I say to any poet who can’t write poems these days, I’m with you. I can’t, either, especially as each day’s bad news keeps multiplying in scale and range. But not writing poems isn’t bothering me yet. From a writing point of view, I’ve found the Covid-19 crisis to be, in addition to a mass tragedy and magnification of inequality, a reminder that silences are nothing new. I didn’t write in the immediate aftermath of childbirth, or in the time around any move, or while starting my teaching career. I’ve even had days of silence in an artists’ colony, which in pragmatic terms is a waste but in creative terms, natural. Writing is a conversation. Sometimes you talk, other times you listen, and what you eventually say is more meaningful for your having listened. The entity you’re conversing with might not care what you think - it may even want to do you mortal harm - but by listening to it (while doing everything you can to avoid infection by it), you are developing a response. Like the vaccine we’re all waiting for, that response could take a long time. Pandemic-prompted non-writing can be a form of writing. By paying attention, we shape the white space around our lines and stanzas. That white space is not the absence of poem but a defining element of a poem’s structure. In the meantime, whether or not we’re able to compose a line, we have to eat.

A Bright Green Side of Broccoli Rabe

1 bunch broccoli rabe, about 1 lb.
1 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
Salt
1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes or a seasoning blend such as Penzeys Tuscan Sunset, Florida Seasoned Pepper, or Lemon Pepper

1. Put a large pot of water on to boil, as if you were cooking pasta, over high heat. (If you are cooking pasta, reserve the hot water for it in step 3.)
2. While the water heats, rinse the broccoli rabe, then cut the small stems and florets into 2-inch lengths. Using a paring knife, peel the outer layer of skin from the thick stems, then cut them into 1-inch lengths. As you cut, collect the thick stems in one bowl, the leafy florets and small stems together in another.
3. When the water comes to a boil, add a tablespoon or so of salt (adding it gradually, as dumping it in can cause the water to bubble up further). Then add the thicker stems of the broccoli rabe. A minute later, add the florets and small stems. Stir briefly, let the water return to a boil, then drain the rabe and spray with cold water to arrest its vibrant color. Drain well. At this point, you can set it aside until close to serving time, even refrigerate it overnight.
4. Shortly before you’re ready to eat, heat the olive oil in a wide saucepan (12” is nice) over medium heat. Add the garlic and stir until it’s fragrant but not browned, a few seconds. Add the drained broccoli rabe, stir to coat with the garlicky oil, and season with red pepper flakes or seasoning blend and salt to taste. Toss and stir until heated through, a couple of minutes, adding an extra minute or so if the greens were refrigerated.

About 4 servings, 2 if you love bitter greens.

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 1, 2020)

In Monet's Dining Room: Remembering Milton Glaser (1929-2020) [by Rozanne Gold]

 

"Milton’s designs were sumptuous, color-drenched, vivid, expressive and…mouthwatering."

The art world, to be sure, is mourning the loss of one its greatest graphic designers and typography innovators of all time. Milton Glaser’s evocative images are emblazoned in our collective conscience as a narrative that accompanied more than sixty years of American culture. Milton touched the lives of millions of art and pop-culture lovers, but more specifically, as a teacher-of-eminent-status at the School of Visual Arts, where he inspired generations of young designers.

 Less known are the remarkable contributions Milton made to the culinary landscape – in fact, he was an amuse-bouche of the meal that would become America’s first food revolution in the 1970s.  From restaurants to products to supermarkets and cookbooks, Milton’s designs were sumptuous, color-drenched, vivid, expressive and…mouthwatering.  Whereas Milton’s brushstrokes stoked so many worlds – music, poetry, book design, fashion, to name a few -- it is the world of food, supermarkets, packaged goods, and restaurants that brought us together.

Rozanne (left) and Nicky in the Gracie Mansion kitchen. The fern wallpaper was chosen by Mary Beame, wife of Abe, the 104th mayor of NYC.

When I was 24 and the chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch, Milton asked me to help him rebrand the Grand Union supermarket chain. The prototype was their flagship store on the Upper East Side near  Gracie Mansion where I was living. I had just returned from Italy where I studied with cookbook author Giuliano Bugialli. Milton was keenly interested in freshly-made pasta, pesto and mozzarella di bufala, all-things Italian, but also obscure in the late 1970s. We tasted jarred goods, canned foods, and everything from the deli cases and hatched a plan to not only redesign the stores but everything edible, too. What a stunning education to be in his orbit, and to watch his beautiful hand translate ideas into design.  

The Gold and Glaser design for the Grand Union supermarket chain. "We hatched a plan to not only redesign the stores but everything edible, too."

Milton wrote “The Underground Gourmet” (for the New York Herald Tribune and later for New York Magazine), but his sophistication about food and dining spread widely above ground as well. In addition to our mutual reverence for Italian food, we celebrated our ancestral roots with a love of Hungarian cooking, and were suckers for the cabbage strudel from Mrs. Herbst, whose bakery was not far from Grand Union. By the early 1980s, nouvelle cuisine was emerging and the focus of our city’s gastronomes shifted to everything French. Milton introduced me to the decidedly non-nouvelle work of Mireille Johnston, the author of “Cuisine of the Sun” (classical dishes from Nice and France, 1976) and “Cuisine of the Rose” (the food of Burgundy), whose wonderful cookbooks he designed.  

For the next many decades we worked together on other projects: We created American Spoon Foods (a company specializing in regional food products), and collaborated on all the menus for Aurora, the Rainbow Room, and Windows on the World (above, all three-star restaurants) when I was chef/director of Baum +Whiteman, the consulting group responsible for the creation and operation of all these places.

But the project closest to our hearts never got built: Monet’s Dining Room, to be located in the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd Street in Manhattan. Monet was Milton’s muse (I’m certain he had many), and the restaurant’s interiors were designed to look like Monet’s house in Giverny, France – complete with its daffodil yellow dining room and powder blue kitchen. Milton hired me to be the Director of Restaurants and sent me on a two-week trip to France to eat in dozens of two- and three-star restaurants with master chef Richard Burns who was to become the restaurant’s executive chef. It was a joy of a lifetime – to dine and meet the world’s most important chefs – Paul Bocuse, Alain Senderens, the Troigros brothers, Alain Chapel – and to walk around the lush gardens of Monet’s home in Giverny. 

Claude Monet's La salle a manger, an inspiration for "Monet’s Dining Room" to be designed by Glaser and located in the Barbizon Hotel on East 63rd Street in Manhattan."After a year the project was halted and simply remained a dream." photo © The Claude Monet foundation.

Today, sitting at my dining room table, I longingly flip through the pages of a paper I wrote after that remarkable research trip.  “A Gastronomic Trip to France: A Critical Evaluation/September 1982” – which included dozens of restaurant critiques and an interview with Claire and Jean-Marie Toulgonat, nephew of Claude Monet (and a distant relative of then VP, George Bush). I learned that Monet loved cepes more than anything in the world; that he adored duck wings grilled with nutmeg; that Monet’s cook was a woman; and that a typical formal dinner at his home would include a soup of truffles (from Perigord only), foie gras, a fish course, game course (another favorite was woodcock), and a roasted meat (such as roasted turkey with marrow).  Milton was, of course, delighted with such details and very happy to hear that the Troisgros’ chefs requested an invitation to the opening of “Monet’s Dining Room.”  It had been nothing short of a thrill to see Milton’s concept spring to visual life in his inimitable drawings. But after a year, the project was halted and simply remained a dream.  

Milton had big appetites and understood at his core that both art and food induce hunger, longing and desire, and that by sharpening and stimulating our senses – through the manipulation of materials, design, ingredients – we were all performers in life’s huge canvas.  I was consumed with his teachings. 


