The Best American Poetry

An Féar Gorta [Terence Winch]

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An Féar Gorta

 

If I ever go back home again, we will drive

through the countryside just as it is getting dark.

We will gather together in the town’s only hotel,

eating, and telling jokes at each other’s expense.

 

My heart beats steady there, my spirit alive

to every gesture, every glance, the fire and spark

we find in those we love. Those to whom we tell

our dark secrets along with our idiotic nonsense.

 

Whatever route I take, I always seem to get lost.

I have a tendency to choose the wrong road

to the wrong place. I wind up confused and stranded

wondering if I’ll ever make it home.

 

But I want that ticket back, no matter what the cost.

At An Féar Gorta I want that rhubarb tart a la mode.

I am even willing to stand in the rain, and be reprimanded

for the sorry, soggy state in which I’ve left this poem.

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                                  at An Féar Gorta with cousins Monica (Guthrie) Donovan and Mary Guthrie, Oct. 2013

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An Féar Gorta is one of my favorite eating establishments in the world. Located in Ballyvaughan, in County Clare, Ireland, where I have many beloved relations, it is a place, as the poem suggests, that I look forward to visiting again. 

I originally thought the term meant "the hungry man," as "fear" is “man” in Irish. But the fada (accent) confused me---instead of "fear," it's "féar," which means “grass.” So, the name translates to "The Hungry Grass," a term going back to the Famine. More information can be found here, here, and here.

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                                      the garden at An Féar Gorta. Photo by T. Winch

Sinatra at the Sands, January 1966 [by David Lehman]

Ed. note: Jack Daniel's produced a limited-batch sour-mash whiskey called "Sinatra Century" to mark the singer's 100th birthday, December 12, 2015. Lehman's book Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World was published by HarperCollins at the same time. An editor at The Wall Street Journal noted the coincidence and commissioned Lehman, who likes good bourbon, to review the new whiskey, which came in a gift box including a thumb drive containing the recording of a Sinatra show at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966.

1. The Background

Frank Sinatra discovered Jack Daniel’s one sleepless night in the early 1940s. “It’s been the oil to my engine ever since,” he later said. He famously praised “anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or Jack Daniel’s.” Frank always kept a bottle nearby, offstage, and he was buried with a flask of JD in his casket.

In her autobiography, Judith Campbell Exner —the moll who was mistress to both John F. Kennedy and the head of the Chicago mob—recalled a day spent with Sinatra. He “acknowledged the comings and goings of an endless string of visitors, growled at flunkies, drank martinis, ate lunch, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate hors d’oeuvres, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate dinner, and drank more Jack Daniel’s.”

By the mid-1960s, Sinatra could drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and still go on stage.

2) The Anticipation

Like any respectable Sinatra aficionado, I have imbibed my share of Tennessee’s trademark sour mash whiskey. And as the author of a new book on Sinatra, I had an extra incentive to try the latest ultra-premium Jack Daniel’s bottle sent to me by my editor at The Wall Street Journal: a limited-edition 100-proof whiskey aged in 100 “alligator-charred” oak barrels (so called for the scaly interior surface left by the fire, the deepest of all the chars whiskey producers use to impart flavor and color to the liquor). It hit shelves in October—in plenty of time for toasts to Frank Sinatra on his 100^th birthday, December 12, 2015.

The whiskey is called Sinatra Century. By serendipitous coincidence, my new book is called “Sinatra’s Century.” I wrote it, quite simply, because I have loved the singer’s voice, his musical savvy, his definitive versions of great standards ever since I heard “All the Way” and “Witchcraft” on the radio when I was eight or nine and grasped the essence of swing from Sinatra albums a few years later. Timing it to coincide with the centennial, I wrote the book in 100 parts, because Sinatra’s career exists in exquisite counterpoint with what Henry Luce called the “American century” and because the century is the perfect form for a subject with so many facets.

