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Poetry family trees and brassica subspecies

Something else of interest from the Poetry Paper I mentioned earlier, a feature called The Poetry Family Trees. Featured poets – just-appointed US poet laureate Donald Hall, Sinead Morrissey, Michael Symmons Roberts, Lorna Goodison, Adrian Mitchell – were asked the following questions, which are interesting ones for all of us to keep in the backs of our minds.

  • Which ‘family tree’ do you think you belong to as a poet – which poets do you recognise as your precursors?
  • Why do you like these poets and what do you value them for?
  • The first poem/poet that made an impact on you. When and why?
  • The next book by someone you’re most looking forward to?
  • How much time do you spend reading poetry in an average week?
  • And what proportion are contemporary/from earlier centuries?
  • What else do you read?

Continuing with the many-named vegetable theme, here’s another one for you: Chinese cabbage. I’m in favour of going by the Chinese simplified name, “Large White Vegetable”. But if you want to do a closer identification, we’re talking Brassica campestris, aka Brassica rapa – subspecies pekinensis, Che-foo type. You may also encounter it as: wong baak, won bok, wong nga bok, da baicai, pe-tsai, pai-tsai, pechay, or nappa, napa, Siew Choy/siu choy, tsina, kubis gna, hakusai, celery cabbage and Peking cabbage; some of these names might attach themselves to another category of pekinensis – Chihili type – which is greener and leafier. We are gravely warned against confusing it with another Brassica subspecies – chinensis – better known as bok choy or pak choy and is also called Chinese white cabbage, Chinese mustard, white mustard cabbage.

A good source of vitamin A, this vegetable – let’s call it Chinese cabbage – has been grown in Asia since the 5th century, and in North America for about a hundred years. It forms the basis of the Korean wonder-food Kimchi (yum!). It is a wonderful salad vegetable owing to its tender, juicy, mildly spicy flavour. The best ever quick salad meal, which I first had in someone’s home in Prague of all places, is:

About 2 cups Chinese cabbage, in 1 inch chunks
3 rashers bacon
1 clove garlic
1/4 lemon
1/4 cup good olive oil
Cook the bacon; cut in 1 inch pieces. While you’re cooking the bacon, mince or press the garlic and toss it with the cabbage. Toss in the bacon, squeeze the lemon and drizzle the olive oil. Grind a bit of pepper over it all if you must. Mix fleetingly and eat hungrily. Speak to no one you haven’t shared this with – at least until the garlic subsides.

There is something ecstatic in this meal for me: the collision of hot salty bacon with crunchy cold cabbage, the tartness of the lemon and bite of garlic. And the trusty olive oil doing what oil does: dispersing all those discrete flavours across the tastebuds

    Little Boris, big Ted and a whole bunch of rapini

    Hard to blog these days: too many distractions. World Cup, dog walks in the glorious sunshine, weeds glaring at me from the stony margins of my garden, and now little orphan Boris (*no* idea why that photo suddenly loaded..?!) who is lodging here for a week while he gets over a nasty cold. Like Anton the wonder dog he is from local rescue society Animals For Life.

    It’s been hard to make time to read these days. Still, even with Boris gnawing at the corners of the book and purring remorselessly, I managed to get through the first chapter of Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and Programmes from “Listening and Writing”, a rare old (1967) Ted Hughes book I found on ABE. In his note to teachers in the first chapter, he shines some light on the magic of writing exercises. Time limits of, say, 10 minutes “create a crisis, which rouses the brain’s resources: the compulsion towards haste overthrows the ordinary precautions, flings everything into top gear, and many things that are usually hidden find themselves rushed into the open. Barriers break down, prisoners come out of their cells.” With all that rushing it’s hard to still the internal critic, let alone an external one, so I liked the way he raised a hand to that: “As in training dogs, these exercises should be judged by their successes, not their mistakes or shortcomings.” Woof to that.