Rozanne Gold, is one of the most prominent women in the food world. As an award-winning chef, author, journalist and restaurant consultant she helped shape America’s culinary landscape as a pioneer in the food revolution that began in the 1970’s. A four-time winner of the James Beard Award and recipient of the Julia Child/IACP award, she began her remarkable career at the age of 23 as first chef to New York Mayor Ed Koch and later became the youngest female executive chef in the country for Lord & Taylor’s thirty-eight restaurants. As Chef-Director of the renowned hospitality group, Baum + Whiteman, Ms. Gold helped create New York’s magical Rainbow atop Rockefeller Center (where she was co-owner and consulting chef for 15 years), Windows on the World, and three of New York’s three-star restaurants, including the Hudson River Club in 1987 where she helped launch today’s locavore movement.
Rozanne is a graduate of the New School with an MFA in poetry, where she teaches "The Language of Food," exploring the intersection of cuisine and commerce, poetry and prose. Ms. Gold hosts and curates a series of literary events at the Garrison Institute, and was recently named a Board Director of "Brooklyn Poets." Her new podcast, "One Woman Kitchen" (produced by MouthMedia Network), features the inspiring stories of the food world's most remarkable women.

Two Dozen Reasons to Make Dinner [by Adrienne Su]

Twelve Ways Cooking Is Empowering:

1. When you look into the refrigerator at what used to elicit a wail of “there’s nothing to eat,” you see the makings of a frittata, pizza, or fried rice.
2. After making and eating the frittata, pizza, or fried rice, you can gloat about not having wasted the scraps in the refrigerator.
3. Scraps in the refrigerator start to look less like clutter and more like material for a creative project.
4. If you’re working on a creative project unlikely to generate income, such as a book of poems, you can turn humble ingredients into excellent food.
5. What’s in your food is under your control.
6. You can’t always control how a dish will turn out, but you can learn from disappointments.
7. Even with occasional disappointments, your house smells terrific and feels like a home.
8. After cooking, you’re forced to clean your house, or at least the kitchen, thus supporting another round of cooking.
9. You can directly support people who are sick, mourning, occupied with a new baby, protesting, or simply living their lives.
10. If you live in a place where restaurants don’t serve what you long for, you can still have many of the dishes you crave.
11. You have fewer cravings for sweets and snacks because you don’t feel, after a meal, that something is missing.
12. Fewer things are missing.

 

Twelve Usable Cookbooks:

1. America’s Test Kitchen, Bowls
2. Irene Kuo, The Key to Chinese Cooking
3. Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook
4. Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
5. Peter Meehan et al, Lucky Peach Presents 100 Easy Asian Recipes
6. Urvashi Pitre, Indian Instant Pot Cookbook
7. Susan Purdy, The Family Baker
8. Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking
9. Lorna Sass, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way
10. Ellen Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook
11. Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food
12. Online archives of Fine Cooking magazine (technically not a cookbook, but as trustworthy as #1-11)

 

The Two Kinds of Poets [by Adrienne Su]

I have an informal, untested theory that when it comes to sustenance while writing, there are two kinds of poets: coffee poets and food poets. Coffee poets (who in some cases could be considered tea poets) can go half the day or longer without solid food; their focus is sustainable without the distraction and mess of eating. Coffee poets who are also capable of writing in public spaces are doubly blessed, as they can log many hours in a cafe without having to incur the expense of meals with their beverages, or the interruption of leaving for lunch. Bringing a thermos, they can bide their time in libraries, getting lost in the books they’re reading and writing, enjoying a communal version of a solitary activity.

As a food poet, one whose energy levels are better maintained by six small meals a day versus three large, I envy coffee poets their long stretches of concentration. They aren’t constantly reminded by hunger of their profane, alimentary existence as human animals. When they write at home, their kitchen sinks don’t fill with dishes within the first three hours. Their keyboards don’t get sticky or greasy. They don’t end a day of writing only to realize that, bit by bit, they have eaten all of last night’s leftovers and there is nothing for dinner.

The inimitable Kazim Ali is a coffee poet: “Early morning is my writing time-- and coffee is the key to my experience. I buy beans from local roasters, preferably organic. My favorite is Mexican coffee, the darker the roast the better. I used to hand grind the beans (more for the meditation quality of doing the work, rather than any notion of coffee purity) but now I just have a little grinder for them. In the past I swore by the french press or a pour-over if I was only drinking a cup, but these days I make drip coffee in a coffee-maker because it’s easier to make a lot and keep it hot. If I don't drink it black, I'll drink it with stevia and almond or oat milk. Mahmoud Darwish (in that rapturous extended passage near the beginning of his memoir of the Beirut bombing of 1982) says ‘Coffee is the sister of time,’ and I believe it. I hover over sentences with that warm company.”

Kazim, who in addition to poetry has written memoir, criticism, novels, and translations, while also building a distinguished record of editing and teaching, is clearly driven by more than coffee. Yet knowing this detail about his process suggests that we food poets might do well to streamline the way we work, to be more like coffee poets, only with food. We can’t cut food-preparation time down to that of brewing coffee, but we can aspire to limit it on certain days.

Generally, when cooking, I find that I have to be all in, mindfully trimming fat, fishing out lemon seeds with a tiny measuring spoon, intuiting the springiness of dough. Otherwise, I cut or burn myself, or over- or undercook things. Most “quick and easy” recipes don’t work for me; they spur an inattention that ends in disappointment. Yet on the rare occasion that I find myself free to write for a day or the better part of a day, I don’t want to dwell in cooking. I also don’t want to resort to a giant pot of stew that has to be eaten so many times that you never want to see it again, the way dogs resign themselves to their kibble after begging for what you’re having.

Here are a few ways to hang back from the kingdom of cooking while trying to sidestep taste fatigue:

* Embrace the powers of the microwave, which generates less dishwashing than conventional cooking and in summer keeps the kitchen cool. I’ve been making the Szechuan Green Beans in Barbara Kafka’s Microwave Gourmet for decades; it cooks in the dish it’s served in. (Barbara Kafka started out as a poet.) Marie T. Smith’s memorably titled Microwave Cooking for One helped me finish my last book; the chili and the fish chowder are as simple and good as promised, and the recipes multiply for when you’re not isolating. Julie Sahni’s Moghul Microwave contains miracles, too, among them Parsi Chicken and Savory Keema Cake.

* Cook extra of whatever you’re making the day before, but make sure it includes two or more of these elements: spicy, sour, bitter, fermented, or contrasting textures. Having to eat the same dish over and over is more tolerable when it has complexity; it takes me a long time to tire of Chinese spicy noodles, in vegetarian or carnivorous versions, hot or cold, inflected with some or all of these: sesame paste, peanut butter, black vinegar, chili oil, a touch of sweetness.

* Cook extra dinner before your writing day, but with specific plans to transform the leftovers into something different. Two books that can help with this are Leftovers by Kathy Gunst and Green Plate Special by Christine Rudalevige.

* Do what my parents did when raising teenagers and working: order rice-based takeout meals, then extend them with your own rice and vegetables, keeping the vegetables easy: sliced Napa cabbage simmered in chicken broth, stir-fried broccoli or asparagus.

* Team up with a local “food poet” friend whose eating preferences are compatible with yours, even if lockdown forbids eating together. Each of you cooks a dish, then gives half to the other.

Chances are, you will still spend more time in the kitchen than a coffee poet will. But channel Kazim’s observation about the “meditation quality of doing the work,” and adapt the wisdom of Mahmoud Darwish to your own temperament. Spicy noodles, too, can be the sister of time.

Everything in Its Place [by Adrienne Su]

Poet and memoirist Sandra Beasley cooks differently depending on whether she’s writing poetry or prose: “I’m a tremendous fan of mise en place; one of my favorite wedding gifts was a stack of glass nesting bowls that I use. I’m methodical which, to be honest, is something that I pride myself on as a poet as well… For prose, I’m a mess—indulgent snacking, weird sleep and meal hours, hoping my husband does most of the cooking! I get overwhelmed with the scale of prose projects. I cook better as a poet.”

