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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

What it looked like on a sunny lunchtime in early June. (And what it looks like the rest of the time.)

Nineteenth try lucky — finally it posted! Why?? Why?? I don’t understand. As you see I tried everything. I guess Blogger just gets cranky with image files every so often and calls a halt.

My previous unedited posting read as follows: I have had to admit defeat: photo posting on Blogger no longer works for me, so I’m having to go through Flickr (which worked after several tries). On Blogger, I’ve tried everything I can think of – tweaking internet options, clearing cookies and temporary internet files, rebooting, uploading from files and urls, adding the url in the Edit Html box. Nothing works. Searched the help files and googled the problem. We must put it down to bad blogger photo karma. Any other suggestions for cures would be more than welcome.

Since my first triumphant experience with skate wings in black butter, back in April, I tried cooking it again and was appalled by a penetrating ammonia odour coming from the fish. What was going on? Had I added too much vinegar, causing some toxic reaction? Delia mentioned nothing about this possibility in the book I was using for my recipe.

So I did a little further research and here’s what I found. Apparently skate, like shark, can become contaminated by the urea both species carry in their skin. Not all pieces of skate will have this: the ammonia odour comes from poor handling when it’s first caught and processed, and you should be able to smell it in the raw fish. Ideally you should sniff the fish before you buy it – impossible to do through a grocery store’s shrink-wrapped packaging of course. Better to make your purchase through a fishmonger if you can find one; and of course they’ll be least likely to sell you improperly prepared fish, so safer all round. (I guess this would be more of our self-inflicted damage from allowing mass-procurement supermarkets to take over food handling from knowledgeable specialists.) However, if you do find yourself with an ammonia-scented morsel, you can rescue the day by soaking it in lemon-infused water for 30 minutes to remove the smell (and taste). I guess that’s one more reason skate is a sadly neglected fish… but try it anyway.

After discussion about the tone of poetry reviewing in Canada, I came across some interesting reading from the archives of Chicago’s venerable Poetry Magazine where they once had a major fisticuffs over poetry reviewing. Plus ca change..

I had some time on Monday evening – a couple of hours right around supper time to be exact – to meditate on the lack of edible food in our public places, in this case the Calgary Airport.

Having disembarked for my stopover – a tiny packet of pretzel-like substance my only sustenance during the four hour flight from Ottawa – I was looking for something freshly cooked or remotely resembling fresh edible food. But what a wasteland it is for the connecting traveller, with most so called food outlets already scraping up their leavings to shut down for the day at 7pm, or already closed. Unless your tastes run to donuts or foul smelling sandwiches, or greasy steamtabled chinese style food, or nasty looking pasta, you will roam the hallways hungry and without so much as a single decent retail outlet to distract you. There was no longer even a Dairy Queen to brighten the horizon.

The one sit-down restaurant – Montana’s last time I was there, but now replaced by Kelsey’s (no real change there since the same American company owns Harvey’s, Swiss Chalet, Second Cup, Milestones, Montana’s, Kelsey’s and Toast Cafe) – served me food and drink so utterly vile on my last visit that I was moved to write a letter of complaint. The response from the company was to offer me a coupon to dine with them again. As if.

Speaking of ownership, I read in the Guardian an article about corporate ownership changes to ethical companies including Green & Black’s (Cadbury), Rachel’s (Dean Foods), Ben & Jerry’s (Unilever) and the subsequent decline in their ethical rankings. Even the Body Shop is no more the lone voice in the cosmetic wilderness, since it’s been sold to L’Oreal! It’s so hard to keep up. Another good reason to try to give your custom to the dwindling number of locally owned operations wherever possible.

So, party’s over, and I’m back at the trail’s end/beginning.

League of Poets AGM ended after two more days of meetings and readings and meetings and readings. By the end of Saturday’s banquet I could not have eaten another bite or heard another word.

We had a keynote address on Saturday night by longtime member (indeed present at the founding meeting of the League) Margaret Atwood. She was in droll mood and after a charming and carefully bilingual introduction by Pauline Michel, she launched into a quip-packed 40th anniversary address, on the subject of Why Poetry? (Her lecture will, they tell us, be printed in full in a future issue of Prairie Fire.)

