Chopping Onions, Peeling Grapefruit, and Braising Shrimp

Joyce Nower

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. -- G. K. Chesterton

Chopping onions, peeling grapefruit for a sorbet with Compari, braising shrimp in sesame oil and garlic... ."Everything is a potential subject for poetry," my high school English teacher used to say, and since the Fifties her maxim has been realized in this country beyond her wildest dreams. Although all "domestic imagery" - it includes all tasks and activities performed within the home - has increased over the years, its most popular examples are cooked up in the kitchen, and by far not just in the poetry of women. From the simple details of setting, to details carrying emotional overtones, and on to images that do the heavy lifting as the symbolic heart of the poem, kitchen and food references create a tasty stew of word pictures.

Domestic chores being the traditional province of women, we find some domestic imagery in the trickle of poetry by American women poets even before World War II. No More Masks (Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1973), a pioneering anthology edited by Ellen Bass and Florence Howe, reminds us about these struggling poets. Consciously writing against the mainstream, they wrote about breast feeding ("Night Feeding," Muriel Rukeyser, 1935), baking and sewing ("Interlude," Amy Lowell, 1919), and more.

Such imagery became increasingly visible in the postwar period with the growth in the number of women poets. References to "crud" on the stove (Kathleen Fraser, "Collective Invention," New Shoes, 1978), wiping dishes, ironing, canning, dusting, etc. (Adrienne Rich, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," from the book of the same name, 1967) exemplify the ever more detailed domestic imagery in the poetry of the astonishing number - about 83 - of rather well-known postwar women poets.

Why the spectacular increase? History-in-a-Nutshell reminds us that American society underwent profound changes in the postwar era. Rosie-the-Riveter, who had "manned" a factory during the war, was "let go" when the boys came home, returning to her usual duties as homemaker and mother, and her new, more subtle, role as consumer. Madison Avenue sales pitches flooded radio and TV with an outpouring of home products generated by America's burgeoning, home-oriented, manufacturing might.

But by the late Fifties, deciding which floor polish would keep the home "spic 'n span" was no longer enough for many women. A determined effort to find and maintain one's identity under the homogenizing shadow of corporate America, begun by the Beat poets of San Francisco, created waves in the otherwise placid ocean of postwar abundance. Many were affected, and a frantic search began for the causes and cures of the malaise. Other social upheavals of the times contributed - the Free Speech Movement, voter registration drives in the South, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and so on. The resulting self analysis and questioning among young men and women (in the Women's Movement formalized as the Consciousness Raising Group), contributed not only to the breakdown in strict gender roles at home, but to a parallel opening of nontraditional artistic and career opportunities for both sexes. In the arts, female and male poets felt the loosening of traditional concepts of "appropriate" subject matter. All of this was re-enforced by an autobiographical-confessional trend, which dominates poetry to this day.

Back to domestic imagery. Was it simply a fad of the day? No way! The search for current kitchen and food imagery led me to several good contemporary anthologies. I give their names and assign abbreviations below.* Of the roughly 2000 poems I leafed through, perused, read, and studied, about 6 percent, a rather significant number, contained some domestic imagery, with the kitchen as the most popular room in the house, and food-related activities, as you might expect, the most popular domestic tasks. Women are still mainly the ones performing the tasks, but men do join in - on occasion.

The kitchen is the setting for David Huddle's humorous intergenerational poem "Ooly Pop a Cow" (PNC). The poet remembers his mother in the kitchen as he compares the outrageous songs and sayings of his daughters with those equally outrageous ones of his own youth. He remembers his mother "her hands /in biscuit dough/ her ears turning red" listening to the pop lyrics he brought home as a boy. Here the memory of food preparation adds to the detail of the setting, but is incidental to the pop culture comparison that is at the heart of the poem. But food is at the heart of Alberto Alvaro Rios's "Nani" (UA): "I watch the mama warming/more tortillas for me. I watch her /fingers in the flame for me." Food becomes the direct expression of Nani's love, the traditional connection, and the stuff of family cohesion: "Nani never serves/ herself, she only watches me/ with her skin, her hair... Even before I speak, she serves." As the recipient of the action, rather than the performer, the poet identifies the symbolic nature of food preparation.

Not all food memories are warm fuzzies, however. Keith Ratzlaff's "Table Prayer" (PNC) doesn't touch any of the above peaks. The setting is a family dinner in Grandmother's dining room where the blind-in-one-eye canary annoys the poet, as does the painting above its cage: Christ helping a sailor navigate his ship through a storm. "Soon, Christ or no,/this one's going down" is what the poet is darkly thinking as Grandma says grace. While Grandma's concept of being saved is "the continuous moment/ of never going down..," to the poet, being saved is being saved from Grandma's concept of religious redemption, dull food, and the noisy canary! Indeed, not a Norman Rockwell moment!

Culinary peaks can also be marinated in deadly irony. In Michael Glaser's "Preparations for Seder" (UA) the poet, himself preparing the traditional schmaltz (chicken fat) for matzoh balls, feeds the rendered schmaltz bits called "cracklings" to himself and his children, all the while realizing the deadly contrast between the ancient Hebrew vision of freedom in the Promised Land as "succulent and dangerous" and the matzoh balls made with the carcinogenic fat of animals. Looking beyond carcinogens, Adrian Louis, in "One of the Grim Reaper's Disguises" (PNC), sees Death in a can of beer, a shaker of salt, and on the kitchen counter in a ten-pound bag of "bad-ass rez [reservation] ... potatoes ... rabid with tendrils" and with a smell "like a coven of wings." The dark humor lies in the metaphor of the "Grim Reaper" next to commonplace foods that can prove to be poisonous.

