Recipes & Reading Lists: Separated at Birth?

Winter in Des Moines is never easy, nothing like the gentle weather of Red Hen’s L.A. home, but this one has been a bear.   The blizzards have made headlines.  Now here we are at Valentine’s Day, and the snow that fell before Christmas remains on the ground.  We’re crushed under chilly white sediment.

What’s a guy to do?   Certainly I’ve got a desk heaped with projects.  This bleak midwinter saw me complete the edits for my forthcoming Red Hen title, The Sea-God’s Herb: Selected Work on the Postmodern Project.  Also I’ve got the usual stacks of grading.   Yeah yeah yeah — enough about work, already.  The real relief comes in the kitchen.  My wife and I know how to celebrate a Hallmark holiday, and lighten the winter gloom, pulling together a great meal.

For my final blog, I’ll talk recipes, not reading lists.  I’ll share, for starters, the mouth-watering possibilities in rare meat called guanciale.  A pungent near-bacon made from the cheek of the pig, fresh local guanciale can be found in just two places on earth: in around Rome, and in and around Des Moines.  La Quercia Meats of Iowa delivers unusual pork products (prosciutto would be another) so flavorful and traditional that they’ve won raves in the New York Times.

The dish that features guanciale is a hearty thing, with red sauce, red pepper, and onions.  What, no garlic?  Not if you ask the Romans, who make the meal a regular part of their menu from November through April.  This is America, though, and in my kitchen I draw up the ingredients.  I’ve got garlic cooking in the exceptional fat of the guanciale, and garlic amid the nuggets of the meat in the finished product.   That’s bucatini all’Amatriciana, and you’ll find it in many a foodie’s diary.   To prepare it well requires a skilled hand, and this winter I finally developed one.

But, look at that: talking about diaries, revisions, and skilled hand.  You’d think I was still talking about writing.  The very name of the dish takes us to the library, looking up bucatini (tubular pasta, its opening a hole or buca) and Amatriciana (in the hill-town of Amatrice, farmers and shepherds needed a bracing repast after their long, cold days in the fields).  Then there’s the whole problem of describing the dish, trying to generate anticipation as well as get across its unique qualities.  In my kitchen, anyway, I’m always a short step from my desk and its papers.

The poetry on Red Hen Press shares my sensibility.  The books could be culled for an anthology of fine food reconfigured as lines on a page.  Indeed, wasn’t the 2002 Saltman Award-winner State of Blessed Gluttony, by Susan Thomas?  The book’s link is below.  Thomas’s witty “Note” imagines the farewell letter left by Penelope of the The Odyssey, grown weary of waiting for Ulysses.  Where better for such a poem to start than letting the man know what the palace has got for oil, mutton, and wine?

Even the experimental poetry of Kimberly Burwick, in Has No Kinsmen, includes a scary meditation on preparing salad.   And Nickole Brown’s Sister samples classic Southern fare, and Camille Dungy makes significant menu distinctions:  What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison.   Really, the examples could go on a lot longer.   But I think you see the point: that poetry amounts to cold-weather sustenance as good as anything in a dish.  Besides, I’ve got lunch waiting.

http://www.redhen.org/RedHenPress.html#/catalog/catalogView/type=authors;authorUUID=02B398FC-0A4B-66F4-906C-89DB4A85D967

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on the desk (or, books DO matter)

Trapped in my office, surrounded by books, papers, and other sundries, I realize I have a bunch of pretty cool poetry collections lying around here. I’ll list them quickly here, in no particular order without annotations (or links: look ‘em up yourself!), saying only that if I put it here, I recommend it.

Sharon Dolin, Burn and Dodge

Scott Hightower, Natural Trouble

Kathy Fagan, The Charm

Terri Witek, Shipwreck Dress

Sandra Simonds, Warsaw Bikini

Rachel Hadas, River of Forgetfulness

Jane Satterfield, Assignation at Vanishing Point

Brendan Constantine, Letters to Guns (yes, Red Hen’s own)

Molly Peacock, Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems

Jean Gallagher, This Minute

Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning

Jeff Gundy, Deer Flies

Don Bogen, Luster

Basil Bunting, Complete Poems

Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems

David Lehman, ed. Great American Prose Poems

The One O’clock Poets, This Full Green Hour (shameless plug: this is my poetry group, and we’re reading Thursday, 1/21/10, 6pm at Cornelia Street Cafe)

Colette Inez, Eight Minutes from the Sun

….and I’ll close the list with my current favorite book about writing poems:

Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

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on the nightstand…

Some days, the only time I have to read for “pleasure” (as opposed to student writing, class prep, and other compulsory texts) is when I hop into bed.  I’m sure many of you can relate. I’ve been gradually unpacking more of my books since a move six months ago (!), and so I decided to randomly select a book or two (or three) from the shelf closest to my sofa bed. I read at whim from each book, until my eyes clothes and the volume I’m holding drops to the floor. Here’s a list of my recent choices, idiosyncratically annotated.