She said she’d joined the League back “when poetry was top dog,” when, like her, many of today’s Canadian novelists were beginning their careers — as poets. Recounting a couple of sweetly sordid anecdotes, she remarked that back then the poets – mostly male – were living in the afterglow of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman, and self-destructive acts were part of the job description. She felt that these days she’d send aspiring poets to plumbing school: there’s always a demand for your services; it’s easier to think about poetry when doing something with your hands; and it’s nice and dark under the sink.

So then she got to her question. Though we no longer think we can conjure rain, or even mildew, or have our heads chopped off for writing poetry, we are in a tamer age than when words were more potent. Why then do we do this poetry thing, whether written or oral, or is it built in?

Instead of providing answers, she offered what she called some potentially interesting sidelights.
1. Reading, writing and speaking are all located in different parts of the brain.
2. If the speaking part of your brain is knocked out, the singing part may still remain.
3. Words have their own address book in our brain: we recognise that John Smith is a different thing from a carrot. Poetry can serve as an aide-memoire (to prove her point, she had us filling in the blanks of Alligator pie; Alligator pie… )
4. Music, poetry and mathematics are more closely related than poetry and prose. There’s a system of pattern recognition at work that’s connected to music and math – and of course she was speaking here of rhymed and metered verse rather than “that which resembles prose”.
5. Fire and grammar are what distinguish humans from other life forms. Only humans cook their food, and having reduced the time we would have spent digesting unprocessed food, we have thus liberated up to five hours per day for other pursuits. And though animals may communicate through noise, they lack grammar. The dog can and does think in past and future tense, but no dog is likely to question where the first dog came from, and where do dogs go when they die.

Oral cultures, she went on, swam in a sea of language; but now we live on comparatively dry shores, extruding our brains into other technologies, and so that part of our brain has probably shrunk. Technology and numbers are said to represent ‘the real world’ – as opposed to the obsolete world that poets occupy. But we make what we long for, and destroy what we fear, as we have always done; these things have not changed, and we know this because we have poetry. Human imagination drives the world: it directs what we do without our tools, and poetry is part of the way we sing our being.

There followed the banquet (some very good grilled chicken or cedar-planked salmon) and awards ceremony. I was thrilled that Suzanne Buffam won the Gerald Lampert Award for her wonderful book Past Imperfect. She read the lovely poem Please Take Back the Sparrows.

The winner of the Pat Lowther Award was Sylvia Legris, for Nerve Squall, reviewed with considerable venom in the Globe and Mail earlier that day. A tragic waste of newspaper space for the single review of poetry on offer, and a badly ill-judged match of reviewer to subject, as the reviewer himself admits: “Those who enjoy linguistic foreplay, and the pinball wizardry of caroming words, will favour this book. Those like me will find that it all adds up to narcissistic inconsequence.” Well, it’s not my cup of tea either, but if it was good enough to engage the not inconsiderable intellects of the juries of both the Griffin and the Lowther awards, and prove itself the stand-out over hundreds of other collections, it can’t be as bad as all that. It would have been far more useful to hear from a critic able to explain just what that power was, in the context of all its competitors. Surely the Globe could have scraped the barrel a bit harder and found a reviewer who could deal with the book in its own terms?

A more interesting article in the Globe and Mail about the origins of ABE, the online treasure trove for book lovers.

Day one of the League of Canadian Poets AGM (and 40th anniversary celebration) was meet ‘n greet — lots of people I haven’t seen since my first League AGM in 1993, and some I have met along the way. We had an open mic (asking for trouble, I read the Rhonda Poem, but it didn’t – as I feared – initiate a rash of “d” word mishaps) which rattled along despite the looong list of participants. It was a great way to introduce ourselves to our fellow bards. After lunch there were a couple of afternoon workshops.

I went to the poet laureate panel, which featured Pauline Michel (Poet Laureate of Canada), Louise Halfe/Sky Dancer (PL of Saskatchewan), Lorri Neilsen Glenn (PL of Halifax) and Alice Major (PL of Edmonton) plus Cyril Dabydeen who had been the second (and second last) PL of Ottawa. They spoke about their various duties and the many surprises that awaited them when they took up their laureates.

Michel spoke at length, in beautifully written English, and occasionally burst into song, about what and why she does what she does. For her the job of the poet (“we are all poet laureates”) is to promote writing as a means of artistic expression: “what is not expressed either implodes or explodes” she said; “but where do the arts firt into a culture where a good living is more imnportant than a good life?” She had managed to get funding for an assistant to schedule her events, a role that was fulfilled during the term of the first PL – George Bowering – by his wife; the requests come thick and fast and Michel said she thought three years should be the minimum length of the term to allow enough time to see through her various projects and duties.

