ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

I enjoy talking prosody or fine technical points in the context of a workshop, but otherwise I’m not a one to want to discuss poetics with all and sundry. On this matter I was glad to find a kindred spirit in WS Merwin, who made a few seemingly timeless points when his 1956 collection Green With Beasts was made Poetry Book Society Choice:

“I don’t usually like literary conversations, though I deeply enjoy talking with writers other than poets about the practical side of getting things written. I like talking with some people about particular poems: though I think that in such conversations all I usually do is to try to describe a quality that excites my enthusiasm in a poem. I do not like writing about poetry… Above all I do not like trying to generalize about poetry…

…I think that one of the dangers of modern poetry has been a tendency to become inbred. Its small audience enhances the danger. It even seems possible for some poets to write as though critics, even particular schools of critics, were a fit and sufficient audience for poetry.”

He then makes

“one of the few general statements I feel safe in making about poetry. It is a mystery. It is a metaphor of the other mysteries which comprise human experience. But, like some other mysteries, it gives us a feeling of illumination – one mystery giving us a name by which to know another.”

I’ve been feeling some illumination from reading a collection of writings by MFK Fisher called The Art of Eating. Her prose is exquisite. In The Well-dressed Oyster she begins, firing on all cylinders and out of both barrels:

“There are three kinds of oyster-eaters: those loose-minded sports who will eat anything, hot, cold, thin, thick, dead or alive, as long as it is oyster; those who will eat them raw and only raw; and those who with equal severity will eat them cooked and no way other.

The first group may perhaps have the most fun, although there is a white fire about the others’ bigotry that can never warm the broad-minded.”

One suspects her allegiances lie with the second group.

“..almost every oyster-eater who does not belong whole-heartedly to the third and last division, would die before denying that a perfect oyster, healthy, of fine flavor, plucked from its chill bed and brought to the plate unwatered and unseasoned, is more delicious than any of its modifications. On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell.”

At least we have her words to savour, in lieu of a leisurely oyster harvest on the beach, since red tide has robbed us of some of our summer fun.

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

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.

The City of Victoria has appointed its first Poet Laureate: she is Carla Funk, Vanderhoof’s most famous daughter. In a city crawling with poets, I found it a little surprising that only eight threw their names in the ring (no, I did not). Perhaps the $1500 a year stipend dampened their passion.

According to a city development planner quoted in the article, Victoria stands at number 3 in North America on the Bohemian Index which ranks artistic and creative occupations of our residents. Actually that’s not entirely correct: in the information I found, we rank number 3 in a list adjusted for size – i.e. cities of 250,000 to 500,000 – behind Santa Barbara CA and Sarasota FL, and just above Madison WI and Albuquerque NM.

One of my favourite magazines is BBC Good Food, which I always pick up when I’m in England, or occasionally when I’m feeling flush in Canada. An issue from April 2005 surfaced in the magazine basket, and I read all about onions. We are told that we tear up when cutting onions because of allicin, although I found conflicting advice and more conflicting advice that the problem substance is actually a sulfide that breaks down into a volatile gas called syn-propanethial-S-oxide.

Whichever it is, the sulphuric compound produced when you slice the onion reacts with the moisture in your eyes to produce trace amounts of sulphuric acid, and the tears we produce to wash it away simply aggravate the problem.

The good news from plant chemistry is that “Allicin and syn-propanethial S-oxide have strong feeding deterrent activity toward herbivores such as insects.” Unfortunate that it doesn’t deter the feeding effects of carnivorous insects, but at least it supports folk wisdom about the benefits of planting garlic and onions around your rose bushes.

You can reduce the tearing effects by chilling onions before cutting. Alternatively, the Onion-USA site advises that the cells that release the sulfuric compounds are concentrated at the base of the onion, so you should cut the top and peel down without trimming off the root end until the last possible moment.

Or, like me, you could make sure nobody is around when you’re cutting and use a pair of safety goggles. I used to have a handy onion chopper that was no more than a jar with a chopping blade, and that worked well too. Looks like there are lots of variations of these devices on the market these days.

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.