I can’t help but connect this to Sandra’s facility with forms. Writing a sonnet or sestina is an overt act of ordering raw material, taking the chaos of human existence and working it into a recognizable shape, with strict rules governing what can appear at the end of each line, how many lines there will be, and sometimes how many stresses each line should contain. Many good formal poems break some of the rules, within the bounds of what I call, in the classroom, not looking like a mistake. One could argue that free-verse poems do the same - give shape to the shapelessness of experience - and the best free verse does exactly that. But something about mise en place mirrors the compulsive neatness of rhymed quatrains, the symmetry of a pantoum returning to its first and third lines as it completes its mission of saying every line twice, without ever quite repeating itself.

Here is a curry in progress, in Sandra’s kitchen:

A fellow devotee of forms, I’ve made similar efforts to create order in the kitchen. I share Sandra’s enthusiasm for mise en place, which is essential for the speed of Chinese cooking (the actual cooking, not the prep, being speedy). I also do - or did, pre-Covid - methodical lunch preparation. Ideally, I’d start the work week with four of something like this in the fridge (not five because some weeks included a lunch out or at home):

This was a makeshift sardine banh mi - the carrots and radishes quick-pickled, the baguette not pictured; that’s mayo in the sauce container - and a side of fruit. Other favorites include calamari and white bean salad, with mesclun or farro in the other compartment, or a bowl. It isn’t quick, but making four at once cuts down the time spent per lunch. Seeing the containers stacked in the fridge erases a daily problem from the week and pre-empts the junky snacking that follows a hastily purchased, not-really-what-you-wanted sandwich. Most of all, thinking about lunch is over until the weekend.

Some advance-lunch guidelines: Once you have your stash, don’t give in to the temptation to eat one for dinner midweek; not only will you lose a day, you’ll also get tired of it. Don’t repeat a lunch for two consecutive weeks; you’ll get tired of it. Sauce or dressing should travel in its own container, to be mixed just before you eat. If the lunch involves good bread, slice and freeze the bread for the week, thawing what you need for the next day overnight, or let it thaw in your lunch bag during the morning. Some ingredients have to be added the day you eat, such as avocado; use a reminder app to carry the mental load of remembering to add them. Keep salt and pepper at work. If you have the space where you work and it’s allowed, having a small toaster oven there can be life-changing.

It’s hard to fend off the notion that poetry writing is an irrational, struck-by-lightning activity that doesn’t respond to ongoing effort. For sure, there are days when it seems to resist. But writing of any kind works better when you keep trying, and it’s less intimidating if you view writing as a form of organizing. Sandra reports about her photo: “I use that cooking time for planning writing projects; in this case, I was working toward delivering a commissioned poem on deadline.” I find this reassuring evidence that poems are made, not granted by deities. And on those days when kitchen organization seems impossible and you keep reaching for the chips, maybe that’s a good time to muck around in a larger, more sprawling project, dare I say prose?

Without Restaurants [by Adrienne Su]

Poet Faith Shearin reports from sheltering-in-place in Massachusetts: “We are cooking a ton because even the carry out in Amherst and Northampton has shut down. I miss restaurants more than I can say. I love a lot of food I don't know how to cook: Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese… Our Covid diet consists largely of the things I was raised on. Several generations of my ancestors drank iced tea and fried chicken in eastern North Carolina; I made my first batch of cornbread with my great grandmother before I learned to read. My great grandparents were farmers and corn was their most prolific crop. I was served grits with one soppy egg for breakfast, and cornbread with most soups; both sides of my family were devoted to Brunswick Stew. Nobody could completely agree about the ingredients in this dish so a lot was left to interpretation and imagination. I like to pull the chicken off a freshly cooked bird, dice some onions and garlic, chop basil, then add corn, red potatoes, and lima beans to a broth that is half tomato sauce half chicken broth. One grandmother liked to add green beans; another favored several meats, including pork. Some folks make it thin, with tomato juice, and some make it thicker with tomato paste. I make cornbread like this: 2 and 1/2 cups of coarse ground cornmeal, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1 and 1/3 cup buttermilk, 2 tablespoons of butter. Cook at 375 for 25 minutes. I sometimes serve the stew with a spinach salad or make a fruit cobbler to go with it, or I throw a sweet potato in the oven and serve it with a little bit of butter and brown sugar. I like to cook when I am in the mood and rapidly tire of it when I'm doing it three times a day. I know a lot of people feel like this. The food I can cook well is the food I learned to make from my grandparents; it tastes like childhood.”

Faith and I are old friends. We both call the American South home - Kitty Hawk, NC for Faith, Atlanta, GA for me - but both live now in places where cornbread and Brunswick stew are more novelties than staples. Although my family arrived in the South much later than Faith’s did and our fried chicken was more likely to come from a restaurant than a cast-iron skillet on the stove, I share her connection to fruit cobbler and grits, and felt the estrangement when I first moved North. My Thanksgiving stuffing is cornbread-based. Like Faith, I cherish Indian, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants. My grandmothers cooked Chinese food, but I didn’t grow up cooking with my grandmothers, as the link had been broken by World War II and the Chinese Communist revolution; I never met my paternal grandmother. My mother, driven with her family from their home in Shanghai when she was a child, had to teach herself how to cook Chinese food in 1960s Atlanta, which meant the ingredients were Southern-inflected, the techniques explained in English by Joyce Chen and Grace Zia Chu. But because she knew how the dishes were supposed to look and taste, my mother was well-prepared to use (and adapt) the instructions. By the mid-1980s, Atlanta’s Chinese restaurants had multiplied approximately one hundredfold since my father’s arrival in 1948; many catered to a Chinese clientele. Our lives had reached the point where time was scarcer than money, so we often lived on good-quality takeout plus home-cooked rice and vegetables.

Faith’s lockdown-narrowed diet reminds me that the foods we associate with comfort and home are not necessarily made in the home. Restaurants build meaningful family memory, too. Without restaurants, her longing for, say, tofu with bok choy is no less a part of who she is than her skill in turning out a Brunswick stew; it only joined the family later. This spell of eating what we can is an opportunity to expand self-knowledge. What do we miss the most, and what is different about us without it? What skills from previous generations - even if we have to imagine them, as I imagine Faith’s great grandparents in a bad year for corn, or each of my parents as a foreign student in Georgia, faced with the mystery of buttermilk or white gravy - are we calling on now? What do we know how to cook that, out of forgetfulness or the excitement of the new, we haven’t cooked in a decade and are bringing back because the pantry, or a pandemic-driven sense of continuity with lost forebears, points to it? It’s worth recording, occasionally if not regularly, what we’re eating these days, as well as what we aren’t. One day we’ll be able to look at the list, understand what it reveals, and possibly even write again, with new perspective on who we’ve become.

 

The Pauses between Poems [by Adrienne Su]

Most of the poets I know have been temporarily silenced, at least in verse, by the Covid-19 crisis. Recent months recall the aftermaths of 9/11 and the 2016 presidential election: impossible to write creatively about, impossible to turn away from. To seek the distance needed to transform experience into reflection feels like closing your eyes at the wheel. To wander into gray areas, so that a poem might begin in one place and end in another, requires a surrounding prevalence of non-gray areas. Now everything is gray, and wandering hazardous.

Was it really only a short time ago that the average poet was maneuvering to maximize writing time, stealing half an hour before a work meeting, setting alarms fifteen, then twenty minutes earlier than normal, or making notes in a parked car or real-life waiting room? As recently as February, as if poem-making conditions were normal, I was identifying strategies for increasing writing time by reducing time spent planning, shopping for, and preparing meals, without giving in to joyless repetition, frozen dinners, or excess takeout.

I’m more of an authority on the latter (not giving in) than the former (kitchen shortcuts), although I’m interested in both. Even before the rituals of eating became central to life under lockdown, I saw every meal as a chance to celebrate being alive and able to savor breakfast, lunch, dinner, or one of the many semi-meals I sneak in between. It’s a near-obsession. Despite repeated culling and frequent visits to the library, I have nearly 300 cookbooks, in addition to several shelves of food nonfiction. Over the years, including many spent parenting alone, I’ve assembled an army of appliances meant to save time - pressure cooker, stand mixer, food processor, programmable rice cooker, immersion blender, Vitamix - but also a number of things that aren’t about saving time: canning supplies, ice-cream maker, pizza stone, cake-decorating tools, and an admittedly neglected manual pasta machine. When there’s room for it, cooking is a pleasure and the closest thing I have to a hobby. Yet I find (or, pre-pandemic, found) myself constantly chafing at having to choose between writing and cooking, and resenting cooking for so being relentlessly non-optional.