    And woof to vegetables of many names. When I innocently picked up a bag of something labelled Rapini, I was in for an interesting journey. Aka Broccoli Raab, it may also be labelled raab, rapa, rape, rapine, rappi, rappone, taitcat, Italian or Chinese broccoli, broccoli or broccoletti di rape, cime de rape, broccoli de rabe, Italian turnip, turnip broccoli, rabe, broccoletto, or broccoli di foglia. Rapini works for me.

    Originating in the Mediterranean and also China, it is actually a descendant from a wild herb. Although it looks and tastes like it, I discover that it is not a member of the broccoli family. It is, however, closely related to turnips! It is grown as much for its long-standing, tasty mustard-like tops as for their multiple small florets with clusters of broccoli-like buds, which never form heads. When you buy it, it should have bright-green leaves that are crisp, upright, and not wilted. I looked at some recipes – though in the end I thought, like most vegetables, it was nice either raw or simply steamed and tossed with lemon and butter.

    Fast food and dead metaphors

    Well, he talks so much that inevitably some of what he says is going to be rubbish. But bless him he works hard and has fired up a lot of people about food and eating well. Here’s my quote of the week, from Anthony Bourdain: “Fast food institutionalizes low expectations.” From an interview last January in Tyee Books. (He continues, “I said once that McDonald’s is like crack for children. And eating in proximity to clowns is never a good thing.” True words.)

    I heard a radio program a couple of years ago where a Vancouver chef tried to do a Jamie Oliver and show kids how much better freshly prepared food was, by making macaroni and cheese from scratch and then letting them do a taste test. Just as Jamie found, many (most?) of the kids preferred what they were used to, namely Kraft Dinner.

    Obviously. If your taste buds have been fine tuned by processed cheese powders and high levels of salt, why – indeed how? – would you be able to address the subtleties of real cheese? An authentic macaroni and cheese certainly won’t have the neon colouring or the gluey consistency these kids are used to either. They were trained to like this stuff by the people who bought and served it to them, without regard to the long term implications to their palates or health.

    Just as we’ve been trained to expect cheap food, no matter the consequences. We have spawned and nurtured the Costco-Walmart generation, demanding bargains without regard to the quality of the cheap food, the environmental cost of shipping it from the cheapest markets, the crippling effects on local food production in poor countries, and the damage to local food production, processing and distribution industries in our own countries. I wonder what it is we buy with the money we save buying cheap food?

    One thing I bought myself was a ticket to England for the writing retreat in Yorkshire, where I happened upon the second issue of The Poetry Paper, published by The Poetry Trust. In it, Donald Hall meditates at some length on dead metaphors, tagging his own with [DM] as he writes:

    When we speak, when we write letters or newspaper headlines, we use dead metaphors and we understand each other. The dead metaphor is not a criminal activity – but it is an activity at odds with poetry. If a poem is to alter us, or to please us extravagantly, it requires close attention from both poet and reader. Close attention to language is the contract [DM] that writer and reader sign. The terms of the contract require that each word be fully used – so that its signification, implication, association and import may impinge upon us, move us, and reward intelligent attention.

    He is evidently on the side of the fence [DM] (yikes it’s infectious!) that says poems cannot be translated into other languages – because their art lies in their multiple meanings and freshness.

    Translation is a useful scam, so that languageless readers may gather notions of what Cavafy or Tu Fu are up to, but Frost’s ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’ is a definition of poetry. Poetry lies in the minute shades [DM] that distinguish among words commonly known as synonyms. Poetry happens in the differences between the words listed together in Roget: ‘chaste, virtuous; pure, purehearted, pure in heart; clean, cleanly; immaculate, spotless, blotless, stainless, taintless, white, snowy; unsoiled, unsullied, undefiled, untarnished, unstained…’

    He gives the nod [DM] to writing groups or at least friendly poem exchanges during the editing process.

    Illness provides ten thousand wounds [DM] to the language, which Hall’s Index would nurse back to health [DM]. The dead metaphor is a cancer [DM] in the poem’s language which only revisionary scrutiny can cut out [DM]. We are crippled [DM] when we use ‘crippled’ except in its literal sense… It’s only in revision that we uproot [DM] the dead metaphors that inspiration provides – or we may need the help of friends… The brain notoriously overlooks its own errors while it discerns the errors of others.