Jack Daniel’s already has a top-shelf whiskey with Sinatra’s name on it – 90 proof Sinatra Select, which is selling well, at twice the price of single-barrel bourbons that are just as good. So there was a part of me that wondered whether the same would be true with “Sinatra Century” – whether JD is selling a name, an event, and a future souvenir rather than a whiskey that can go head to head with A. H. Hirsch Reserve or the best of Buffalo Trace’s Antique Collection.

3) The Presentation

The presentation of Sinatra Century is as lavish as it should be, priced at $379 or more per one-liter bottle. It arrives in a deep blue-indigo lacquered carrying case with an engraved brass handle on top. Pop open the case, and the bottle sits in a custom groove, like a dark liquid jewel set against black velvet. Each bottle is numbered—mine is FAS 23095, the initials standing for Francis Albert Sinatra. Also in their own made-to-size grooves are a hardbound booklet devoted to Sinatra’s relationship with Jack Daniel’s and a tie clip that doubles as a thumb drive.

That last item comes loaded with a previously unreleased album of a live Sinatra performance: thirteen songs, two monologues and a coda, all recorded at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January 1966. Frank had just turned fifty and was teaming up with the brilliant arranger Quincy Jones backed by the Count Basie Orchestra, and what better way to return to that evening than with a rocks glass in hand?

4) The Proof

           Isn’t “proof” a lovely word? It stands in one context for the potency of a potable, and in another it means verification: a geometrical proof, say, or the proof of the pudding. Both senses come into play here. Would Sinatra Century prove potent enough to provide the perfect accompaniment to belters like “Luck Be a Lady” and “Fly Me to the Moon”? At 100 proof, it had better. (The standard “Old No. 7” Jack Daniel’s bottle clocks in at a mere 80.)

As to color, I said amber, my wife said topaz. I said tongue of flame, my wife said Stradivarius. She described the taste as “warm orange afterglow.” I took another sip and said, “Cognac.” She sipped and said, “The Cognac of bourbons.” Goes well with dark chocolate. Warms the soul “in a drear-nighted December” (to quote Keats).

The whiskey is the best I’ve ever had from Jack Daniel’s.

How to drink it? Neat or with a few ice cubes. We stuck to Sinatra’s own recipe: “three rocks, two fingers, and a splash”–a Sinatra haiku, when you think about it. We omitted the splash.

5. The Playlist

Sinatra Century promises not merely a whiskey but an experience. So you’re sitting in your favorite reclining armchair sipping and playing the recording of that Sands appearance of January 1966. It opens with a trusty icebreaker, “Come Fly with Me,” then turns to a ballad he’s sung since his crooner days, the Gershwins’ “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” Self-consciousness spoils the verse intro. The skinny singer can scarcely keep a straight face when obliged to sing “I’m your big and brave and handsome Romeo.”

He’s on safer ground with Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” Perhaps the most celebrated of all Sinatra’s up-tempo finger-snappers, it brings out his swinging best. In adapting Nelson Riddle’s 1956 arrangement, Quincy Jones makes miraculous use of reeds and muted horns to compensate for the lack of a string section.

Sinatra always maintained he was at heart a saloon singer and he proves it anew in “Street of Dreams” and Matt Dennis’s great, haunting “Angel Eyes.” As you savor another swallow, the pace changes with “Fly Me to the Moon,” a highlight of the night. Sinatra reinvented Bart Howard’s 1954 song: It wasn’t a sad wistful plea, after all, but an assertive proclamation of love. It was also a nod to NASA’s great decade, the conquest of space as a seduction song. Killer arrangement. Love that flute.

The timeless “You Make Me Feel So Young” shows Sinatra at his most buoyant, and then he turns up the warmth in Johnny Mandel’s Oscar-winning “Shadow of Your Smile.” Sinatra is dating Mia Farrow and Mia likes the song.

Frank Loesser’s “Luck Be a Lady” comes from the musical “Guys and Dolls.” In the movie version, Sinatra played Nathan Detroit, but it was Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson who got to sing this ode to gambling that marks the show’s heroic climax. Now, to correct the injustice, Sinatra demonstrates how the song should be sung. One of Sinatra’s anthems in the 1960s, a hymn to Las Vegas, here it’s as electric as “Fly Me to the Moon,” with a tail like that of “My Kind of Town.”