Before the novel coronavirus upended routines, I often got up early Sunday, intending to go to the grocery store while everyone else was either at church (this is rural Pennsylvania) or lingering over waffles. I’d list what ingredients needed to be used up, then deploy an Eat Your Books search to create a week’s worth of menus that called for them, thus generating a second list, of what to buy. But I tend to page through cookbooks as if they were restaurant menus: “I’ll have the pesto-grilled salmon, please, with butternut-squash risotto and a side of broccoli rabe, probably followed by peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream,” with the intention, the next day, of switching to Chinese food. The list would grow complicated, requiring stops at multiple stores. By the time I actually reached the first store, it was crowded, and by the time I finished shopping, it was mid-afternoon. If I wanted to make lunches to take to work that week and dinner for that night, I’d have to start cooking right away. What happened to my plan to shop early, then have a little bit of Sunday to write?

Somehow, over time, though, the writing got done. That most of it has recently been about food seems relevant, but domestic chores can be the enemy of writing about anything, including domestic chores. I’ve unwittingly cut other things out - I’ve missed out on most movies, for instance - but, stepping back now, realize that I’m not completely inefficient in the kitchen. Over time I’ve developed a few ways to nourish a day of writing, on the occasion that such a rare day can be found, without too much compromise on taste. This week I’ll talk about some of these ways, with input from a few other poets on sustenance and writing (or sustenance and lockdown).

In the meantime, I say to any poet who can’t write poems these days, I’m with you. I can’t, either, especially as each day’s bad news keeps multiplying in scale and range. But not writing poems isn’t bothering me yet. From a writing point of view, I’ve found the Covid-19 crisis to be, in addition to a mass tragedy and magnification of inequality, a reminder that silences are nothing new. I didn’t write in the immediate aftermath of childbirth, or in the time around any move, or while starting my teaching career. I’ve even had days of silence in an artists’ colony, which in pragmatic terms is a waste but in creative terms, natural. Writing is a conversation. Sometimes you talk, other times you listen, and what you eventually say is more meaningful for your having listened. The entity you’re conversing with might not care what you think - it may even want to do you mortal harm - but by listening to it (while doing everything you can to avoid infection by it), you are developing a response. Like the vaccine we’re all waiting for, that response could take a long time. Pandemic-prompted non-writing can be a form of writing. By paying attention, we shape the white space around our lines and stanzas. That white space is not the absence of poem but a defining element of a poem’s structure. In the meantime, whether or not we’re able to compose a line, we have to eat.

A Bright Green Side of Broccoli Rabe

1 bunch broccoli rabe, about 1 lb.
1 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
Salt
1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes or a seasoning blend such as Penzeys Tuscan Sunset, Florida Seasoned Pepper, or Lemon Pepper

1. Put a large pot of water on to boil, as if you were cooking pasta, over high heat. (If you are cooking pasta, reserve the hot water for it in step 3.)
2. While the water heats, rinse the broccoli rabe, then cut the small stems and florets into 2-inch lengths. Using a paring knife, peel the outer layer of skin from the thick stems, then cut them into 1-inch lengths. As you cut, collect the thick stems in one bowl, the leafy florets and small stems together in another.
3. When the water comes to a boil, add a tablespoon or so of salt (adding it gradually, as dumping it in can cause the water to bubble up further). Then add the thicker stems of the broccoli rabe. A minute later, add the florets and small stems. Stir briefly, let the water return to a boil, then drain the rabe and spray with cold water to arrest its vibrant color. Drain well. At this point, you can set it aside until close to serving time, even refrigerate it overnight.
4. Shortly before you’re ready to eat, heat the olive oil in a wide saucepan (12” is nice) over medium heat. Add the garlic and stir until it’s fragrant but not browned, a few seconds. Add the drained broccoli rabe, stir to coat with the garlicky oil, and season with red pepper flakes or seasoning blend and salt to taste. Toss and stir until heated through, a couple of minutes, adding an extra minute or so if the greens were refrigerated.

About 4 servings, 2 if you love bitter greens

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger [by Michael Fontaine]

That's Diogenes up above, the Greek philosopher who famously lived in a wine barrel.

This post is #4 in the series on How to Drink. Click here for parts one, two, and three. Fair warning: this one's longer, so pour a glass of wine, fire up the music, and get a little stronger. 

 

Nietzsche said it first, but Kelly Clarkson said it better:

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

She's right, and if you don't believe it, then lifting heavy or running a couple dozen sprints will remind you. (I’ll come back to that topic tomorrow.)

In the meantime, Clarkson goes a long way toward answering an ancient question, namely, where do good ideas come from?

As you'll see below, Vincent Obsopoeus is the first person in world history to write a How-to manual for drinking alcohol.

Strange as it now seems, nobody had ever thought to do that before. How did he come up with the idea?

Start with Hollywood. In 2006 a dark comedy came out called Smokin' Aces. It’s a terrible movie but it features a brilliant performance by Jeremy Piven.

Piven plays a Las Vegas card illusionist who gets tangled up with the mob, and in every scene -- no matter what’s happening, even when he's getting beaten up  -- he keeps fiddling with his playing cards and pulling tricks. Those cards are an obsession, a part of him. “They're kind of like worry beads for the character that I kind of incorporated,” said Piven at the time.

That's exactly the kind of guy Obsopoeus was, only with wine instead of cards. 

When an influential man once offered to help Obsopoeus get a prestigious job, he replied that the advertised salary was so low, “it won’t even quench my thirst.”

And when Obsopoeus asked Joachim Camerarius to blurb The Art of Drinking, Camerarius replied,

If you publish this book, you won’t easily convince everyone of your sobriety (as you claim). ... People assume speech tracks one’s true feelings.

In other words, thought Camerarius, everyone would assume Obsopoeus was an alcoholic because he wrote a poem in praise of drinking wine. It's inevitable. 

Events proved Camerarius right. A couple years later, Obsopoeus wrote another book and in it, he tucked away a tiny comment about drinking games:

I wrote a lot about that topic in The Art of Drinking, and I hear a lot of people are trashing me behind my back for publishing it. They say I went too far. Whatever. Obsopoeus doesn’t care. They can go on hating and criticizing me until they explode.

That sounds deeply bitter, and it is, but it's also totally hilarious. Why?

The tell is the phrase I translated here as "Whatever. Obsopoeus doesn't care."

In Latin it's Haec non sunt curae Obsopoeo et Hippoclidi, literally, "Obsopoeus and Hippoclides don't care."

In ancient Greece, Hippocleides was a young man who ruined his chance to marry a princess by getting drunk and acting stupid at a party. In his drunken state, he quipped, "Hippocleides doesn't care."

In time that response became the classic ancient Greek expression for "f#ck it."

And it shows that even at the very moment he was accused of drinking too much, Obsopoeus couldn't resist making a joke about drinking too much.

That brings me to the letter I’d like to share with you.

Because of space restrictions, I didn’t have room to include Obsopoeus' original preface in How to Drink. It’s a gem, though, and I’m pleased to publish it here online among fellow lovers of literature, instead of burying it in some specialist journal.

Even better, it’s now generously seeded with hyperlinks for the curious and indulgent to follow. It’s the first translation into any language, and it’s a fascinating insight into how and why Obsopoeus came to write his poem on The Art of Drinking – the very first, as he points out, that anyone had ever thought of.

Specifically, the preface reveals how great literature can spring from a combination of disappointment, resentment, a lot of wine, and a determination to prove all the bastards wrong.

