…for then I could rush out to the newsagent and buy a copy of the Independent on Sunday, and read Nancy’s poem which appears in its pages today.
Since I am not and I cannot, instead I will browse the recipes and then read about Englishmen and their beer bellies.
I was confused when I first moved to England about use of the term “corn” – which to North Americans means the yellow kernels that brighten every summer picnic. In England it’s used in its traditional and more wide-ranging sense, meaning any grain, and generally the kind that feeds livestock. According to Michael Pollan, it used to mean literally any grain at all – including grains of salt, hence the expression “corned beef”. And hence the qualifier “sweet” which is added to the kind of corn that people eat, as in sweetcorn.
While passing through London in November, on my way to Italy, I happened on a copy of his recently published and much-praised book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, right there in the Bloomsbury Oxfam Bookshop. Delighted I was, but long in the opening of this fascinating story. I have started reading it this week, after coming upon an interview with him recorded a few months before the book hit the shelves. The interview is more about Pollan and his research and writing methods than the content of the book, but he does preface the interview with a reading from it and answers some interesting questions about it at the end.
(Corn Maiden, in the sculpture garden of The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Santa Fe)
And so I’ve been reading the first section, which is a depressing story about the appropriation of corn – one of the traditional foods of American Indians – by agribusiness, and about the enslavement of American farmers to corn subsidies which in turn has created such a surplus of corn that its products form a shocking part of the fabric of American life, from sweeteners to manufacturing materials.
And if we thought it was cruel to feed cow by-products to cows, it turns out it’s actually not much better to feed them corn, which they aren’t designed to digest either (they are grass not grain-eaters). Luckily Pollan is a talented, humane and funny writer, so it’s possible to survive the facts he’s presenting to his fellow humans. I thought I’d take a break and look at some of his other writings today.
His 2003 article about Slow Food (from Mother Jones magazine) is interesting reading, particularly following turkey season. I hadn’t realised, when I wrote my poem, Lamenting the Turkey, that I was writing about Broad Breasted Whites, but seeing them described in Pollan’s article as “mindless eating and shitting machines” that are so deformed by breeding they cannot reproduce without artificial insemination, I’d say that’s exactly what they were; lumpy and awkward like the poem. Here it is, (from Cartography) – let’s dedicate this iteration to Pollan and to omnivores everywhere (oh, and by the way I do -really!- like eating turkey but will of course be more diligent about buying traditional breeds in future..).
Lamenting the Turkey
Stub-winged idiot, a food whose life
is a brief hymn to gluttony: crescendo of feathers
and flesh fills our tables, bloodlessly knifed
as the red leaves of Christmas bloom in the background,
remorselessly bright.In a time we’re kneeling to stars and shepherds
this is our chosen meal: a feathered blunder
so dumb it drowns in rain, gaping at skies
as they seal its throat with liquid wonder.We adopt all the symbols of peace
but consume the corpse of a baleful thing:
it riots at the scent of blood, will slay
wounded brothers with its bladed chin.We fill the season with music, and stop
this wobbling voice with a plug of bread;
it ends its time as it always lived:
stuffed with food, yet never fed.So this is our festive platter:
a death of stupidity and fatted fear,
naked and shining beneath the candles,
a meal we gobble in the gullet of the year.
As I was cleaning out my spice drawer — ok, thinking about cleaning out my spice drawer — I made an ill-advised visit to my computer and happened upon a Blogcrictics posting about the health benefits of spices. Almost shocking to come across an article like this that doesn’t mention turmeric.
Of course the king of spices himself must be Michael Ondaatje for his enduringly fragrant poem, The Cinnamon Peeler, featuring another most healthful spice.
The blogger does go on about cardamom though, which I’m definitely in favour of. I love it in kheer and I have a recipe for Cardamom Lime Cheesecake which was an old favourite (- just think of the comprehensive nutritional benefit you get from that one: vitamin C from the limes, calcium from the dairy, protein from the eggs, and eternal life from the cardamom!)