Time for another round.

The audience is hushed when Frank sings “It Was a Very Good Year,” where again the reeds do the work of strings, and then the Rodgers and Hart standard “Where or When,” not only a marvelous love song but also the greatest ever on the subject of déjà vu: “Some things that happen for the first time / Seem to be happening again.”

The nightclub act ends with a song Sinatra owns: “My Kind of Town,” the terrific tribute to Chicago that Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen wrote for their boss to sing in “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” his last movie musical.

By now you’ve made a dent in the bottle and you’re robustly singing along.

-- from  "Author David Lehman Takes On Jack Daniel's Sinatra Century," in The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2016

The End of Summer--Tutti Frutti Tarts [by Barbara Hamby]

Summer is ending, but the impulse to pile on the fruit is almost irresistible. For Labor Day I made a Lemon Mascarpone tart with a combination of plums, blueberries, raspberries, and cherries. Right away the Italian description "tutti frutti" came to mind. It translates as "all the fruits." I didn't manage to do that, but I did my best. 

A week later for my friend Elizabeth's birthday, I made Patricia Wells' Lemon Lover's Tart, because lemon is her favorite. I've made this tart over and over, but I've never made this Tutti Frutti version. I also wanted to try out my tartlet tins.

The pandemic has made all kinds of obsessions seem less weird. I'm studying French and Italian on Duolingo, talking things over with my little cat Patsy, and all summer I made fruit tarts. Oh, I also wrote a lot of poems. I call that a good summer. Thanks for sharing it with me. -- Barbara Hamby

Summer of Fruit Tarts--The Berries [by Barbara Hamby]

I had a friend in college who when everything was going great would say, "It's the berries!" I knew right away what he meant. Berries are one of nature's most beautiful gifts. When we were hunter-gatherers, berries were there for the picking although now someone else picks them and they show up in little boxes at the market. 

Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries--they are little party favors of the gods, Demeter's joy at Persephone's return. They can be eaten by the handfuls right off the bush, made into jams for winter, or baked into tarts. I wanted to try Tartine's pastry cream with Rose Geranium. I planted two rose geranium plants in my herb garden in the spring to use in a jam recipe, but when I saw the pastry cream recipe, I couldn't help myself. You soak four leaves in two cups of warm milk for a half hour and then make the cream. The rose geranium is a perfect compliment to the blackberries. If you don't have the rose geranium, you can use rose water.

Since I wasn't going to be taken out for dinner on my birthday this year, I decided to make my favorite Ligurian fish stew and end with this lemon mascarpone tart with blueberries, blackberries, pitted cherries, and little sprigs of mint. Happy birthday to me.

 

As summer's bounty is nearing its end, I'm freezing berries in anticipation of berriless days ahead. Berries are a metaphor for the small sweet things in life. In the nearly extinct Tofa language in Siberia, "to go berry picking" is a metaphor for death, which seems very beautiful to me.

Summer of Fruit Tarts--Peach-O-Rama [by Barbara Hamby]

I go a little crazy when peaches are in season, which in North Florida is between the middle of June and the middle of August. We're a 45 minute drive from Georgia, which is the center of the peach universe. The best of the best is the Elberta peach, which is like biting into everything the world promised you but snatched away until the moment when that golden flesh hits your tongue and the juice is running down your arms. Standing over the kitchen sink is the preferred position during the week or so that Elbertas are released by the Peach Gods into the mortal realm. 

After this experience, then I start thinking about how to preserve some of the peaches for the winter. Peach jam is a must. Not only is it good with toast and jam, but if you slice some jalapenos in a jar or two then you can add it to a cheese board. I also make a white-peach saffron confiture, which is a looser French jam. White peach and lemon verbena is also a great combination.