In it we learn that Obsopoeus – a gifted translator – had recently lost out on some commissions to translate classical literature, apparently on the grounds that he wasn’t a serious enough person to handle great “works of art.” And that's why, he says, he turned his attention to the one “art” that everyone thought he was worthy of: the art of drinking.

It all goes to show that Kelly Clarkson was right. What didn’t kill Obsopoeus, made him stronger.

 

The Preface to The Art of Drinking

(For the original 1536 Latin text, click here. My translation is from the slightly slimmed down version he included in the 1537 reprint, here.)

 

To John Hartung,

the illustrious and humane gentleman, and

Judge of Heilsbronn Abbey,

Vincent Obsopoeus sends his warmest greetings

 

The people of Corinth were shocked at first and paralyzed with fear when the news dropped that a hostile army, led by King Philip of Macedon, was about to invade their city.

Then, though, they all kicked into high gear, competing to make all necessary preparations to defend their homeland. One started furbishing weapons, another was gathering stones, a third was patching the city walls and fixing portions that had collapsed or that were weak with age; yet another was erecting towers and battlements. In short, everyone everywhere was working their tails off to do whatever the situation demanded.

Diogenes the Cynic saw all this energy in action. And, since he didn’t have anything to do (nobody was asking him for help!), he hitched up his tunic and started frantically rolling his dolium—the wine “barrel” he lived in — up and down the streets of his neighborhood.

When a friend asked him why, he answered,

“I’m rolling my barrel so I won’t look like the only one here who’s a slacker!”

*          *          *

What’s the point of this story, my good Hartung?

It’s this: that given the tidal wave of authors writing and publishing books—well, the same thing’s happening to me that happened to Diogenes back then.

You see, there’s no shortage of people writing and publishing endless books (good ones, too!) every single day and on every topic under the sun, and certain people are so gripped with the irresistible urge to write something that ¡they’re shamelessly “decanting” the Greek and Latin classics into modern languages! And by doing that, they’re whoring out all their humanistic education and even the Muses themselves, whoring them no different than a disgraceful pimp exploits naïve young women. ¡As if—thanks to the behavior of certain loudmouths—the Classics weren’t already in crisis, and suffering plenty as it is!

(By contrast, when philosophers in the ancient world transmitted their dunderheaded philosophy to their students, they wrapped it up in certain secret signs and symbols so that none of it would accidentally get shared with the uninitiated!)

And that’s why—given this huge throng of writers and mass of popularizing translations — I thought it was a good idea for me to roll my barrel with Diogenes for a while. I don’t want to be the only one sitting around doing nothing!

(here comes the sarcasm...)

Because I know I’m "not up to writing up a systematic treatise" on those truly great works of literary art, and because nobody really needs my help to translate them, I’ve settled on just one “art”—yes, it does sound funny at first glance, but it’s probably the richest and most popular—namely, the Art of Drinking: because who doesn’t see how widespread drinking is?

Still, for an art that virtually everyone on planet Earth is eager for, it’s regrettable that until now, there haven’t been any guidelines or recommendations for people to follow, and hence learn to drink with greater knowledge, moderation, and sophistication.

I guarantee you that people ignorant of grammar don’t make as many mistakes in language on any given day as the number of gross mistakes you see made every single day by drinkers who get tripped up because they aren’t educated in the art of drinking.

It’s also pretty well established that as institutions, the Greeks had designated roles for those who dictate how much wine to drink and those who have to drink it, and the Romans had their own “symposiarchs” and “dictators” and the custom of appointing “kings” for their parties.

If an Art of Drinking was ever taught by anyone at any point, though, I haven’t found it. You see, in the various Convivial Questions and Symposiums written by Plutarch, Athenaeus, and even Plato and Xenophon — and by Macrobius on the Latin side — people tend to be long-winded and talkative, not alcoholics.

Only a crackpot, however, could have the temerity to deny that specific guidelines for the art of drinking can be found the same way they can for other arts. Because I realized this, and because I pitied the human race for being left helpless in this one exclusive domain, I quietly made notes of certain observations I’d stumbled upon through frequent experimentation.

I organized them into the three books that follow, and published them in order to equip people that are smarter and better educated than me with a more expansive reason and opportunity for reflecting and writing on the subject.

I’m content myself to have blazed some trails to the Art of Drinking; if others can come refine and enlarge it as their abilities allow, I won’t resent it.

And so, as I said, given the whirlpool not only of people writing, but also of people binging and emptying out wine barrels night and day, it’s been a pleasure to roll this Diogenes-barrel of mine: unlike everyone else, it’s not my fate (</sarc>) to serve a Corinthian crisis or greater literature—no, not with the “cold blood in my breast limiting my inspiration.”

I’m also glad to realize what I can and can’t do, having taken a good hard look at the financial straits my family is in. That’s why I have willingly followed Horace’s recommendation and undertaken to write about a subject matter that isn’t completely beyond my strengths.

(here comes the venom)

My other reason for “rolling this barrel” is the false opinion some people have of me, and the smears that certain trash talkers have put out there.

When they go accusing me to one and all of being a “world-champion wine drinker” (which isn’t true, and nothing I’ve ever done to them ever provoked them to say that, other than their being unable to live without blackening someone else’s good name); — those stupid idiots don’t understand that they’re actually “insulting” me in the most honorably way possible.

You see, the famous Plato, prince of philosophers, doesn’t think it’s absurd for the most beautiful reward for virtue to be being drunk for all eternity, even though I’m not aiming at that reward for my virtues (they’re far too small, you see, to be graced with so incredible a prize </sarc>).

You see, I do like wine more than water, but I’ve always controlled my enjoyment of it with such moderation that I’ve made sure that no one’s ever gotten misled or hurt by my drinking.

Meanwhile, those sobriety-worshippers who are slandering me—who go around signaling their virtue in public while binging in private—they’ll surely spell the doom of no few people with their destructive teaching, contaminated as they are by far more disgraceful sins and behavior.

Besides, I’d rather get called a slightly immoderate wine drinker than be accused — and rightly so — of being a riot-starter or teacher of evil or blasphemer or ghostwriter or perverter of scripture or disturber of the gospel’s peace and harmony or the author or abettor of a pernicious heresy or a church robber and nefarious Sacramentarian or an Anabaptist fanatic or, I might add, a disgraceful man-whore or imposter or plagiarist.

But enough—I’ll respond to my slanderers in a separate essay, and I’ll make sure they haven’t caught “a cicada by the wing.”

Still, if they do want to see how with what “fairness” and virulence they’ve been traducing my name, then allow them to direct their malicious eyes at me. Keep maligning me, and I’ll make sure they hear plenty about the malfeasance of their actions!

*          *          *

I dedicate this dabbling of mine to you, my dear Hartung — the majority of which I dashed off riotously and off the cuff, over drinks. Although your excellence deserves a greater gift, I had to limit myself not to what you deserve, but to what I could provide. And if I can’t honor you with a golden statue as you deserve, then please be content in the circumstances with this marble one—or rather, mud or clay—I’ve set up for you. If it’s modest and beneath your dignity, please consider that “God, too, looks fondly on our best efforts.”

Please don’t assume, though, that I dedicated these books on How to Drink to you because I think you’re getting debauched night and day in whorehouses overflowing with wine (nobody is more temperate than you are, and there’s no need to haul you back to a more productive life), or because even when the circumstances don’t require it, you’re a pro at playing the part of a friendly dinner companion, wherein, on account of your affability and poise, you deserve to be called a “man for all seasons.”

No, the only reason I’ve dedicated How to Drink to you is so that this poor, little homeless book of mine will have you for their patron. Under your patronage, it’ll fly free among the hands of women and men, protected from all the backbiting, smirks, and sneers of sycophants. I know it.

Please commend me to the Reverend Father, Abbot John. Pass my greetings on to Mr. Sebastian Hamaxurgus, the grain supervisor. In the past, we often—well, we didn’t roll Diogenes’ barrel together, but we did empty a few barrels of Bacchus…

Ansbach, January 1536

 

Notes in the Margin

Plagiarism goes a long way back. In 1577 a man name Franciscus Iunctinus of Florence ripped off Obsopoeus’ preface entirely – verbatim! Little did he know he'd get exposed by Google Books in 2020. There's a lesson there...