Kitchens don't have to be potential burial grounds however. They can be the kind of sacred ground that allows us to live more deeply. In Cynthia Huntington's "The Rapture" (PNC), the kitchen and "stirring a pot of soup" become a setting for a unique thirty-second "rapture," during which the poet falls to the floor "a bolt driven down my skull into my spine," her legs "swimming against the linoleum." She returns from this experience transformed: "...I knew that my life was changed./ I seemed to have become entirely myself in that instant." The ordinariness of the setting makes the psycho-physical experience all the more extraordinary.

Another kind of positive transformation is found in the symbol of steamed string beans in Naomi Shihab Nye's "Bill's Beans" (PNC). "Bill" is the poet William Stafford, and the green beans he grows represent the depth, freshness, focused poetic technique, and generous spirit of Stafford: "He gave us our lives that were hiding under out feet." The poem commemorates his life.

Not a simple thing, food. In fact it can reveal the two "you's". In Natasha Saje's witty "I am peeling four pink grapefruit" (PNC), the one "you" is dutiful, task oriented, and focused; the other, libidinous, sensuous, out-of-bounds. The poet-as-hostess prepares a sorbet with Campari for a party. Self #1 peels the grapefruit and removes the bitter white pith. Unfortunately, Self #2 eats the sweet sections , so that there is not enough sorbet for the six guests originally planned for, but only enough now for two: Self #1 and Self #2. Who is this second self who screws up the dessert plans? It's the self that falls in love quickly with whatever - a chocolate mousse, the sweet meat of the grapefruit, the pleasure of her guests - or with whomever, "on the basis/ of a bare arm." It is not, however, the second self that predominates: that sensuous other self is kept in line by the more rational one, the faithful wife "who has been true to one man, even though her heart strays at times." An honest poem! Food provides here the underlying structure of the poem, as well as the occasion for a great comparison between the darkness of chocolate mousse and "the heart of a faithless wife."

Of course, some poets just flirt with food preparation. To them it doesn't have the seriousness that listening to jazz has. In the poetic riff "I Chop Some Parsley while Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'"(SAAR), Billy Collins pits the "cynic who always lounges within me" against the "sentimentalist." Maybe there's a more psychological overtone to "parsley" and "onions," - a bit bitter, a tad teary - than we thought on first reading.

Food takes on a wider and more complex role in the final two poems in this review. In "cutting greens" (ESEAA) by Lucille Clifton, food preparation is the vehicle for identification with the living world in which the mask of universal kinship is black: the poet is cutting collards and kale, "thinking of everything but kinship," then noting that the pot is black, as is the cutting board, and her hand, "and just for a minute/ the greens roll black under the knife/ and the kitchen twists dark on its spine" and the poet feels a bond "of live things everywhere." "Eating Alone" (R) by Li Young-Lee is about the pleasures of sentient being: the joy of self-sufficiency, from harvesting his own vegetables to preparing his own meal; the sheer physical pleasures of drinking water from the "icy metal spigot" and watching a cardinal vanish "at the corner of my eye"; and the remarkable memory of his father showing him a rotten pear in which "a hornet/ spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice." The joy of sentience includes mastery of physical skills, the ability to look and see beauty, the appreciation of paternal love. In fact, he senses the presence of his father out in the garden, but no, it is only the shovel leaning against a tree. The poem ends with: "White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas/ fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame oil and garlic. And my own loneliness./ What more could I, a young man, want." A sense of completeness is interwoven with aloneness, memory, meditation, and Chinese food. What more could a reader want?

Why is the kitchen-and-food-preparation the most popular domestic image? I posed this question to a group of friends who ostensibly had gathered to discuss a book, but who, in reality, were enjoying more the eating of a gourmet meal together, cooked by this month's host. His veal scalopini, mixed greens, prosciutto and cheese rolls, and tiramisu were something to behold as well as savor. Maybe it tells us something about the intrinsic qualities of the kitchen, one friend noted: the kitchen contains a great variety of objects, and this would appeal to poets who deal in concrete imagery. Someone else noted that, unlike breathing, food is a collective concept and involves others, and we are a social species. Someone else called out, "Survival! Fun!" A fourth voice announced: "We do it frequently!" to which someone else countered: "Food is a form of sex!" Well, all right! Any more theories out there? And what might I find if I moved on to examine imagery about laundry, ironing, and dusting?

*They are as follows: Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (UA), edited by Maria and Jennifer Gillan (Penguin Books, 1994); Poets of the New Century (PNC), Eds. Roger Weingarten & Richard M. Higgerson (David Godine, 2001); The Best American Poetry (BAP), Ed. Rita Dove (Scribner Poetry, 2000); The Generation of 2000: Contemporary American Poets (G2000), Ed. William Heyen (Ontario Review Press, 1984); and Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans Since 1945 (ESEAA), Ed. Michael Harper & Anthony Walton (Little, Brown & Co. 1994). Individual books of poetry included Billy Collins' Sailing Alone Around the Room (SAAR) (Random House,2001); and Li-Young Lee's Rose (R) (BOA Editions, 1986).

Joyce Nower