But peaches this beautiful deserve to be put into a tart. I started with a riff on the Patricia Wells' Apricot Almond Tart, substituting peaches for the apricots. It's a divine tart not matter what fruit you use. This is a photo of the tart before it goes into the oven.

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800

The perfection of the Elberta is expressed in all its golden glory! The Wells tart recipe is wonderful, but this year I wanted to try another one--Amanda Hesser's recipe. It is very different from Wells' recipe, but it is wonderful in its own way. The photograph at the beginning of this piece is Hesser's Fresh Peach Tart: https://food52.com/recipes/14217-peach-tart

Another peachy tart that is beautiful and delicious is this white peach tart. The White Peach is in the markets here around the beginning to the middle of August. This tart needs peach jam, and lucky for me I had some fresh jam that I'd made in July. I use the Tartine recipe, which calls for peaches, sugar, and lemon juice. It's a simple perfect recipe.

 The perfume of a white peach is like a whiff of paradise, not the Old Testament one but the land of milk and honey in which everyone is illuminated by an inner light and poetry is on their tongues. This is an Italian recipe, and when I saw it, I knew I had to try it if only to be faithful to my peach-mania.  https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/white-peach-tart

I'll leave you with this poem from my new book, Holoholo. Even when I'm in the middle of summer with its abundance of peaches, I am thinking of their passing from this world:

 

                        Ode to the Last Peach of Summer

How many summers are left me, fierce afternoons in July

            as I bite into globes of ripe peaches, juice running

down my hands, the aching splendor of their golden flesh,

            some as big as a baby’s head with its fuzz

and tender skin, but always I’m thinking of you, the last peach

            of the year, sometimes in September, one year

on October fifth, and you're a little hard, my sweet nut,

            or mealy, the rough fabric of your meat, its scent

a faint telegraph from August when I’m wallowing

            in so many peaches I bake pies, make peach jam,

some with jalapeños, pour Bellinis, but with every bite

            I get a little closer to you, and November looms

with its desperate peachless days. O pit with crevices

            like the dark side of the moon. Juice exploding

on my tongue. Flesh of your flesh. O to live in a world

            that has peaches, a moment or two in the riot of summer

before rain begins to fall, and in the dark woods mushrooms

            sprout like gold coins in the last grass of the year.

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Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She  is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo: Poems (2121) Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all  published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry and was published in 1999 by New York University Press. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. You can find out more about Barbara here.  

"We nibbled on it like mice." Novelist Bell Kaufman (May 10, 1911 – July 25, 2014) on her first taste of chocolate.

Bel Kaufman, z"l, granddaughter of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem and author of award-winning novels (Up the Downstair Case), recalls the food shortages of her childhood in Soviet Ukraine and how her early memories of hunger have made her deeply appreciative of food.

For the full interview, visit the Yiddish Book Center here. 

-- sdl

Summer of Fruit Tarts--Figgissimo [by Barbara Hamby]

The sauna of a Southern summer seems made for figs. When David Kirby and I bought our house, I discovered an old fig tree near the driveway and the vegetable garden. The woman who sold us our house told us her father had had a victory garden there during World War II. Does the fig tree date back to the forties? I wish I'd asked her. 

A fig tree is a glorious creature with large leaves that look like the palms of a giant. I've planted two more trees since we moved in. We had to have a pine tree in the front yard removed, and I'm going to plant another one where the pine was. Early in the fall fig trees begin to loose their leaves, but when they start to leaf out in the spring, their bare brown stems erupt with little rosettes of green, and I know that the figs are on their way.

This summer has been miraculous. I usually make two flats (12-jars per flat) of fig jam. This year I made 36 jars, and two fig tarts.

I'm wondering about the figginess of this summer. Could the drought during May followed by torrential downpours be the reason? Probably not, because this is a pretty typical late spring into early summer. I have to compete with the birds and squirrels for the figs. This year I got all St. Francis of Assisi and addressed the critters. "Brother and sister birds, you take the high figs and I'll take the low ones. Then we'll all live as one. Brother and sister squirrels, I know you're hungry, too. Please take all you want, but please don't take a bite and then go on to the next fig. Let's share the lusciousness."