Poets and Painters in the Garden of Drunkenness [by Michael Fontaine]

This is post #3 in the series. Click here for part one and here for part two. Pro tip: click on any picture in this series to find out more about it.

 

Fun cocktail party fact: the word for drunkenness in ancient Greek is methe (pronounced méth-ee).

Actually, you already knew that. How?

Because it – or rather "she," since the noun is grammatically feminine – shows up in English in the words crystal meth and amethyst. (An amethyst is the gemstone you wear to keep the lady at bay.)

Methe was never really an official goddess in ancient Greece, but since people do “worship” her, Greek artists thought she made a great allegory. What's more, that allegory works in two ways, since (like “drunkenness” in English) methe can mean either intoxication (getting drunk) or addiction (alcoholism).

In The Art of Drinking, Obsopoeus exploits that ambiguity at several points, especially in the teaser he ends book one with:

The next book depicts the haunting portraits and problems of Drunkenness, composed by me in classical verse. You, binge drinker, who are constantly getting hammered, look at them as if you were looking in a mirror, and see how truly disgraceful the sight is! Once you’ve seen Drunkenness, you should turn and run from her for all your life, if you love the glory of true sobriety.

As he repeatedly says, Obsopoeus thinks getting buzzed or tipsy is okay, but getting drunk--hammered, blitzed--is wrong. It's a distinction worth bearing in mind.

Moreover, in speaking of "portraits" here, Obsopoeus means what he says literally, but in a totally surprising way.

He starts book two by referring to Apelles, one of the greatest of the "old master" painters of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago. Think Raphael, Michelangelo, Artemisia Gentilischi, and you're on the right track:

Among the paintings of Apelles—those monuments of old—that learnèd Greece celebrates in its writings, his ingenious hand left behind a masterpiece. It surpasses both the Venuses he created—the one of her emerging naked from the waves of the sea, and the other for the people of Kos that he only managed to get a start on. I’ll describe that picture, though its excellence outdoes my song and its precious art defeats my verses.

The picture at right is a Renaissance recreation by Titian of the first one of Apelles' lost paintings of Venus mentioned here, the "the Venus Anadyomene." He painted it around the year 1520, sixteen years before Obsopoeus wrote The Art of Drinking.

Apelles' other lost painting of Venus, the "Aphrodite of Kos," was also recreated in the Renaissance by Botticelli in the 1480s. I'm sure you've seen it:

Like Botticelli and Titian, Obsopoeus also wants to recreate a painting by Apelles. The difference is that instead of using pigments, he's going to use poetry.

In formal terms, Obsopoeus is going to give us an ekphrasis. That's the fancy term for a poet's attempt to outdo the beauty of a painting by describing that painting in beautiful language. It's an ancient and classical technique, and as a rule rather than exception, the poet's description ends up far more artificially alive and animated than any painting could ever be. 

That's true here, too. Obsopoeus spends the next few hundred lines describing a painting you could call “The Garden of Drunkenness.” It's a sweeping allegory for people who cannot stop partying when the party is over.

The crazy thing is, though, no such painting by Apelles ever existed. Obsopoeus made the whole thing up, inspired (it seems) primarily by Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (1490–1510). That's the painting featured at the top of this post. Here's a wonderful short video introduction to the painting:

Like Bosch, Obsopoeus' "painting" shows us a green field filled with flowers and people. Unlike Bosch, his people are leisurely drinking wine at a festive gathering, and when the party's over, most of them get up and go home.

Others can't or won't, though. Instead, those people head for a walled garden in the center of the field. The garden is full of bad figures, like Hangover, Dementia, Self-Indulgence, Memory Loss, Depression, and a few others. And then--

Presiding in the center of the garden is a woman in royal raiment, drunk and surrounded by an entourage of women. A grassy garland’s encircling her styled hair, and she’s holding a phiale in her hands as if she’s about to drink from it. … As I studied these details, at first I thought the queen standing in their midst was Circe, but it wasn’t her. It was Drunkenness, labeled in Greek letters: Methe, Queen of all Wine-Drinkers.

This is a glass "phiale," or shallow wine bowl, from the time of Apelles (now in the Corning Museum of Glass in central New York).

By telling us that Methe is "holding a phiale in her hands as if she’s about to drink from it," Obsopoeus is doing something quite extraordinary.

To wit: at this central moment in his imaginary ancient Greek painting of Drunkenness drinking from a phiale, he’s alluding to a real ancient Greek painting of Drunkenness drinking from a phiale that once hung inside a shrine in Epidaurus, Greece -- and a famous one, to boot.

That painting was not by Apelles but by Pausias (4^th c. BC), another old master of ancient Greece. And what made it so famous is that it depicted Methe drinking wine from a crystal phiale, with her face visible through the glass. Not an easy feat!

(Pausias’ painting is lost, but his idea was imitated in the late Renaissance by Annibale Caracci, long after Obsopoeus' death. That's it at left.)

I'll come back to this point in a minute.

Meanwhile, what happens in the Garden of Drunkenness? As you might guess, things go badly.

The people inside continue drinking until they pass out. They transform into animals -- sheep, pigs, donkeys, monkeys -- and when they wake up, they start vomiting or attacking each other in a wild frenzy.

Some try to escape the Garden, but they're met by an entourage of old women as they do. The women lash the people trying to leave; they handcuff the compliant ones and bludgeon the resisters, and ultimately enslave them all. Obsopoeus then tells us their names: Fever, Edema, Psoriasis, Poverty, Old Age, and, yes, Death. Yikes!

Obsopoeus' allegorical painting is haunting and glorious. It’s the climax of the whole poem, and clearly designed to be. Rather than go into more detail, though, I'd like to share related material with you that I didn't have room for in How to Drink.

In my last post, I quoted a “liminary” poem in Greek by the Renaissance scholar Joachim Camerarius. In fact, Camerarius wrote two Greek poems for Obsopoeus’ book, and I’m pleased to present the other one here. It’s a miniature masterpiece, and it's a fantastic specimen of how learned and playful Renaissance poetry can be.

It alludes to the Garden of Drunkenness by way of Pausias' painting, and you could call it Poetry is a Painted Crystal Bowl. 

Like Obsopoeus, Camerarius is struck by the inherent competition between representing reality in the written word vs. the painter’s art. He heightens the similarity between those two arts by punning on the similarity of words used to describe each.

In his view, Obsopoeus’ written (engraphon) poetry is as beautifully, skillfully, and clearly executed as Pausias’ painted (graphike) crystal bowl because, through each one, you can discern the orderly rethe (features) of disorderly Methe (Drunkenness).

Here's the poem:

They say there was this one work of the painter’s art

    by Pausias that was really worth seeing:

Drunkenness drinking from a glass phiale that she was tipping up

    while facing forward, so that her whole face showed through,

and though the bowl covered her lips and eyes,

    all her features were still quite clear.

Unquestionably, then, this—a painting like that—was a work of art.

    But a greater work of art is the written one in your hands,

by our friend Vincent.

    It has the gorgeous adornment of the Muses’ verses,

it teaches you how to drink a lot with understanding and without harm,

    and it has found a system in an unsystematic business.

In it, not only will you be able to view Drunkenness,

    you can consort with her, and with pleasure and understanding.

Here’s the Greek for those of you who can read it. I’ve highlighted and color coded the many words that correspond or pun on each other in each part of the simile:

Παυσΐεω τέχνης ἔργον τόδε φασὶ γενέσθαι                  

      ἄξιον ἓν γραφικῆς, ὅ ττι μάλιστα θέας·

ἐξ ὑάλου πίνουσα Μέθη φιάλην ἐπέχουσα

      ἀντία, φαίνεσθαι ὥστε πρόσωπον ἅπαν,

τῆς φιάλης τ’ ἐπιπροσθούσης χείλεσσι καὶ ὄσσοις,

      εὔδηλ’ εἶναι ὅμως ὡς τάδε πάντα ῥέθη.

