“The Frond-lipped, Brine-stung / Glut of Privilege”: Top Five Food Poems
by Ernie on 13/01/11 at 9:15 am
Poets like grub as much as their unlaureled fellow citizens, but a poem about food is never, of course, merely about the tempting morsels we find before us on a plate. A simple repast is occasion for reverie, meditation, and flights of fancy. Let’s have a look at some famous poems about food. Send in your own favorites!
5. “For a Cook” by Craig Arnold
What I remember most is what he did to the couple
who sent his best pasta back to the kitchen,
pronouncing it “too thin.” Capers and kalamata
olives tossed with squid-ink angelhair
—salty, he used to say, as sweat on a black man’s cock.
He said this often, not only to shock:
food should be made with love, and love to him was sweat,
saliva, tears. What do they want from me?
he muttered, adding an egg, more Parmesan, a pint
of heavy cream, and tossed it all together,
the straw-yellow sauce stringy with albumen,
thickened with semen as an afterthought.
Now he is dead. I write the recipe of all
of him that’s still out there in circulation:
tips of fingers and knuckles, pared away to scars
by the big knives, carelessly julienned
together with the root vegetables, the stray chips
of thumbnail, here and there a curled black hair,
spit hissing in a skillet, a drop of blood in the sauce,
the oil of his hand glazing the dough.
4. “Beans” by Mary Oliver
They’re not like peaches or squash.
Plumpness isn’t for them. They like
being lean, as if for the narrow
path. The beans themselves sit qui-
etly inside their green pods. In-
stinctively one picks with care,
never tearing down the fine vine,
never not noticing their crisp bod-
ies, or feeling their willingness for
the pot, for the fire.
I have thought sometimes that
something―I can’t name it―
watches as I walk the rows, accept-
ing the gift of their lives to assist
mine.
I know what you think: this is fool-
ishness. They’re only vegetables.
Even the blossoms with which they
begin are small and pale, hardly sig-
nificant. Our hands, or minds, our
feet hold more intelligence. With
this I have no quarrel.
But, what about virtue?
3. “Oysters” by Seamus Heaney
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
2. “Crab” by Sharon Olds
When I eat crab, slide the rosy
rubbery claw across my tongue
I think of my mother. She’d drive down
to the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in a
huge car, she’d ask the crab-man to
crack it for her. She’d stand and wait as the
pliers broke those chalky homes, wild-
red and knobby, those cartilage wrists, the
thin orange roof of the back.
I’d come home, and find her at the table
crisply unhousing the parts, laying the
fierce shell on one side, the
soft body on the other. She gave us
lots, because we loved it so much,
so there was always enough, a mound of crab like a
cross between breast-milk and meat. The back
even had the shape of a perfect
ruined breast, upright flakes
white as the flesh of a chrysanthemum, but the
best part was the claw, she’d slide it
out so slowly the tip was unbroken,
scarlet bulb of the feeler—it was such a
kick to easily eat that weapon,
wreck its delicate hooked pulp between
palate and tongue. She loved to feed us
and all she gave us was fresh, she was willing to
grasp shell, membrane, stem, to go
close to dirt and salt to feed us,
the way she had gone near our father himself
to give us life. I look back and
see us dripping at the table, feeding, her
row of pink eaters, the platter of flawless
limp claws, I look back further and
see her in the kitchen, shelling flesh, her
small hands curled—she is like a
fish-hawk, wild, tearing the meat
deftly, living out her life of fear and desire.
1. “Grub First, Then Ethics” (Brecht) by W.H. Auden
Should the shade of Plato
Visit us, anxious to know
how anthropos is, we could say to him: “Well,
we can read to ourselves, our use
of holy numbers would shock you, and a poet
may lament—’Where is Telford
whose bridged canals are still a Shropshire glory
where Muir who on a Douglas Spruce
rode out a storm and called an earthquake noble,
where Mr. Vynyian Board,
thanks to whose life-long fuss the hunted whale now suffers
a quicker death?’—without being
called an idiot, though none of them bore arms or
made a public splash,” then “Look!”
we would point, for a dig at Athens, “Here
is the place where we cook.”
Though built in Lower Austria
do-it-yourself America
prophetically blueprinted this
palace kitchen for kingdoms
where royalty would be incognito, for an age when
Courtesy might think: “From your voice
and the back of your neck I know we shall get on
but cannot tell from your thumbs
who is to give the orders.” The right note is harder
to hear than in the Age of Poise
when She talked shamelessly to her maid and sang
noble lies with Him, but struck
it can be still in New Knossos where if I am
banned by a shrug it is my fault,
not Father’s, as it is my taste whom
I put below the salt.
The prehistoric hearthstone,
round as a birthday-button
and sacred to Granny, is as old
stuff as the bowel-loosening
nasal war cry, but this all-electric room
where ghosts would feel uneasy,
a witch at a loss, is numinous and again
the centre of a dwelling
not, as lately it was, an abhorrent dungeon
where the warm unlaundered meiny
belched their comic prose and from a dream of which
chaste Milady awoke blushing.
House-proud, deploring labor, extolling work,
these engines politely insist
that banausics can be liberals,
a cook a pure artist
who moves Everyman
at a deeper level than
Mozart, for the subject of the verb
to-hunger is never a name:
dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms,
but the neotene who marches
upright and can subtract reveals a belly
like a serpent’s with the same
vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile, or Pigmy,
he must get his calories
before he can consider her profile or
his own, attack you or play chess,
and take what there is however hard to get down:
then surely those in whose creed
God is edible may call a fine
omelet a Christian deed.
The sin of Gluttony
is ranked among the Deadly
Seven, but in murder mysteries
one can be sure the gourmet
didn’t do it: children, brave warriors out of a job,
can weigh pounds more than they should
and one can dislike having to kiss them yet,
compared with the thin-lipped, they
are seldom detestable. Some waiter grieves
for the worst dead bore to be a good
trencherman, and no wonder chefs mature into
choleric types, doomed to observe
Beauty peck at a master-dish, their one reward
to behold the mutually hostile
mouth and eyes of a sinner married
at the first bite of a smile.
The houses of our City
are real enough but they lie
haphazardly scattered over the earth,
and Her vagabond forum
is any space where two of us happen to meet
who can spot a citizen
without papers. So, too, can her foes. Where the
power lies remains to be seen,
the force, though, is clearly with them: perhaps only
by falling can She become
Her own Vision, but we have sworn under four eyes
to keep Her up—all we ask for,
should the night come when comets blaze and meres break,
is a good dinner, that we
may march in high fettle, left foot first,
to hold her Thermopylae.
2011 01 14 | verse per se
Jan 14th, 2011
[...] Top five food poems: (5) For a Cook — Craig Arnold; (4) Beans — Mary Oliver; (3) Oysters — Seamus Heaney; (2) Crab — Sharon Olds; and (1) Grub First, Then Ethics — W.H. Auden [E-Verse Radio] Now I need to go exercise: I put on a month’s worth of calories just reading though that feast! But first, a few more poems I want to read . . . [...]
2011 02 14 | verse per se
Feb 14th, 2011
[...] those re-read today from the stack I read and listed a month ago here: Top five food poems: (5) For a Cook — Craig Arnold; (4) Beans — Mary Oliver; (3) Oysters — Seamus Heaney; (2) [...]
Cooking with “Shells” « hungrypoet
Apr 28th, 2011
[...] I had the idea of using the book to build a menu. Many of the poems simply mention food. “For a Cook” is possibly the closest thing to a verse version of Kitchen Confidential you’ll find [...]