    Black beans and blind men

    Nigella Lawson’s How to Eat is, I discovered, the subject of a blog along the lines of the Julie/Julia project. I had received the book last year and thought it was time I cracked the cover and tried something. I happened to have a bag of black beans in the cupboard so I made South Beach Black Bean Soup. It was very good, particularly after letting it sit for a day and then adding a squeeze of fresh lime, some chopped coriander (cilantro) and a dollop of sour cream. Didn’t have any red onion but might try it with that later. I did find myself yearning for heat, and the tabasco helped. But it seemed… wrong somehow to make black bean soup without chiles. Anyway, it’s a good one for vegetarians and coeliacs.

    I spent a little time today browsing The Poem, a spare and readable site, which describes itself as “a taster of contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland.” I enjoyed Christopher Logue’s “Rat O Rat” – one of the little beggars just strolled along my fence the other day and gave me a haughty look – but the one that follows it “from New Numbers” is an amazing narrative gem.

    Sharpen those pencils

    A couple of submission opportunities have crossed my inbox lately.

    The “Words for Wilderness” prose and poetry contest, sponsored by the Washington Wilderness Coalition (WWC), seeks work that comes from the heart of the wilderness and the writer. It can include both personal work that revels in the experience of nature as well as writing that explores political aspects of civilization’s relationship with wilderness. Winners will read their work at an event in late June. Deadline May 17, 2006

    Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc. is seeking articles by women for a couple of new collections of essays about travel. Greece: A Love Story (deadline June 1st) needs essays on the Greece that lies behind postcards; and Go Your Own Way (Deadline: May 15, 2006) is seeking original, personal stories by women on the experience of traveling alone in all corners of the globe.

    Suet, treacle and some other things

    Canadians who have acquired British cookbooks may sometimes need to know equivalent ingredients or measurements. Here’s a site that offers quite a bit of information, although not an answer to the question that still stumps me: what in a Canadian grocery store can equate to shredded suet for making mincemeats, dumplings, pastries and puddings? The suet offered by grocers in Victoria when I asked included bird suet (studded with birdseed!) and chunks of fat pared from beef cuts.

    The official word on suet as sold in England is that it is made by grating the hard white fat which surrounds the kidneys, although there is also a vegetarian version, which according to the label is made of hydrogenated vegetable oil, wheat flour, sunflower oil, pectin and sugar. Lard and shortening are the wrong consistency: too soft and greasy. I haven’t experimented to see if they actually work in the finished product, though. I did find mention that hard coconut fat might be the answer. Further experimentation clearly needed in this area. Stay tuned.

    Or apparently I can order vegetable suet through A Bit of Home, which happily is based in Toronto so no issues with customs, GST and duty. Everything from self-raising flour to jelly cubes to PG Tips pyramid teabags. Disappointing not to see Cornish Wafers, or Mackerel in brine which are – besides the cheese, the yogurt, the stunning produce selection, the extravagant selections of cream, of marmalade and of sugar – among the things I miss most about living in London.

    I must make a return visit to the lonely little UK shelf in Market on Yates, which stocks a similar selection to A Bit of Home. I scored a 500g jar of Marmite there last year for around $18 – which is still cheaper and easier than flying over and slogging back with it in the overwrought luggage.

    In The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You, Paul Farley painted a memorable portrait of black treacle, loosely equivalent to molasses in North America (I’m happy to see that Treacle also appears in New British Poetry):

    Funny to think you can still buy it now,
    a throwback, like shoe polish or the sardine key.
    When you lever the lid it opens with a sigh
    and you’re face-to-face with history.
    By that I mean the unstable pitch black
    you’re careful not to spill, like mercury

    that doesn’t give any reflection back,
    that gets between the cracks of everything
    and holds together the sandstone and bricks
    of our museums and art galleries…