τεχνικὸν ὧδε γραφὲν—τίς δ᾿ οὔ φησ᾿;—ἦν ἄρα τοὖργον.

      μᾶλλον δ᾿ ἐν χερσὶν τεχνικόν ἐστι τόδε

ἡμετέροιο φίλου Νικήτα’ ἔγγραφον ἔργον,

      κόσμον ἔχον μέτρων πάγκαλον Ἀονίων·  

πολλὰ πιεῖν ἀβλαβῶς μετ᾿ ἐπιστήμης τε διδάσκον,

      καὶ λόγον εἰν ἀλόγῳ πράγματ᾿ ἐφευράμενον·

ἔνθαπερ εἰσιδέειν γε Μέθην δῆθ’ οὐ μονον ἔσται,

      ἀλλὰ συνεῖν’ ἀυτῇ εὖ καὶ ἐπιστάμενως.

 

Notes in the Margin

Since this is a blog for poetry lovers, I thought I'd end with a liminary poem of my own I wrote for How to Drink -- one of a couple I wrote in Latin. (Yes, to say that's old fashioned and nerdy beyond belief is an understatement.) I composed them in the Baroque tradition, a tradition that's distinguished by all kinds of wordplay.

Here's a one-liner I'm especially proud of because it manages a pun on methe, method, and methodicus. Depending on how you analyze it, that last word can mean (1) "methodical" or (2) "who talks about methe." The meter is dactylic hexameter.

 

The Dos and Don’ts of Social Drinking [by Michael Fontaine]

Social drinking can be a lot of fun. It can also be a major source of stress and anxiety, and a gateway to problem drinking. Not good. 

As I mentioned in my first post, the end of book one in The Art of Drinking discusses responsible drinking at social functions, while the entirety of book two is devoted to excess drinking. (I’ll discuss that in tomorrow’s post.)

That structure suggests Obsopoeus was especially alert to the gateway aspect of social drinking, and that may explain why he devotes so much attention to the topic. He knew that work parties, holidays and weddings could be make-it-or-break-it events.

Amazingly, Obsopoeus' advice for those occasions seems as wise and useful today as it was 500 years ago. Let me share some examples.

He starts by stressing the importance of etiquette, beginning the moment you walk through the door. First and foremost, he says, keep it light – even if you're upset about something:

If some hidden worry does happen to be gnawing at you, then lay your cross down the moment you step through the door or dispel it ASAP with a drink of wine—there’s no surer remedy for worries than alcohol.

You'd be hard pressed to find a textbook offering advice like that today, but Obsopoeus is sure it's sensible. In his experience, a single glass of wine – if necessary – won't inevitably send you down an irreversible path.  

He then offers a long series of dos and don’ts, elaborating on each point. For example,

• Do Follow the Conversation. No other interest, no pet hobby or topic that you bring up on your own, should force people to follow your inappropriate digression if they aren’t into it. No, you follow them. Surrender your ego to your group of friends. That’s how you avoid antagonizing people and the fallout that comes with it.

• Do Say Nothing Rather than Something Stupid. Nothing exposes the inferiority of a subpar intellect faster than a tongue droning on unthinkingly. Many win a reputation for wisdom through their silence and then lose it through their stupidity.

Ever met someone like that at a party?

Some of this may come instinctively to you. Unfortunately, it doesn't come instinctively to everyone. If you find yourself scratching your head at any of these next points, I encourage you to read his elaboration of each one:

• Don’t Try to Win Arguments
• Don’t Try to Impress People with Your Intelligence
• Do Be Careful with Your Jokes
• Don’t Use Foul Language
• Don’t Make Jokes at Other People’s Expense
• Do Keep Your Bodily Functions under Control

One of the best pieces of advice he offers is how to give a proper toast – and how to politely deflect peer pressure to join in if you're not into drinking. Here’s what you should say, he says:

 

“My fine friend, don’t you know how the Homeric warlords drank wine? They’d drink as much as each one’s heart desired. Everyone should down drinks as they please! I don’t know of any of those heroes ever acting like you were and telling someone, ‘Match that drinking!’ I grant I’m no epic hero, but what’s stopping us from following the heroic code?”

The heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey are shown drinking wine on many occasions, but never in any kind of competitive way. So, if those tough-as-nails guys — guys like Achilles and Agamemnon and Ajax — if those guys didn’t feel compelled to pound drinks, then you shouldn’t either. Brilliant! (And all the better if your host doesn't know who Homer was, because the last thing he or she will do is ask.)

Obsopoeus also offers some actionable advice about how best to refuse a drink when you're not into it:

Still, to avoid offending someone by refusing their offer of wine, do have a single drink if they’re pressuring you.

This is not the advice contemporary programs would offer today, but Obsopoeus has a point:

And that’s why—to avoid hurt feelings—I’m frequently drinking: it’s not because I’m thirsty, but so I won’t be a sober killjoy.

That said, he immediately admonishes us to never pressure other people to drink:

Forcing someone against their will is as serious a crime as chasing them away from flowing water when they’re thirsty. The sweetest glass is a drink that’s downed by choice, whereas forcing hurts the drinker and the wine alike. Wine makes friends and breaks friends; being forced to drink wine isn’t universally liked.

Obsopoeus finally sums up his advice with a golden rule borrowed from Ovid's treatise on sex education:

• Moderation must forever be your guiding principle.
• Everything needs to be kept within finite limits; and
• Consent to memorize the same thing Ovid taught his young man in love:

“I’m going to give you a specific drinking limit: Your mind and feet should both be doing their job.”

Again and again Obsopoeus comes back to that point, that moderation is the key to lasting sobriety, and if you're having trouble talking or walking, then you're past your limit. Time to head home.

I’ll talk about what happens when you don't in tomorrow’s post. In the meantime, I’d like to end this post with a liminary poem I didn’t have space to include in How to Drink.

When you wrote a book back in the Renaissance, it was customary to hit your friends up to write short poems—called “liminary” poems—to celebrate the publication. They were blurbs, basically, and the best of them enlighten and enhance the book that follows.

In How to Drink, I reprinted a liminary poem in Latin by Joachim Camerarius, a famous scholar of the German Renaissance. I didn’t have room for a second one Camerarius wrote in ancient Greek, and I’m pleased to share it here.

The conceit is that wine can be a bucking bronco, and art — and specifically, Obsopoeus’ "Art" of Drinking — will give you the confidence you need to "ride" it. (The conceit goes back to ancient Greek comedy and gets picked up elsewhere in the Renaissance; see footnote nine here):

Get set, all you wine enthusiasts out there!

     If your heart is willing but

your puny body lacks the strength,

     then smile and say hello to wine’s intoxication!

Vincent has devised the therapies in this Art for you

     so that you can drink wine without fear.

You little fellas don’t have to fear a big, tough guy anymore,

      because look, with art, even a kid can ride a mighty horse.

Here’s the Greek for those who can read it. (The phrase I translate “wine enthusiasts” literally means “suffering from the gentleman’s disease,” and it’s a recherché allusion to Aristophanes’ comedy Wasps, line 80.)

Θαρσεῖθ’ ὅσσ’ ἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν νούσῳ κατέχεσθε,         

      οἰνώδη θ’ ἱλαραῖς φρεσσὶ φιλεῖτε μέθην,

εἰ μὲν θυμὸς ἔνι στήθει πρόφρων, δύναμις δέ

      λείπετ’ ἐν ἀβληχρῷ σώματι δαμναμὲνη·

τοίης Νικήτης τέχνης τάδε φάρμακα πᾶσιν                  

      θῆκεν ὑμῖν ἀδεῶς οἰνοποταζέμεναι.                            

μή τινα νῦν δείσητε μέγαν μικροὶ ἄνδρα θρασύν τε.

      τέχνῃ παῖς ἵππον πόσσον ὁποῖος ἑλᾷ;       

We Have Sex Education. Should We Teach Drinking Education, Too? [By Michael Fontaine]

It sounds heretical to even ask, doesn't it?