Cardamom Lime Cheesecake (8-10 servings)
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 tbsp sugar
1-1/4 c graham crumbs
2 envelopes gelatin
1-1/4 c sugar
1 c milk
grated peel of 3 limes
1-8oz pkg cream cheese
2 c large curd cottage cheese
1/3 c lime juice
1 c whipping cream, whipped
3/4 tsp cardamom
At the Feast of Fields the other weekend, we noticed a bowl of hazelnuts at the Dunsmuir Lodge stand. We paused, we tasted, we tasted again. They were amazing! We asked about them and were told they had been shelled the day before, then blanched in water, dusted with icing sugar and deep fried. Spectacular. Another (get thee behind me Satan) reason I’m so glad I don’t own a deep fryer…
I have been reading a book mentioned earlier on this blog, 101 Ways to Sell Poems and was struck by the sections (they are several) to do with reviewing. In my experience writers here spend almost as much time uselessly deploring the state of reviewing as dissing our teeny tiny publishers for not being more powerful marketing machines. This book answers both questions with the suggestion we just get off our duffs and wade in there to help.
Reviewing, as Chris Hamilton-Emery points out, needn’t be limited to the already limited space in newspapers. We can be both reviewers and reviewees, and both positions are helpful to our own literary presence. We have the power of the net behind us. Blogs, of course, are good places to air our allegiances to books that impress us (and hey — what am I doing now?); so are online bookseller review spaces (e.g. Amazon.ca); online journals and e-zines, listservs, our own web pages are also good places to do this. And there’s nothing to stop us from starting another online reviewing journal anytime we want. Implicit in his discussion is the suggestion not to waste time and newsprint/webspace trashing other writers’ works: you do more good by promoting your interests through positive action.
Some of the many remarks I found noteworthy came from the publisher side of Hamilton-Emery’s brain, where he addresses that question we get from our publishers: to whom should we send review copies? Hamilton-Emery tells you to stop and think carefully about that one, because it serves nobody’s interests to simply send copies to every newspaper and journal around. Profit margins on poetry are low enough, he observes; the last favour you want to do yourself and your publisher is to “flush their profits down the drain [by sending] too many unsolicited review copies to the benighted leagues of literary editors.” He urges poets to “Think of all the junk mail you have ever received and how delighted you were in opening it all up and reading it.”
He assures us that there is nothing untoward in cultivating reviewers to talk about our books. Other people are already doing this. All you are doing is helping out the journal by focusing their ability to match the right reviewer to the right book, instead of leaving them to wade through the accumulations and randomly assign, let’s say, absolutely the wrong book to the wrong reviewer.
Here’s a funny thing, from a year ago. As a National Poetry Day project last year, the Poetry Book Society had set up a food page allowing you to search poems by ingredient (or browse by author or title). How wonderful is that??
Here’s another funny thing. My mother loooooved parsley. She had trees of the stuff all over the balcony and it adorned, nay, festooned all our meals. I wonder if she ever saw this tribute ditty?
Parsley, parsley everywhere
Let me have my victuals bare.
–Ogden Nash
Ooh, even better than Lightning Cake – but not as good a name – is Dutch Plum Cake which I found in my mother’s 1955 edition of Good Housekeeping, a book in even worse physical condition than the Boston cookbook. This one has silver duct tape on the spine and crumbling pages. Luckily someone else has copied out the recipe for me. I didn’t make the vanilla sauce; it was lovely warm and on its own, or with ice cream. And a good way for me to use up a little of my personal warehouse of home made jams and jellies!
I’ve been enjoying a blast of end-of-summer reading. A wonderfully easy and useful book on my table just now is 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell, by Chris Hamilton-Emery, a poet himself as well as the publishing director of an excellent UK press, Salt Publishing. In a neat demonstration of zeitgeist, it’s appeared at the same time as Wendy Morton’s memoir about the poet as self-promoter, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. Hamilton-Emery’s book gives some incredibly useful background on the poetry publishing industry (if that is the word for this labour of love) and a host of well-organized and practical suggestions for poets and publishers alike to get this slowest of all selling genres out into the world.