It seemed to work. Fig jam is one of mother nature's true gifts. Bread, butter, and fig jam with a cup of coffee or tea makes an ambrosial breakfast. With a strong stinky cheese it goes well with an aperitivo. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm going to make a crostata marmalata, the Italian breakfast tart, with fig jam. 

I inherited David's mother's copper jam-making pot, and I cook up two or three batches of jam every summer. Our trees have small brown figs called Brown Turkey, that seem to me more concentrated in flavor than their larger cousins. In my mother-in-law's recipe for fig jam the only ingredients are figs, sugar, and lemons. The most complicated part of making fig jam is fig curation. The season is only a couple of weeks in July. It starts slowly and then builds up speed. On good days I pick a pound in the morning and another pound in the early evening. Every two days I have enough for a batch of jam. But figs are tender little orbs. You have to watch them or they'll turn into mush. 

Since I had so many figs this year, I had plenty for tarts. My first tart was beautiful, but the crust was a disappointment. That's because I tried a crust that wasn't Patricia Wells' crust. The second one was beautiful and balanced. The recipe is from her great book At Home in Provence, which won a James Beard award when it came out in 1996. I was at the Miami Book Fair and saw her demonstrate some of the recipes. The copy I bought is falling apart because I've tried so many of the recipes. The fig tart is a variation on the apricot almond tart. The only change I made was that I substituted orange flower water for the almond extract. This photo is of the halved figs without the cream filling.

I'm hoping to find some purple figs at the market later in the summer, and try the recipe with them. Here's the recipe again: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800

Next week: It's a Peach-luscious world

Summer of Fruit Tarts--Cherry-mania [by Barbara Hamby]

Oh, cherries--how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. You are a small bomb of sweetness that explodes on the tongue like a day in summer. There are so many ways to take advantage of the glorious cherry. First, of course, you eat them raw like candy. I'm teaching a class on the letters of the poets next year, and I'm reading Sylvia Plath's two huge (as in 800 pages plus apiece) volumes of letters. For some reason a bowl of cherries really goes well with a long book. I remember reading War and Peace one summer in my twenties and eating cherries.

I started my Summer of Sylvia Plath with Red Comet, the splendid new biography by Heather Clark. The cherries made those last terrible months of Plath's life easier to read about. Plath loved to cook and eat. Her early letters mention the enormous amount of food she ate at camp. Friends say her metabolism was off the charts. I'd love to make her lemon pie. Maybe later in the year when my lemon trees start bearing fruit.

Back to cherries!

After eating cherries like candy, cherry jam is the next step in my cherry-mania. If you lace the jam with jalapeños, then you will have a marvelous addition to your fall cheese boards. I've also made some cherry jam without the peppers to use when I make a Gateau Basque and a newly discovered Maltese Tart to commemorate the birth of the Virgin, which leads one down a linguistic path on all the uses of the word "cherry." Look for the on September 8, which is the BVM's birthday.

A third use for cherries is Eugenia Bone's divine recipe for cherries preserved in red wine. I usually make three or four pint jars every summer. In the middle of winter it is a great topping for pound cake or a simple olive oil cake. 

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/15896/well-preserved-by-eugenia-bone/9780307885807/excerpt

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1019986-olive-oil-cake?action=click&module=Global%20Search%20Recipe%20Card&pgType=search&rank=1

Finally, you can make a cherry tart. My go-to tart recipes are from Patricia Wells' book At Home in Provence. This is the easiest recipe ever, and your friends and guests will be wowed. The crust has a cookie-like dough that you press into the tart pan, so you don't need a rolling pin.

Any cherry recipe begins with pitting the cherries. Cherry juice wants to explode all over, so it's best to lay down an old towel on your table. I use gloves, because the juice will stain your nails. Also, investing in a good cherry pitter is essential. You can buy one for less than ten dollars. I have two, so sometimes I can invite a friend to a cherry-pitting party.