In this world of ours, though, we’ve grudgingly come to admit that a few things that seem instinctive, really should be taught. Sex is one. Driving a car is another.

In all my life, though, I’ve never heard of anyone offering a course in the art of drinking alcohol.

I don't mean a twelve-step program to quit alcohol, mind you. I mean a course in how to enjoy alcohol responsibly, sustainably, and with discrimination.

Controversial? Sure. Risky, dangerous, potentially disastrous? That too.

But maybe it's not as nutty as it sounds – especially with so many of us stuck at home and drinking more than usual.

What might drink education look like? In fact, it might look very much like the book I recently rediscovered and translated as How to Drink: A classical guide to the art of imbibing. And even though it's five centuries old, the ideas it contains are as insightful, timely and actionable as ever. You simply won't believe it.

In much of the world, booze is an all-or-nothing thing. Thirty percent of us in the U.S. never touch the stuff. The other 70% of us do, with varying degrees of success. And for better or worse, virtually all of us learn about alcohol in the same hit-or-miss way that people once used to learn about driving cars or sex.

Five hundred years ago in Germany, a man named Vincent Obsopoeus saw a better way. Obsopoeus (pronounced Job? So pay us!!) was a very experienced drinker, and he decided to do the world some good by systematizing his experiences as rules and committing them to paper.

Incredibly, he wrote his treatise as a poem – a poem in classical Latin, the language spoken in ancient Rome 1,500 years before his time.

Obsopoeus' poem became an instant classic. It was read and reprinted – until the book was suddenly banned. It disappeared for centuries and was eventually forgotten.

No, Obsopoeus wasn't a rock star. He was the principal of an elite high school in Bavaria, and in his time he witnessed the birth of a poisonous new culture among young men of bingeing, hazing, peer pressure, and competitive drinking.

German universities had fraternities way back then – and frat parties, too. Drinking competitions started popping up, where the goal was to make the other guy pass out. Sounding like a critic far ahead of his times, Obsopoeus regarded this flush of hardcore masculinity he was seeing as “toxic.” (He says so explicitly.)

Worse, boozing was taking over professional life, too. The pressure to join in was overwhelming.

Obsopoeus saw all this and sought to halt it. He lifted his pen and composed a three-part poem called De Arte Bibendi, The Art of Drinking. He was inspired by a famous three-part poem from ancient Rome called The Art of Love, the world's first- or second-oldest course in sex education. (The competitor for that honor is India's Kama Sutra.) 

The difference between Ovid and Obsopoeus is that Ovid wasn't really serious about most of the advice he offers. Obsopoeus was, and he speaks with the candor of someone who's been around the block a few times.

The surprising thing is that unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, Obsopoeus doesn't just advocate teetotalism—that is, abstaining from alcohol completely.

Better, he thought, to take stock of the main occasions for drinking, see what works for most people best, and then systematize and institute some rules to guide our behavior.

In that respect, we can see a clear analogy with sex education in schools today. Sex ed typically recommends keeping sex within the bonds of a committed relationship. It doesn't recommend lifelong celibacy, which – if you look around – clearly isn't a sustainable way of life for most people.

Obsopoeus thought of booze the same way, and he uses that central insight to develop a number of practical strategies for managing our relationship to alcohol.

He begins by pointing out that there are three occasions on which we drink:

1. At home by ourselves,
2. Going out to meet friends, and
3. At social functions, like work parties and weddings.

Interestingly enough, Obsopoeus says home is far and away the best place to drink. Why? Because drinking at home gives us a chance to spend time with our significant other.

Obsopoeus spends the rest of his first book discussing how much to drink and how to behave on each of those occasions. He helps us identify the best drinking buddies, advises what to say and not say, and even how to give a toast.

In the second book, he turns to a far darker topic, excessive drinking, and repeatedly admonishes us not to go down that path.

In book three he does a complete about-face, and offers to teach us his secret way to win competitive drinking games--and it's not what you think.

In a series of blog posts this week, I’ll share some of Obsopoeus' insights and practical advice. I’ll also reveal some fascinating background material that I couldn’t squeeze into my book, material that reveals the creative impulse that led him to write it in the first place.

To listen to a podcast expanding on some of these thoughts, click here.

I’d like to end this first post, though, by reflecting on a problem I kept coming up against in translating the poem: namely, the choice between “drunk” and “alcoholic.”

Obsopoeus wrote his Art of Drinking in the 16^th century, long before it occurred to anyone to consider excess drinking a disease. Of course he recognized that drinking to excess can be self-destructive, that it ruins your family, finances, health, and even life; he says so himself. The idea of “alcoholism,” though, literally didn’t exist back then.

When I went to translate his poem, then, I faced a dilemma—and a morally loaded one.

Latin has many words, like vinosus, for someone who drinks too much. So, should I translate them “drunk” or “alcoholic”? The first is faithful to Obsopoeus and his world, the second to our own. But the second is anachronistic, and hence faithless to the author.

“In the animal kingdom,” remarked Dr. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), the late professor of psychiatry, “the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” Nothing proves his point like having to choose between drunk and alcoholic. One of those words brings naught but condemnation and stigma; the other brings compassion, help, even health insurance payments.

“No one can serve two masters,” quipped Jesus. Meanwhile “the translator is a traitor,” runs a famous Italian proverb (traduttore, traditore). Faced with the impossibility of serving both, I chose to betray both. I wound up charting a middle course, letting the context dictate whether to say “drunk” or “alcoholic.”

I hope readers will tell me what they think.

 

Notes in the Margin

In a nice review yesterday, Philip Martin wonders about one of my translations. 

Obsopoeus wrote, wine "has no steering wheel."

Wait, he was writing in the 16th century. Did they even have steering wheels then?

They did – on boats! (The Greek proverb literally says “Wine lacks rudders.”)

Jocelyn Dax (1954-2019) by Stacey Lehman

My friend Jocelyn Dax died on Monday. Her funeral is today.

We met decades ago when a mutual friend suggested that she offer me her extra ticket to the New York City Ballet at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. We discovered we had a lot in common and quickly became close friends.

Jocelyn was funny, smart, sophisticated, and beautiful. She was tall, with long legs and unruly hair. She graduated from college at 19. She spoke perfect French! She loved music (Bob Dylan), poetry (Allen Ginsberg), mystery novels, and great food. I would say that the through line of our friendship was cooking, talking about food and cooking, and eating great food. Among my most dog-eared recipes are “Jocelyn’s Caponata,” “Jocelyn’s caviar pie,” “Jocelyn’s marinated pork loin and curried leeks,” “Jocelyn’s Shrimp with tomatoes and feta cheese.” You could drop in on Jocelyn and count on being fed a perfect egg or tuna-salad sandwich. If you planned a Passover Seder for twelve, Jocelyn would show up with chicken soup and 60 matzoh balls (“will that be enough?”). She baked my favorite kind of chocolate chip cookies. Her freezer was always filled with ice-cream, her pantry with snacks.

Jocelyn was sexy and lusty. I remember sitting in a movie theater when the male star of whatever French movie we were seeing took off his shirt. “Oh. my. god,” she said, just under her breath.

We did a lot of growing up together. Those were the years when, in the words of Alice Munro, "you realize that what you're living is your life." Marriages. Divorces. Love affairs. Career changes. And for her, a child.

Of course her proudest and most lasting achievement is her son Michael, an accomplished writer and environmentalist. Today he's a tall, handsome, confident man but I can't help but see him as a boy, sitting on the stairs of Jocelyn's lovely home to eavesdrop on the "grownups" in the dining room. 

The photo above was taken in Paris in the 1980s. I was on the last leg of my vacation; Jocelyn was starting hers. We met for an afternoon of walking around the city and catching up. I was awed by the way she managed every transaction with her beautiful French. Our first stop was a patisserie, where she selected two perfect pains au chocolate, which we ate on our way to dinner. “Don’t you just love eating and walking?” she said.

-- sdl