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Leonard on form
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…
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Some live to travel, others travel to cook
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. -
Cauliflower and cumin
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??)
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In her latest collection, Rhona McAdam navigates the dark places of human movement through the earth and the exquisite intricacies lingering in backyard gardens and farmlands populated by insects and pollinators, all the while returning to the body, to the tune of staccato beats and the newly discovered symmetries within the human heart.
“…A beautiful, filling collection, Larder is a set of poems to read at the change of the seasons, to appreciate alongside a good meal, and to remind yourself of the beauty in everything, even the things you may not appreciate before opening McAdam’s collection….”
Rhona McAdam is a writer, poet, editor, and Registered Holistic Nutritionist with a Master’s in Food Culture from Italy and a deep-rooted passion for ecology and urban agriculture. Her work spans corporate and technical writing to poetry and creative nonfiction, often exploring the vital links between what we eat and how we live. Based in Victoria, BC, and available via Zoom, Rhona is always open to new writing commissions, readings, or workshops on nutrition and the culinary arts.
