My wife just put some frozen buffalo chicken strips in the oven, so this one will be quick. And about food.
That's usually the way I work with food - as long as it's not repellent, it's just fuel so let's get the tank filled and keep rolling. I'm not saying food isn't great and all that, but food isn't all that and a bag of chips.
Which is why I enjoy this poem a lot, by someone you've probably never heard of.
The Cook's Lesson
John Fuller
When the King at last could not manage an erection,
The tables were wiped down and a banquet prepared.
The Cook was a renegade, a master of innuendo,
And was later hanged for some imaginary subversion,
Found laughing in the quarter of the filthy poor.
This, had we known it, was to be his last banquet,
And as such was fittingly dissident and experimental.
Often he had confided to us the tenets of his craft,
How a true artist is obsessed with the nature of his material,
And must make evident the process of creation in preference
To the predictable appearance of the finished product.
The charcoal-burners were lit, the porcelain laid
And the simple broths prepared in which the meal was enacted,
For this was a living meal, a biological history of food..
I cannot remember much. We sweated and fainted and were revived
With fragrant towels. We ate furiously and were rewarded
With knowledge of a kind we did not even recognize.
Spawn in the luke gruel divided, gilled and finned,
Swam down flowered channels to the brink of oil
And fell to the plate. Before our eyes
The litter spurted into the fire, picked out by tongs,
Eggs hatched into the soup, embryos bled,
Seeds sprouted in the spoon. As I said, we ate fast,
Far back into life, eating fast into life.
Now I understand that food is never really dead:
Frilled and forked, towered, dusted, sliced,
In mimic aspic or dispersed in sauces,
Food is something that will not willingly lie down.
The bland liquids slid over our tongues as
Heartbeats under crusts, mouthfuls of feathers.
This poem is also notable for being in a Penguin collection called "British Poetry Since 1945," edited by one Edward Lucie-Smith. There's no reason you should have heard of either the anthology or the author - I think I picked it up at a Goodwill for 50 cents.
But it's very notable to me because of two factors - one is the incessant snarkiness and passive aggression on the behalf of the editor. And I don't mean in the introduction or preface. Every author is introduced with a brief biographical sketch nearly unrivaled in their skill at character assassination. A few snippets, pulled nearly at random:
"It took a long time for R.S. Thomas's work to achieve recognition."
"[Peter] Redgrove is less disciplined than [Ted] Hughes, and more grotesque: when unsuccessful, his poems are apt to become mere collections of images and effects."
"[Stevie Smith's] apparently naïf style has a surprising flexibility..."
"[Henry] Graham is also a painter, and has worked as a jazz-musician. To this extent he is typical of the Liverpool environment. He is perhaps untypical in having little interest in 'pop' materials."
"Many of the chief poets of the thirties seemed to falter after the war, and none more visibly than Louis NacNeice. His poetry written in the immediate post-war period has a dismaying flatulence..."
The second is the editor's inclusion of not one or two, not even three, but FOUR of HIS OWN POEMS in the volume! He allowed Robert Graves 3, Seamus Heaney gets 2 and he allots Dylan Thomas one single piece of verse.
So Eddie-baby ("I will NOT be called Eddie-baby!"), if you're wondering whether or not you're one of the greatest poets in Britain of the last 35 years and should therefore include a healthy sampling of your own work, there's an easy way to tell.
You're not.
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