After you've baked the tart shell, Wells suggests sprinkling the crust with ground almonds so the crust doesn't get soggy when you put in the cream filling.

Then arrange the cherries starting on the outer edge of the tart shell and work your way toward the center.

Now pour the cream mixture in and top the tart with ground almonds. Wells says that cherries and almonds are a match made in heaven, and I agree with her.

Here's the finished tart:

This is the basic recipe for Wells' tart. However, if you want a full immersion in Wells' world I'd suggest having a copy of her book At Home in Provence. My copy is falling apart with love and use. Patrica Wells is a goddess. 

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800

Happy baking! 

Barbara Hamby is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018) and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry and her book of short stories, Lester Higata’s 20^th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University.

Mycology [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

 

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photos 2021 (c) Jessica Kerns

This summer we have had so much rain here in the Finger Lakes that mushrooms, both edible and toxic, are popping up everywhere and the hunters are out. Better be careful! Over on Facebook, where friends are posting photos of their fungus finds, polymath Jessica Kerns responded with an emphatic "NO!" when I asked if I could serve up a spectacular mushroom I'd spotted while walking the dog. Elsewhere she notes that "[t]he forests are magical right now. Hunting mushrooms for harvest is therapy." Scroll through her photos, above, and you'll see what she means. "Not all of these are edible," says Jessica, "but two of them are and they are delicious!" Extra credit if you can guess which to saute with butter and garlic and a splash of wine and which belong in an Agatha Christie novel.  

I'm reminded of this poem: 

Mushrooms

        by Sylvia Plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.
>>>

And this passage from The Debt to Pleasure, a favorite contemporary novel by John Lanchester, also comes to mind: 

    On the seat beside me were my wicker basket, my Sherlock Holmesian magnifying glass (hardly ever used or needed), and my copy of Champignons du nos pays by Henri Romagnesi (ditto, though I also keep all six volumes of Champignons du Nord et du Midi by Andre Marchand back at the house).

    In the following account, the alert reader will notice that I am being a little bit coy about the geographical specifics. Forgive me, but we amateur mycologists, especially amateur mycologists of a culinary bent, passionately guard our favored patches of land--a promising batch of cèpes-yielding beeches here, a cropped roadside thronging with ink-caps there, a yonder patch of nettles known to feature spectacular examples of Langermannia gigantea, or the giant puffball, and somewhere else a field with a healthy quantity of cow excrement conducive to the fructation of the nasty tasting but currently popular halucinogen Psilocybe semilanceata, appropriately known in English as the Liberty Cap. (This, by the way, is not as it is sometimes taken to be, the hallucinogen used by the notorious shamans of the Koryk tribe in far Siberia, the Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric, ingestible via reindeer or indeed human urine, most often popularly reproduced in the image of a re-capped white-dotted toadstool, providing a convenient seat for any momentarily resting elf or fairy. The shamans call that mushroom the Wapag, after a body of magical beings who inhabit the fungi with a view to passing on secrets from the realm of the spirits.) We mushroom hunters are a secretive and wary breed, and it is through ingrained force of habit that I confine my account of the site of my labors to the description: a patch of land somewhere in the south of France. . .

Bon Appetit! 

A Summer of Fruit Tarts [by Barbara Hamby]

What says summer more than the gorgeous fruit that descends on the markets? Apricots, berries, peaches, figs, plums, and so much more. I am a dedicated jam maker, so I usually concentrate my efforts there. But I also love to bake. I find it relaxing, especially after a long and especially grueling semester. With graduate admissions, 16 defenses, and two Zoom classes, this was more exhausting than it usually is. I was ready to do some cooking and try to become a human being again.

I subscribe to New York Times Cooking, and a recipe came up that I thought I'd like to try--Gâteau Breton. It was adapted by Melissa Clark. I love her recipes. Her cookbook, Dinner in French, really helped me get through the first part of the pandemic. Sitting down to a civilized dinner seem to keep the chaos at bay. The glasses of wine probably helped, too.

