ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

At the beginning of February, CBC presenter Shelagh Rogers – the best voice in the west? – interviewed our national icon Leonard Cohen about his induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. She talked to him about poetry as well, and he had some interesting things to say about the benefits he’d had from working within the “obligation of rhyme”. “Lift your heart in gratitude,” he says, because it lets you discover congruencies you’d never otherwise encounter. He likes form too:

“Form imposes a certain opportunity to get deeper than your first thought… I don’t have any ideas and I don’t trust my opinions… but when you submit yourself to a form then… you’re invited to dig deeper into the language and to discard the slogans by which you live, the easy alibis of language and of opinion… If you look in the Spenserian stanza for instance, which is a very, very intricate verse form where you have to come up with many rhymes of the same sound, you’re invited to explore realms you usually don’t get to with your ordinary easy thought… I consider my thought stream extremely uninteresting and it’s only when I can discard it that I can say something that I can get behind.”

While you’re hanging around the CBC site, try searching ‘Leonard Cohen’: I stumbled upon a CBC Archives clip of him reciting poems back in 1958…

When I was in Santa Fe last September, I took a few classes at the Santa Fe School of Cooking to get me oriented to my new surroundings. Mostly demonstration classes, except for a hands-on session on roasting chiles and pressing tortillas, they were a fabulous introduction to the town and the food, and a great way to pass the morning, ending with a gourmet lunch prepared before our eyes.

Our chef was Rocky Durham, who was absolutely wonderful: a passionate travel resource for his home town, a quirky advocate of southwestern cuisine – though marked forever by his classical French training – with a well-travelled palate to draw on, and of course a life-long love of good food. One of the best parts of the class were the dining Q and A: Rocky gave his unadulterated opinion of any local restaurant we cared to ask him about, and both tourists and locals (there were some in all the classes I attended) shared their picks as well. But if you go there… just don’t expect to leave without a bag of chiles and seasonings from the cooking school’s well provisioned gift shop.

Rocky gave us a few enduring tips for the road as well. One very useful one was to invest in a cheap electric coffee grinder, and another was not to buy ground spices, but rather to roast whole ones (cumin, cinnamon, oregano etc) as needed in a dry pan and then grind them in aforementioned grinder. It can be cleaned easily, he said, by whizzing a spoonful of plain white rice or salt or fresh bread crumbs. Works like a damn.

One of my classmates, by a strange coincidence, was an American expat living in London, who works at Divertimenti, a stellar cookware shop that has branched out into cooking classes. Though I still have some of their cookware, I’ve never attended their classes, but I have been to some at a much beloved cookbook shop in Notting Hill’s Portobello Market, Books for Cooks, which were endlessly interesting and delicious as well.

And now, after a morning canter along the Gorge with old Anton, I must return to a meditation on rhyme. I’m giving a short presentation on rhyme to the form class on Wednesday; so far I have identified 34 kinds of rhyme and around 40 poetry forms that use rhyme (including 5 different sonnet forms). My favourite kind of rhyme so far is Procrustean Rhyme: rhyme on words which have no conventional rhymes. Uses the method Procrustes used on his victims: stretching them if they were too short to fit his bed, and lopping something off if they were too long. So you end up truncating words (enjambing them awkwardly with hyphens) or extending them into phrases.

Two of my favourite things. Is cauliflower brain food because it looks like brains? And can one have too much cumin in one’s life? So I was delighted to come across a quick and easy recipe for Cauliflower Soup with Toasted Cumin and Lime. With fresh lime juice, it puts, in fact, three ingredients I like all in one place. A wonderful smooth soup, very pretty and zippy. And it’s vegetarian (if you substitute vegetable for chicken stock) and wheat free. I personally would be reluctant to lose the cream but you could omit it from a veggie portion and make it dairy free as well.

If you want to feel even better about eating it, try buying locally grown cauliflower if you can. Here’s a clever site where you can log your Food Miles. Not only do you support local farmers, you cut pollution and transport prices, and get fresher food to boot.

Back on Epicurious there was also an intriguing little snippet about cooking an egg in a glass of vodka (who thinks these things up??)

I used to use Epicurious a lot, until they started littering their site with pop-up ads, including the kind that crawl up your screen till you click them away. But I recently revisited them and either my pop-up blocker works better these days or they’ve done away with the ads.

