So much depends upon food and farm in our favorite poems by William Carlos Williams ...
Have you ever hoarded a bit of special cheese or the perfect heirloom tomato? But when you return to the kitchen ready to cook with your closely held ingredient, it's missing. Later, you find out that your mom, your love or your little brother got to your stockpile first and ate it all up.
We've so been there.
We get a little bit angry when that happens, but we also feel a sense of joy over picking something so delicious our family member couldn't wait to gobble it up ...
That's the emotion that comes up for us when we read William Carlos Williams' This Is Just To Say, a poem (or is it a note tacked to the fridge?) about plums gone missing. The speaker in the poem fesses up to eating the cold, sweet plums the cook was saving for breakfast. Is the plum-eater a bad guest or just an enthusiastic eater of in season produce?
With Easter and spring on their way, we're also thinking about Williams' The Red Wheelbarrow. This quick little poem reminds us of the round, transforming relationship between the works of people, animals and nature on the farm. Experts say this poem can be read as a reflection Dr. Williams' had after treating a sick girl. We wonder if it could also be read as a caution on the dangers of factory farming?
As our celebration of the Hungry Reader continues, tell us about your favorite food related poems. We'll get you started.
((Side Note: Fans of William Carlos Williams might be interested in the Charles Demuth exhibit at The Whitney. Demuth and Williams were friends.))
WCW--what a great poet! The poet who helped me fall in love with poetry as a child was Robert Frost:
Blueberries
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!
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lovely. my favorite poem about food is this one by wislawa szymborska. it was originally written in polish.
The Onion
The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its tip to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
At peace, of a piece,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there's a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one,
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.
Nature's roundest tummy,
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.
â by Wislawa Szymborska
tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
from View With a Grain of Sand
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poetry and food are my two favorite things!! yummmmmy!
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