I made the Gâteau Breton. It was delicious. I served it with crème fraîche--ooh, la, la. It looked just like the photo in the NYTimes, not something that always happens. An obsession was born. I thought why not make fruit tarts to take advantage of the summer's bounty. The Gâteau Breton used dried plums and rum, but fresh fruit was already in the markets. I had a couple of good tart recipes, and I wanted to find more.

In his essay "Are You Still Writing About Your Father?" Tony Hoagland says that a poet is lucky to have an obsession. I certainly have my core obsessions, but I also like to cultivate peripheral ones that talk to the big mamas. I never know if they are going to crop up in my work, and sometimes they don't, but as Keats says you have to work in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. Who knows what will happen? I love that feeling, and nothing is better than a slice of tart with an afternoon cup of tea.

Here's the recipe: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017854-gateau-breton

Next tart: Patricia Wells is a baking goddess!

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She  is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo: Poems (2121) Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all  published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry and was published in 1999 by New York University Press. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. You can find out more about Barbara here. 

An Interview with Adrienne Su [by Aspen Matis]

Adrienne Su is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections: Peach State, Living Quarters, Having None of It, Sanctuary, and Middle Kingdom. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including four volumes of The Best American Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College.

I corresponded with Ms. Su via email about poetry’s ability to translate “a question or problem into comprehensible form” and to “make our everyday vocabulary do something no one previously thought it could.” We also discussed the exciting nature of creative works that elicit “a gut response, an understanding one feels rather than thinks” and the power of strong and timely language to make “a constructive difference” in our world.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Writing poems is the most difficult and original thing I’m capable of doing. It uses all of my intellectual resources, as well as whatever small abilities I might possess in music, visual art, storytelling, and the many languages I’ve studied but can’t speak. Also, I find that writing a poem reduces the pain of nagging uncertainties, not by providing certainties, but by putting a question or problem into comprehensible form.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

First, to make our everyday vocabulary do something no one previously thought it could. Usually this has something to do with the roots of words, the root of “radical” being radix, “root.” Second, to keep at poetry regardless of the recognition that does or doesn’t appear in the poet’s lifetime.

This past March, you wrote a powerful and wrenching opinion-editorial in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about how “As the pandemic raged and many in power blamed China for everything, attacks on Asians followed.” In the context of the horrific racially-motivated Atlanta mass-shooting of Asian women, your essay shares a glimpse of your own experience as an Asian American woman from Atlanta. Relaying the ways in which you’ve navigated the rise in hostility and discrimination you’ve experienced in the past months, you write: “My job is safer than the jobs of spa employees, but I see anew how I coped with the pandemic under an openly racist president. When gyms closed and many took to walking for exercise, I cut back on going outside. After dark, I drove, even to travel two blocks. I appreciated the obscuring effect of masks.” What moved you to write this very personal op-ed, and what impact do you hope your words will have?

Thank you for this response to the piece. I wrote it because the news of the shooting left me feeling pinned by a boulder, and my initial efforts to roll it away — donating money, attending a rally — gave no relief. The boulder didn’t budge. Its weight was saying that I was not only capable of more, the task was also non-optional. Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press, publisher of three of my books, gave me the needed nudge. As an Asian American writer who not only grew up in Atlanta but was one week from publishing a book of poems centering on Asian American Atlanta, I would be wrong not to speak up — and I needed to do it in a genre that moves faster and is more widely read than poetry. How long would the media be interested in Asian America? One, two weeks? If enough writers took up the cause, that interest could last longer. Strong op-eds by other Asian American writers were appearing by the day, so I also knew I needed to say something others hadn’t already said. In terms of speed, I’m the opposite of a journalist, so even with Jen and other writer friends responding to drafts, and with every obligation I could cancel canceled, that short piece took me four full days of obsessive writing and rewriting. My hope is that it conveys something others may have wanted to say about being Asian American in a time of pandemic and racial unrest but didn’t have the writing experience, access to publishing, or possibly even the English language to express — and that that makes a constructive difference, on any scale.