I see Epicurious’ editor has a blog now (you have to sign up for their mailing list to comment though) in which she discussed one of my favourite things from England, Marmite, and observed that taste preferences are somewhat polarised on the matter. There are those of us who think it is an indispensible item for the larder, and those who would only use it to poison the slugs, all of which is tastefully documented on Marmite’s own site.

Personally I think a lot of those who try it once and gag are simply using too much, in quantities appropriate to something milder, like peanut butter. But it’s very concentrated so must be spread very thinly to enjoy it properly; I think using lots of butter is also important. And it is a wonderful thing to have on hand to flavour soups and gravies: totally vegetarian and wheat-free to boot. Marmite has an interesting marketing campaign; what other brand actually sells sloganed (“J’déteste Marmite”) t-shirts to its detractors? And who buys them?

Once when I visited Amsterdam, a helpful local suggested I buy pindakaas as a good typically Dutch treat to take home. I had to tell her we already had peanut butter, which I suppose other countries might claim as typically theirs as well. Interesting , this proprietary pride in snack foods.

Just received my brochure for the Wired Writing Studio which starts with the Banff Centre residency October 2-14, 2006. A wonderful thing is Wired. Robert Hilles and Marilyn Dumont will be excellent poetry resources. Fred Stenson runs a comradely ship, with the hilariously droll technical support stylings of Chris Fisher. The food’s not bad either, and there are some great deals on concerts for participants: I began my lifetime of fandom to the Jaybirds early in my stay, and also attended a bone-shaking appearance by Steve Earle and the Dukes (I prefer him acoustic, thanks, but good to have had the experience). And the Calgary/Banff Wordfest happens during the studio time as well. Geez, what am I waiting for??

Among the many musical offerings we noticed in Austin, the best ones all seemed scheduled to begin after we left. The rodeo, the SXSW conference, everyone but AWP seems to schedule music. (Actually that’s not fair: there was a boogie night at AWP that we were simply too whacked to attend.) Playing in town after we left: Eliza Gilkyson, Ruthie Foster, The Gourds, Bela Fleck & the Flecktones, Lucinda Williams, Rhonda Vincent. It’s not fair it’s not it’s not. But I have to think, on the other hand, why do I know about these people? Because I have seen them play way up here, at the Vancouver Island Music Festival in Courtenay/Comox, and the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. All that is except Bela and he comes up here from time to time, so I live in hope. And except Lucinda, because you have to have some event to look forward to.

So I spent yesterday meditating on oulipo. It sounds like about as much fun as you can have with poetry, but I need more than that, or do I mean less, to move me in a poem, and I wonder at the wisdom of narrowing the readership of the already microscopic readership of poetry for the sake of intellectual gymnastics. Old fartism I suppose, and there are doubtless many fine, coherent examples out there I wouldn’t guess were oulipean. Christian Bok certainly made headlines with Eunoia a couple of years ago, each section consisting of poems made of words that use only one vowel. Damned clever it may be, but it’s not for me, except in small doses. There’s no getting around the fact you have to compromise the sense of a line when you’re performing that scale of legerdemain. Anyway, I found a charming interview by John Ashbery with Harry Mathews, the only American oulipoean, which was worth the journey.

So the point of all this was that we had to invent our own form and write a poem in it for last night’s class. I decided, since I was in sonnet mode, to mess with that. I took the end-rhymed words from an existing sonnet (arbitrarily chosen; I used Richard Wilbur’s Praise in Summer) and used them as the first word of each line of a new poem. To escalate the challenge, I decided to invert the metre into predominantly trochaic pentameter (which makes sense since the chosen words were stressed syllables from the end of iambic pentameter lines) and to rhyme as best I could the first word of the line with the last, so that the poem still rhymes (murderous rhyme scheme too: ababbcbccdcdaa), but it does so at both ends of the line, which pleased my symmetrical soul. Some of the rhymes had to be feminine rather than masculine, and a lot of them are very loose, but I did what I could. And I thought I should mirror, to some extent, the meaning of the source poem, so mine is a rant about winter. It took me so long to write it ended up being an imperfect first draft and I’m waiting for workshop feedback next week before I carry on working it, but I enjoyed the challenge.