David Lehman, The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry (Scribner, 2000). In January 1996 Lehman started to write a poem a day; in 2000 he culled from several years of this “experiment,” which became a habit.  Inspired, as he says, by Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, A.R. Ammons, and Robert Bly (oh, and Emily Dickinson, who composed daily during 1862 and 1863), he found that the discipline “does wonders for your rate of productivity, and it promotes a willingness to take chances.” The poems are funny, edgy, open, cagey, wise-cracking, straight-forward, their subjects ranging from the quantum to the, well, quotidian. I felt inspired to try it myself. So far I haven’t been able to pull it off. Maybe next week…

Penny Kaganoff and Susan Spano, eds. Women on Divorce: A Bedside Companion (Harcourt, Brace, 1995). This is a no-brainer–it even calls itself a “bedside companion.” Given to me awhile back by a good writer friend who’d been through a split herself and whose own book, Daughters of Empire, makes a great bedtime read,  it includes essays by Diana Hume George, Ann Hood, Ann Patchett, Francine Prose, Anne Roiphe, Carol Shields, and others. My copy bears the scars of the Big Red Wine Spill Disaster of 2009 (sorry, Jane!). I must admit it’s a great little book to crawl into bed with, with or without a glass of primitivo.

Michael Wiegers, ed., The Poet’s Child. (Copper Canyon, 2002). Writers (not all of whom are parents themselves) from T’ao Ch’ien and Ho Suan Huong to Kenneth Rexroth and Kay Boyle to Erin Belieu and Jenny Factor take on parenthood.

Erica Jong, Fruits and Vegetables: 25th Anniversary Edition (Ecco, 1997). Originally published in the late Sixties, this earthy, gutsy collection is evidence of Jong’s lyric gift and feminist sensibility. I’d only known her as the author of Fear of Flying until attending a reading/signing at the erstwhile Astor Place Barnes & Noble when this book came out.  It was a very pleasant surprise.

Ruth Limmer, Journey Around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan (Viking Penguin, 1980). I’ve been a fan of Bogan since my undergraduate days, when I wrote a very forgettable essay on “The Pleasures of Form in the Poetry of Louise Bogan.” My battered, yellowed paperback was bought for three dollars at some used bookstore when I was a graduate student. Using lines from the poet’s mesmerizing “Train Tune” (“Back through clouds,”  “Back through garlands, “Back along love,” etc.) Limmer created a “mosaic” from Bogan’s essays and prose fragments that gives a subtle portrait of this somewhat mysterious literary figure. I often confuse Bogan’s childhood history with that of her younger contemporary Elizabeth Bishop (both grew up in small towns in New England, both had “mother issues”); it was good to be reminded of the differences (Bishop’s mother went to the loony bin, Bogan’s just had a bunch of extramarital affairs and disappeared a couple of times).  Perhaps it’s because critics are always remarking on both poets’ “reticence” about their personal lives. In any case, it’s nice to float around in Bogan’s prose before drifting off.

Wendy Milford, ed., Love Poems by Women (Fawcett Columbine, 1990) and Linda France, ed., Sixty Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 1994). The former (yellowed, again–where are the acid-free pages of yesteryear?) was another grad school acquisition, and the latter is a souvenir of my “fact-finding trip” to London in 1994, when I interviewed Stephen Spender and discovered a generation of women poets from the British Isles (a story for another time). I was, I admit, looking for the naughty bits  (it was bedtime, as you recall), and I found them in poems like Helen Dunmore’s “Three Ways of Recovering a Body,”  Denise Levertov’s “Our Bodies,”  Wendy Cope’s “My Lover” (form cribbed from Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”). And, of course, Fleur Adcock’s “Against Coupling” (“I write in praise of the solitary act”) fit the bill. Here’s a sampling, a lovely little lyric from 8th century Japanese poet Ono no Komachi (832-880):

WHEN MY DESIRE

When my desire
grows too fierce
I wear my bedclothes
inside out,
dark as the night’s rough husk.

trans. Izumi Shikibu (ca. 974-after 1033)

Phillip Lopate, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003). This hefty tome collects Lopate’s essays on a range of topics from childhood to movies to his work as writer in the schools. I find myself dipping into it time and again for lessons on style (and substance).

Rick Moody, The Black Veil (Back Bay Books, 2003). Centering around the story of 18th-century Maine clergyman Joseph “Handkerchief” Moody, a putative ancestor of the author’s who donned a black cloth after his wife’s death, this searing memoir unflinchingly reveals Rick Moody’s struggles with depression and alcoholism, which led him to a psychiatric hospital in his early 30s. Responsible for the dreadful state of my fingernails (I was up biting them until 2am one night, reading this spooky book).

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