Louise Halfe spoke first in Cree, and sang in her language as well. She assumed the Saskatchewan mantle from the province’s first PL, Glen Sorestad, and has relished her ability to reach audiences and communities that she is uniquely able to connect with. A former social worker and addictions counsellor, she says she no longer practices but has incorporated her work into her art. She remarked that once again she was the “lone Indian in the room” and that she is expected to represent all the Indians of Canada, regardless of the fact there are many nations.

Lorri Neilsen Glenn, the second PL in Hlaifax, is a year into her four year term. She has a Cree grandmother and Quebecois grandfather and has lived in Halifax for 22 years, “which of course makes me a newcomer” she said. Her appointment coincided with a cut to the municipal arts board, which was shortly followed by the resignation of the cultural officer, so she has struggled without a helping hand to coordinate her duties and help her obtain funding for events. Like the others on the panel she observed the role could easily be full time if she allowed it – though the $1200 stipend would make that tricky. She hopes to help prove that “there is more to Nova Scotia than lobster traps and people who say ‘buddy’ and ‘arse’.”

Alice Major, the first PL in Edmonton, spoke about the politics of her role. She said on her first (of potentially three) command commissions she was asked to write something for a gathering which included the premier. “What,” she asked, “can one say to Ralph Klein?” But because she was there by invitation by the supportive city council who had worked so hard to create the role she was occupying, she put her politics in her pocket and wrote something suitable to the occasion. “Nice,” said Ralph as she walked back to her seat. Her second commission she titled “The hockey poem I thought I’d never write” – a work dressed to impress her audience, it was printed in the Edmonton Journal the following day and then hit the national papers the day after. “All these volumes of verse I have written, which no more than 500 people will ever see” she mused, “and the poem that makes the national papers is the hockey poem.”

The second and last workshop I went to was about poetry in health and mental health institutions. Shirley Serviss kicked things off by describing her work at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton. Working 15 hours a week at this, she is part of a group of professional artists – poets, visual artists and musicians – who are based there, together with volunteers (including poet Ted Blodgett who comes by to play the lute for patients). She described some of her efforts which take the form of anything from transcribing poems to the white boards that seemingly cover every wall, to dispensing poems to doctors, nurses and patients, to bedside work encouraging patients to talk about their lives so she can write them poems, or helping them to shape the words themselves. When she undertook an MA in Theological Studies she had thought she wanted to do a hospital chaplaincy but she prefers this work, which she has had incredibly positive feedback on from family and patients alike. She thinks it fills a gap in patient care as well. “They can turn chaplains or counsellors away,” she said, “but we disarm them: all I’m doing, after all, is giving them a thought for the day.”

Ronna Bloom is a psychotherapist who has given many workshops to health practitioners. She described one of her popular ones on overcoming personal blocks, which works well on people even if they are not writers. She is careful to explain to participants that the exercise will not solve anything, but it might give them extra information about what is blocking them in their lives or work. She pointed out that blocks are there for a reason, and it’s important to remember we might love the places we’re stuck, so her workshops are not about simply kicking them away. She says she knows the things that won’t work, and these include guilt, denial, willpower, or moving house or countries. Her workshop aims to help participants get a good clear look at their block by making it larger. She alluded to a principle of martial arts which suggests that you cannot overcome an opponent by fighting them; but if you join the opponent, you can use that energy to defeat them. And so her workshop starts by allowing participants to describe what they love and hate about the block. They write about what they really want. Ronna then reads them a poem of hers which is a blessing, and asked to write one that blesses some aspect of themselves.

Ron Charach is a psychiatrist who also writes poetry. His poetry column in the Medical Post elicited enough poetry to engender an anthology by Canadian medical practitioners, and he’s had poems in such oblique markets as The Lancet. He discussed research that had been done into connections between poets and mental illness, and ended by giving us a handy prescription to assure mental soundness to allow us to carry on writing.

• Get enough sleep and natural light;
• avoid substance/alcohol abuse;
• keep some structure in your life;
• pace those overwhelming projects;
• maintain your relationships;
• take all threats of suicide seriously;
• don’t hesitate to get professional help.