Your most recent book of poems, Peach State, explores Atlanta, Georgia’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. Poet Mark Jarman describes the collection as “elegant, lucid, formally inventive,” and Paisley Rekdal, who edited The Best American Poetry 2020, calls the book “sly, smart and accessible, formally sophisticated and moving,” adding that Peach State is “a beautiful and thought-provoking meditation on food, race, and identity.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?

In 2015 I saw how international Atlanta had become; being of Asian descent there was no longer the lonely condition I remembered from the 1970s. Both of these things had become clear to me through food: restaurants, grocery stores. In the early days, my family had simply done without many Chinese ingredients, but every now and then someone arrived with a suitcase full of treasures from New York, San Francisco, Taiwan, or Singapore. Today I’m the one who brings a suitcase full of treasures home to central Pennsylvania — from Atlanta. I wanted to write about these changes because, while Atlanta’s transformation was what I had wanted all along, it also meant the erasure of an era. I wanted to acknowledge and celebrate the Chinese Americans, including my parents, who were there many years before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 inadvertently created major demographic shifts. I found that I was best able to portray their resourcefulness, creativity, loneliness, and joy through food. They laid a path for the substantial Asian population of today’s Atlanta — which I also wanted to celebrate. The writing process was a mixture of mourning and delight.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

When I look at shortlists, even longlists, for prizes, I think there is no “best” book. The books are usually doing different things and aren’t meant to be compared to each other. That’s why I think it’s so important that independent publishers and university presses stay around; they care most about the integrity of the work, and while they certainly need to sell books, they aren’t in it for the immediate public response. One day the overlooked great works may receive the recognition they deserve because someone kept them in print. Best American Poetry is a great vehicle for that, too, putting both known and unknown poets’ names in public libraries everywhere.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

Have faith that your non-literary talents will turn out to be relevant to your poetry, but give it time to find its place. For many years, I was ambivalent about my interest in cooking. Cooking ability often translates into added labor, especially for women — labor that is generally unseen and repetitive and done at the cumulative expense of writing time. Eventually, my interest in food became a cornerstone of my writing life.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

Lately I’ve been writing prose, including a forthcoming piece on children’s books for New Ohio Review; a short piece for the Instagram page Apparel for Authors; and another short piece on Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month for USA Today. I’m working on a longer essay on Chinese restaurants. Poetry is still my main genre, but this moment in history seems also to be calling for prose. As when I first read poems that moved me, I remain the most excited by creative works that elicit a visceral response; I wish I could generalize about what constitutes such works, but it’s a gut response, an understanding one feels rather than thinks.  

M. F. K. Fisher on the Martini

 

<<

The first Martini I ever drank was strictly medicinal, for threatened seasickness, and in spite of a loyal enjoyment of them which may be increasing in direct ratio to my dwindling selectivity of palate, I must admit that I still find them a sure prop to my flagging spirits, my tired or queasy body, even my over-timid social self. I think I know how many to drink, and when, and where, as well as why; and if I have acted properly and heeded all my physical and mental reactions to them, I have been the winner in many an otherwise lost bout with everything from boredom to plain funk. A well-made Martini or Gibson, correctly chilled and nicely served, has been more often my true friend than any two-legged creature.

 

-- M. F. K. Fisher, "To the Gibson and Beyond" (The Atlantic, January 1949)

>>

 

Remember: the only difference between a Martini and a Gibson is that the former gets an olive or lemon twist, the latter a cocktail onion or two. To make a "dirty" Martini serve with an olive and add a little olive juice. Vodka Martinis are OK, but for the full effect I recommend mixing gin (Hendrick's or Plymouth or Tanqueray or Beefeater) with a tablespoon of dry vermouth (preferably French: e.g. Noilly Prat); shake with ice, and serve straight up in frozen Martini glasses. Keep the gin (or vodka) in the freezer. For an American gin, try Barr Hill (Vermont) and for an expensive upgrade on the vermouth, consider Dolon's.  -- DL

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)