A Readable Feast: Poems To Feed 'The Hungry Ear'

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However Daily life with Fruit and Nuts, by Robert Seldon Duncanson

Nonetheless Lifestyle with Fruit and Nuts, by Robert Seldon Duncanson

This Thanksgiving, as hearty aromas fill the household, consider a minute to savor a various type of nourishment poetry about foods.

Examine an excerpt of The Hungry Ear

The Hungry Ear, a new collection, celebrates the pleasures and the sorrows of meals with poems from Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath and dozens more. Poet Kevin Youthful cooked up or edited this readable feast. He tells NPR's Renee Montagne that, much like the ideal meals, the greatest poems are manufactured from scratch.

"I assume poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain," he says. "And which is exactly where meals comes from, and so there's this common link."

Quite a few of the poems included in the collection concentrate on a particular meals. Consider, for example, Elizabeth Alexander's mouthwatering "Butter":

... Rising up
we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in little pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter superior
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
more than pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup...

Then there's William Carlos Williams' renowned ode to plums, "This Is Just To Say," which reads like a note posted on a refrigerator :

I have eaten
the plums
that have been in
the icebox

and which
you had been almost certainly
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they had been tasty
so sweet
and so cold

According to Young, Williams' poem "is asking us to pay a tiny bit of attention to the language of meals, the language of relationships the form of coldness, but also this valuable sweetness."

"Bacon & Eggs," Howard Nemerov's snack of a poem, flies by but leaves a lasting impression :

The chicken contributes,
But the pig gives his all.

Finally, Irish poet Seamus Heaney's "Oysters" mulls above the practical experience of eating the shellfish:

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

... I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
May quicken me all into verb, pure verb...

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Poet Kevin Youthful is a curator at Emory University's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

Poet Kevin Young is a curator at Emory University's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

These verses display the poets' deep, personal love of meals, an affection Young explores in his introduction.

" 1 of the points I consider [poets] appreciate about a good meal is that it goes away," Young says, "that you make a terrific meal for friends and family, and if you be successful, it truly is gone. And there is this pleasure in that simply because it is specifically the opposite of writing a poem or writing something. You are struggling and struggling, and finishing signifies it is permanent, or at least feels that way."

But the act of gathering for a meal also has long -lasting results. In " Perhaps the Planet Ends Here," Delight Harjo delves into what seriously happens all around the kitchen table:

... It is here that young children are offered directions on what it implies to be human. We make men at it, we make girls.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they place their arms about our children. They laugh at us at our poor falling-down selves and as we place ourselves back together the moment once again at the table.

This table has been a household in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A spot to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have offered birth on this table, and have ready our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the planet will end at the kitchen table, although we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

According to Young, " There's... this want in [poetry] to fully grasp the prevalent table, the put where we all share and are all equal before. And I consider that is very substantially central to the two the guide [and] this contemplating about foods and its which means and its pleasures."

Examine an excerpt of The Hungry Ear

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